Ugliest Cars of All Time

rea98d

I'm going to have to disagree with Wilcox's opinion on T-Birds. From about 1981 until 97, the basic design remained the same. While they did get a major overhaul in 89, you could tell it was the same car. Anyway, I like the appearance of the 81-97 T-Birds, and a lot of the older ones as well. The car wasn't discontinued, but put on hold until the new ones come out in '01. Of course, this is my opinion, and I won't get offended if anyone disagrees. (I just want to defend my ride.)

moparmad

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.I don't know who is beholding the beauty in the new concept cars I've seen but I think they might be blind.One person here said he thinks it is anything to be different and I agree.Manufacturers have even taken this approach on the interiors,or am I the only one to jump into a new car and turn on the headlights instead of the windshield wipers.And why can't they put the door handles in the same place on the inside of the cars,they do on the outside.Still though I must say the ugliest car I have personally witnessed was a Chevy Chevette two tone with a burghandy top portion above a cat puke tan bottom.Does Ray Charles come up with these paint schemes for some of these companies?Couldn't even look at that car without something knotting in your stomach,I had to drive it to colledge.Try picking up chicks with that.

fezo

I remember seeing Chevettes in that color scheme! My sympathies.

tomcat630

To counter point the post "From about 1981 until 97, thebasic design remained the same."

The 1981-82 T Birds were the boxy, jazzed up Fairmont bodies (actually 1980-82). The 1983-88 models were the first of the "aero" look, but were still based on the Fox platform, while the 1989-97 cars were a new design and the MN-12 platform.

The 1980-82 T-Birds have been called ugly, even though I like them.

wilcox

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty is only skin deep.

Ugly means that they have to excell maybe in some other trait...like performance, sex appeal, quality, and versatility, the like...

That being the case, I take back the comment I made about the Thunderbird being Ugly...

I drive a '91 S-10 long bed sometimes.

rea98d

I'll cede you the point on the 80-82 birds. While they did get a ground up design in 89, you could still look at it and see strong similarities between the previous generation. Most people I've taled to, if they like the 83-88, then they like th 89-97s. Same goes for the reverse. While there are exceptions, they're few and far between. I jus happen to like them.

Ugly means having to excell at something? And all this time I was judging a car as ugly based solely on the fact that it looked awful :-)

Mr_Shiftright

Well, there's sorta ugly, rather ugly and completely and totally ugly...the last category requiring a kind of perverse genius to plan something that bad.

rea98d

Kinda like the 95-99 Tarurses?

prophet2

They make the very plain prior Taurus/Sable models look "ravishing" in comparison.

olegphil

Didn't '95 redesign of Nissan Sentra and Maxima make '91-'94 Nissans look attractive?

rea98d

Okay, bonus points to anyone who identifies the massive dreadnought

rea98d

Gee, no takers? Shifty, I thought for sure your extensive knowledge (massive library? secret website?) could solve this. Am I gonna have to cheat and tell what it is?

Mr_Shiftright

If you think I'm going to dig and look for that...that....THING...uh-uh....unless there's a prize or something....

rea98d

If Shiftright copped out, then there's no hope for the rest of us. It's an obscure vehicle known as a Goliath Dreiadwagen. Built in 1932. One look at this beauty (funny, shifty's description "thing" seems to fit it better), and it's little wonder why the company didn't survive :-)

fezo

A Goliath Dreiadwagen was gonna be my next guess!

Mr_Shiftright

It didn't win Le Mans but it swept up afterwards.

bubukitty

Speaking of swept up, it sort of looks like a very small Zamboni!

rea98d

Come on guys, where's your appreciation of fine art?
(The thing has got to be art, becasue it's too ugly to be anything else!)

speedshift

I joined this a little late, but I'm going to defend the '87-88 T-Bird uglified a few postings above. My wife bought a red '87 Turbo Coupe new and it's still in our garage, so I may be biased, but I remember the styling as rather daring and advanced for the time. They were one of the first (if not the first) aero-look cars--the first aero Birds predated the '86 Taurus. Remember how square-edged and upright everything else was then? Now that jellybean styling is mainstream, we've forgotten how novel that look was back in the early '80s. What I won't defend is how the Turbo Coupe drives. More than a little crude, starting with that truck engine. The V8 version was a very smooth, quick cruiser. However, I give credit to the Turbo as one of the very few cars that kept the performance flame alive back in the mid-80s.

rea98d

For what this guy spent ruining this pretty Chevy, he probably could have bought a boatload of 2dr 57 Bel Airs. BTW, this one is now for sale for $800!

rea98d

Try this url. What they did was convert a 4-door to a 2-door by eliminating the front doors and some of the body.

http://i5.yimg.com/5/a384f5ce/h/a6ecac57/57chevy1.jpg

foxfellow

IMHO, Pontiac is set to unleash a new standard of hideousness on the American road this summer -- the new Aztec SUV. What were they thinking? My step-dad, who LOVES bizarre vehicles, plans to buy one. Just to make his aethetic completely clear, he invested around thousand dollars in AMC stock when they brought out the Pacer in the mid-1970s, figuring that they'd have a tremendous hit on their hands.

Others on my "butt-ugly" list. . . the AMC Matador Coupe; the Toyota Camry "Hearse-back" station-wagon; the first generation of GM FWD minivans; and the last generation Chevy Caprice (it's amazing how much different and better the Impala looked!).

Mr_Shiftright

What was that movie where they go back into the past and re-meet their own parents, and the girl says to her father, who just bought a new car-- "You bought an Edsel?" Do I have that right?

badgerpaul

I think the movie was "Peggy Sue Got Married"

Mr_Shiftright

Ah, right, that was it!

speedshift

My nomination for ugliest car is the entire current Pontiac line-up. The Grand Am, in particular, could displace the '58 Olds as the ugliest GM car ever. The latest Firebird looks like something out of a Batman movie. This reminds me of the styling extremes that companies like Packard and Nash went to to disguise their old bodyshells. Based on Pontiac's recent show cars, it looks like there's plenty more excitement in the pipeline--or sewer line.

carnut4

that was so ugly I had to see what it was! I knew it must be asian, but what? Sure enough-without scaring the young oriental driver, I got close enough to see [without my glasses on] Hyundai on the decklid, and on the other side, "Accent?" Hadn't seen one yet. Gee what an ugly experience...looked like a compact, korean version of a Monte Carlo/Taurus mutation.

bubukitty

Carnut4, if you think the Accent is bad, just check out the Hyundai Tiburon. It really smells the place up.

Speedshift, you are right on on the Pontiac lineup. Check out the posts a little earlier on on this board for Pontiac's new slogan "We Build Excrement".

speedshift

It's odd you should mention Pontiac's "excrement" slogan just after mentioning the Accent. Like carnut4, I have trouble reading the Accent nameplate. Because of the stylized lettering, "Accent" looks to me more like "effluent", which would be a remarkably honest assessment of the car's styling. Just to be sure, I looked up the definition of "effluent": outflow or emanation. An unusual example of candor on the part of an automaker? Perhaps.

mmcsw

We had one. My father bought it in 1973 during the height of the gas crisis. We were all shocked when he brought this ugly beast home, especially since we were a "GM Family", but the car eventually grew on us. I think Dad bought it because of the price and condition and because his 3 teenage boys needed a beater to bomb around in. He got it for $300 and the first time I saw it in the drive way there were only 24,012 miles on the odometer, what a deal! It was a no option Newport, but it still was nicely equipped, with 265 hp regular gas 361 cid wedge v-8, pushbutton torqueflite auto, and a very tall rear end must been been about a 2.7 to 1. It had a little rust, in fact the right front fender had a dime sized hole in it, but the interior was mint and there were no dents anywhere in the body. One of my brothers dubbed it the "buzz car" and the name stuck to the car for as long as we had it. We ran it until it had over 100k on the clock, but I don't remember what happened ever happened to it. What I do recall was doing the most massive burnout of my life in it. I was in my late teens and had a nasty fight with my girlfriend over the telephone, so I decided to drive over to her house and do a burnout in the street in front of her house. It was late at night when I got there, I pushed the "Reverse" button on the dash, floored the gas pedal, got going about 20 mph in reverse, then pushed the "Drive" button on the dash. I distinctly remembered a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach because the car just stopped moving and I thought that I had broken something, but then I looked at the speedometer and the needle was sitting on 30 mph! So I looked in the rear view mirror and all I could see was smoke. Well I held the gas on the floor and the car slowly started moving forward, when it was going about 10 mph or so I took my foot out of it because there was no room in the street to get going too fast. Anyway, the next night(very late) I returned to the scene of the crime to see what destruction I had wrought. The surface of the street was a smooth blacktop asphalt and the right rear tire (non posi rear)had actually dug a depression about 1/2 deep into the pavement. I don't even know if my now ex-girlfriend even knew that it was I who did this, because I never saw here again. So here's to indestructible drive trains, those Torqueflites really held up well. Now I have two kids of own of driving age and I sincerely hope that they don't beat my vehicles the way I did when I was their age.

mmcsw

Getting back to the subject, I really don't like all the cheap plastic body cladding that manufacturers are hanging on their cars nowadays. The new Pontiacs come to mind as an example of this excess.

Mr_Shiftright

Ah, yes, the world's first corduroy car! Maybe LL Bean will now get into car manufacturing.

carnut4

Hey I want one of those '72 Gremlins with the Levi's interior. I have a bunch of old Levi's jeans saved up that I could glue to the exterior for a truly unique appearance. I hear those Gremlins are quite rare though...

Mr_Shiftright

Yes, rare, but only because nobody wanted one in the first place (the downside of "rare"). And, true to form, few people do today...but if the levis were made from 501s (shrink-to-fit) it might help when the car leaks.

gkelly3

I saw an old Citroen DS-21 last week-these things look like they were designed by a butcher on LSD! Supposedly the Citroen was a well-engineered car-but their rarity in the USA argues against this! Also, the late renault "Le Car" was also pretty weird looking, as were any of the 1970's Renaults-R-10, R16, etc. The French really seem to have a prediliction for strange designs-even though they make good wine and cheese.

rea98d

Maybe their designers have enjoyed a bit too much of the good wine & cheese (especially the former:-)

Mr_Shiftright

The Citroen was quite a breakthrough car for 1955, and was recently voted one of the most significant cars of the century. In terms of technical breakthroughs, aerodynamics, fuel economy, etc., I'd have to agree...all these principles are now being used (active suspension, low CDs for body design, good fuel economy, comfortable ride, good handling, lots of space in a not so big car). It's really an interesting car, and predicted the future much better than say American cars of the period. Unfortunately, it was not as rugged as an American car, but few cars of the world were back then...our cars were technically backward compared to Europeans but very strong, simple and very reliable. The Italians were ahead on styling, too, back then.

mustache

Howdy all! Really had a good laugh with this column. Here are my "ugly" nominees:

1. Fiat 850 Never saw one that wasn't rusted and front suspension caving in.

2. 1962 Dodge Seneca. White ofcourse. Had a rear view mirror mounted on the dash.

3. Any Yugo!

4. Datsun "Honeybee" I'm glad the queen finally died.

5. The chevy "turkeyback" Vega.

6. 1961 Mercury Comet

7. Ford Maverick, remember that plastic dashboard.


Best Looking car ever made: 69, 70, 71 Mercedes
Coupes. Ellegant

jpstax

I remember my cousin saying that one of his friend's father had a Checker. NO girl would go out with him because they didn't want to be seen in it. The kid ENJOYED inflicting all sorts of damage on the thing (scratches, dents, etc.) so his "old man" would get rid of it. Eventually his father finally got the message and traded it in on a nice Chevy.

Incidentally, has anyone mentioned the Edsel? (I haven't got time to read all the posts.)

fezo

Oh, yeah - we've mentioned them. Almost like shooting fish in a barrell. To fully do the Edsel thing correctly you need a two tone 58. They don't get much worse!

Someone mentioned Gremlins being rare. This is true - particularly if you think of "rare" as the opposite of "well done."

speedshift

Agree with Mustache on most of his choices, but if you mean the 850 Spyder, that was a slick-looking car, especially the '67s with the headlight covers. A great car to learn how to pull a cylinder head on, and you got plenty of practice.

Also think the Vega coupe was a sharp car, but you have to like post coupes. When they were still around I wanted to put a hot V6 in one, for a real sleeper.

wilcox

The "edition" models of Ford SUV's. I used to think they looked nice....but....upon looking at them in this day and age, they are beginning to look kinda...a..a..duh...Eddie Barfy.
Do you know what I mean?

carnut4

Imagine one of these things sitting in a used car lot some years from now..all rusty and beat-with the wornout "Eddie Blower" logos all over the clapped out carcass...

fezo

Several years down the road the Eddie Bauer editions will be thought of like 70's vinyl roofs and such...

speedshift

Those Explorers must clap out quickly. A guy I know bought one of the first ones. I drove it with only a few miles on it, and it was a nice smooth cruiser. A few years later I was in the same Explorer again, and the dash shook like the truck had square tires--and this was at low speeds. Go over to the SUV conference and listen to the Explorer owners [non-permissible content removed] about reliability. Too bad conspicuous consumption has a downside.

crosley4

I have no idea who this person is.

Tony

vcjumper

Ultra conservative clothing store chain that sells outdoorsy, void of style fashion and accessories.

denniswade

Had a V8 Vega, and it was a blast. 350/350 with Turbo400 tranny and Blackjack headers. Didn't over-tire it so I wouldn't have to put a subframe in it. Figured if anyone could take me on a roll, let 'em! I think the fastback Vega was a great-looking car, it was just engineered poorly.

sgaines1

American
1. Those pathetic little Mustangs from the early '80's (?) that had the headlights that looked like they retracted, but were just molded that way.
2. The Cadillac Evoq (I think that means 'Silver Cockroach')
3. '70's Mercury Montego GT.
4. '70's Cougar and Thunderlard.
5. Most '70's Chryslers, especially the New Yorker, it looks like an Electra with some sort of mutant front end.
6. Almost every Riviera except the first.
7. Almost every Toronado, saying which one's ugliest is too hard.
8. Mid '70's Dodge Monaco. Of course the one I saw was turd brown, which never helped any car.
9. PT Cruiser, it would be retro if all the design of the thirties had been ugly.
10. AMC. AMC, what? Doesn't matter.
11. Cadillac Escalade
12. Lincoln Navigator
I'm sure I'll think of more on the way home.

scongro

The early-to-mid '90's GM minivans (Chevy Lumina APV, Oldsmobile Silhouette, and Pontiac Trans Sport).
They look like a Dustbuster!