Early automobiles like Carl Benz' Patent Motorwagen and Henry Ford's Model T couldn't keep up with the world's fastest horses, but in the century-plus since those primitive vehicles took the roads, things have changed quite a bit. Several modern supercars can top the 250 mile per hour mark, and the Tesla Model S Plaid has three electric motors that combine for over 1,000 horsepower and a 0 to 60 time in the low two-second range. Not every car on the road can take you to ludicrous speed, though. There are plenty of cars available for sale in the United States today that struggle to get up to highway speeds, thanks to engines that might be better suited to motorcycles or boats than to four-wheeled vehicles.
This list would be longer if market demand hadn't led to the discontinuation of several low-powered cars over the last decade or so. The Scion iQ was dropped after 2015, Toyota dumped the Yaris and its hatchback twin five years later, and the Honda Insight hybrid and Chevrolet Spark didn't live to see 2023. We scoured the catalogs of every carmaker with dealerships in the United States to find you the slowest and lowest-powered cars still available today, although these five models are far from being unredeemable stinkers.