Beauties – or beastly ugly cars?
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This is probably not the first article you’ve read about ugly cars. Many have been written in the past and many more will be written in the future.
Much as I would like to tell you how difficult they are to do, the fact is that they simply aren’t. Just pick a selection of the many oddities from America (the Pontiac Aztek, obviously) or the Far East (the SsangYong Rodius, inevitably) and you’re off to the races.
But that’s not really fair. A car which would look freakish if parked in Epping might not attract a second glance in Barstow or Sendai. Different cultures, different tastes. Okay, even Americans think the Aztek looks ridiculous, but still.
Since we’re not going to take the easy route, here’s a selection of cars from our own culture whose designs could charitably be described as challenging.
One thing before we start. Ugliness, like beauty, is a matter of opinion. Whatever you think of any car on this list, someone will agree with you and someone else will disagree. It’s just the way things are. Got that? Right. Let’s go.
Alfa Romeo 166
The 166 was the large executive saloon in Alfa Romeo’s line-up at the turn of the 21st century. Its mid-life upgrade in 2003 was quite comprehensive, involving significant mechanical changes as well as a facelift.
The facelift suggested that Alfa thought it had gone too far with the original design. This included drooping headlights which made the 166 look as if it had once heard very bad news from which it never fully recovered.
Later 166s were less distinctive at the front, but also seemed less in need of cheering up.
Aston Martin Lagonda
In the mid 1970s, Aston Martin built a very small number of four-door cars called Lagonda Series 1. The Series 2 to 4 which followed were completely different.
Designer William Towns liked flat surfaces and sharp edges. Both were much in evidence on the Lagondas. Even the Series 4, which was rounded off to some extent, looked very angular.
The design was very controversial. Aston Martin has used nothing like it since.
Audi A2
The A2’s light and aerodynamic aluminium body made it economical and therefore cheap to run, which was fine except that it was also very expensive to buy.
Attempting to combine aerodynamic requirements and Audi design features in a car less than 13 feet long was a brave but unsuccessful effort. The A2 had none of the elegance of contemporary Audis, or of the later A1 supermini.
Austin-Healey Sprite MkI
The first Sprite was intended to have pop-up headlights, but this idea was abandoned for cost reasons. Instead, the lights were mounted permanently in the ‘up’ position several inches back from the radiator grille.
This gave the car a very strange look which led it to being nicknamed Frogeye in the UK and Bugeye in the US.
Later Sprites had squarer bodies with their headlights at the extreme front and were much prettier, if less distinctive. Despite their appearance, and a production run lasting only three years, Frogeyes are still regarded very fondly today, six decades after they first went on sale.
BMW X6
In very simple terms, the X6 is the bottom half of an X5 SUV with the top half of a coupe body.
Whether or not anyone could have made this clash of opposites work, there seems to be widespread agreement that BMW didn’t. There have been two generations of X6 and neither of them have been pretty.
Still, they’ve been selling for a decade now, so who’s to say BMW was wrong?
Chrysler Delta
Chrysler can’t really blamed for this one. It’s actually a third-generation Lancia Delta, sold in the UK through the Chrysler network because Lancia was withdrawn from the market many years previously.
The third Delta was hilariously overstyled, in sharp contrast to the elegant simplicity of the first. The smaller Ypsilon, another Chrysler-badged Lancia launched at the same time, had exactly the same problem.
Their popularity in the UK can be judged from the fact that not long after they were introduced, Chrysler stopped selling any cars here at all.
Citroen Ami
In the 1960s, Citroen created two cheap and basic cars to sit alongside the older, and even more cheap and basic, 2CV.
The Dyane was a development of the 2CV and looked slightly more elegant. The more distantly related Ami was much uglier than either, thanks partly to its large lozenge-shaped headlights. Saloon versions with their reverse-raked rear windows looked even worse.
The bizarre appearance didn’t seem to put customers off. The Ami remained in production for 17 years, and well over a million were sold.
FBS Census
The FBS Census was a British two-seater sports car with a 2.5-litre Ford V6 engine. Designed by two former Rover engineers who really knew what they were doing, it was surprisingly roomy, and both the ride and the handling were excellent.
The big mistake FBS made was to skimp on the styling, which should have been one of its priorities. The Census looked far more amateurish than it actually was. Very few were built before the company folded.
Fiat Multipla
The original Multipla was an extravagantly odd-looking six-seat version of the 1950s Fiat 600.
Fiat brought the name back towards the end of the century for another six-seater whose passengers were arranged in two rows of three. This made the car very wide, though what people noticed more was its almost scarily alien ‘face’.
To its credit, Fiat was not at all embarrassed about this, and boldly put a “Wait until you see the front” sticker on the rear window.
After six years, though, even Fiat realised the game was up. After its 2004 facelift the Multipla looked far more like a conventional MPV, which was in some ways a pity.
Ford Fiesta Mk4
Some generations of Ford Fiesta have been better-looking than others, but none of them has been particularly offensive – except the fourth, which looked like a fish.
The Mk4 sold very well in the UK, as Fiestas usually do, even though it looked like a fish. Within a few years Ford replaced it with the Mk5, which was almost the same car but had what Ford called New Edge styling inspired by the original Focus, and therefore did not look like a fish.
Ford Scorpio
The Scorpio was the last version of the large saloon previously known as Granada. From the moment it first appeared in public in 1994, Ford had to deal with the criticism and ridicule caused by its appearance.
As some people pointed out, it didn’t look at all appealing from the back, but most of the anguish was caused by the front end, which was just awful.
A 1997 facelift improved things slightly, but not by enough to turn the Scorpio into an attractive car. Production ended the following year.
There was no replacement because, as elsewhere in the motor industry, Ford’s mid-sized model (the Mondeo) was becoming nearly the same size as its large one, and would become bigger still. The Scorpio was not killed by its styling, though it may be comforting to pretend that it was.
MINI Countryman
MINI is more or less compelled to make all its products look similar to the hatchback it introduced back in 2000.
That’s fine up to a point, but it becomes a problem when you try to transfer the styling to a different sort of car. MINI is widely believed to have got this badly wrong with the first-generation Countryman and its slightly sportier equivalent, the Paceman.
The current Countryman, launched in 2017, isn’t much of a looker either, though possibly not quite as ugly as the first one. The Paceman has been discontinued.
Morgan Aero 8
With the Aero 8, Morgan tried to create an aerodynamic shape based on that of its very unaerodynamic traditional models.
This attempt included mounting large headlights in such a way that the car appeared to be cross-eyed. Morgan responded to the resulting criticism by redesigning the front end in 2007.
It solved the problem to some extent, but the basic design conflict was never resolved, and the Aero 8 never became a beautiful car.
Nissan Micra C+C
In the first decade of the 21st century, there was a brief fashion for convertibles with folding solid roofs rather than fabric ones.
If they were based on medium-sized or larger hatchbacks they usually looked pretty good. If they were based on superminis, they usually didn’t. The Micra C+C demonstrated the point, especially when it was painted a light shade of pink.
Yes, the Micra is a Japanese car, and this article is meant to be about European ones. Well, the C+C was designed in London, developed in Bedfordshire and built in Sunderland with a roof supplied by German company Karmann. That makes it European enough to qualify.
Porsche Cayenne
Like the MINI Countryman, the Cayenne is another car whose styling had to resemble that of one with a quite different shape. Porsche felt that its first SUV should bear some resemblance to the 911 and Boxster sports cars, and indeed it did.
Audi and Volkswagen did not have this problem with the Q7 and Touareg, which simply needed to look like big SUVs. Neither of them was particularly elegant, but they looked better than the Porsche.
None of this stopped the Cayenne becoming Porsche’s most popular car, regardless of what the purists thought of it. The styling has improved over the years: later Cayennes are far less visually offensive than the first one was.