What is the UGLIEST car to have ever been made? (SUVs, truck)

[snj90]

I think the Prius is the ugliest car on the road today. Not sure about any older cars cars that might be even uglier.

[GrandviewGloria]

http://cimg.carsforsale.com/310983/F...E58E1440_1.jpg
When it comes to hideousness and wretchedness, nobody could beat the Fords of that era. I tried really hard to pick maybe the Falcon over the Galaxy. But how can you choose? They're ALL so dreary you just want to DIE, looking at them. And in the early Sixties, all American cars were transitioning from the Fab Fifties and into what would - eventually - become The Age of Elegance. It was an awkward time. But Ford got stuck in that moment, like being stuck in the 'Twilight Zone', for seemingly forever.

The generation ahead of mine views Ford as they view Sears - as the absolute embodiment of the dull, plodding, pathetic, obedient American underclass (back when the nation had the supreme luxury of an almost all-white underclass): the shapeless woman in the shapeless and faded housedress, with the crimped-up little home perm; the scrawny little man in workman's pants and a blue jean jacket. A Ford-driving man wore cheap white socks with cheap black workman's shoes. Ford, like Sears, was for people whose lives were about hopelessness and resignation. All they knew was going to work and going to church and raising the kids.

Car ad illustrations show the aspirations of the kind of people to whom a car is marketed. Imperial showed people having lunch with the Admiral at the Yacht Club. Cadillac showed deb balls, mansions, and polo matches. Ford ads show aspirations as simple as having a day in a park, with the children looking neat, the wife with a nice perm from an actual salon, and the husband wearing one of those nice little light cloth jackets you want to buy for him with your egg money, so he can be like your friends' husbands. http://www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-co...irlane-500.jpg (getting one's husband into one of those "nice light cloth jackets with the elasticized waist" remained an obsession for women of that class and generation) Or they show a family, well-coordinated as a group, walking back to the car in their nice church clothes, on a Sunday. http://blogs.artvoice.com/avdaily/wp...rochure-07.jpg If these were the things to which these people aspired, how sad must have been their real lives?

Thunderbird was the exception, of course, to the pathos. Ford, in my native Mississippi's fabled Delta region, was thought of as the car you bought when you couldn't get credit anywhere else. I know a family who, until recently, were broken-down aristocrats. They were struggling mightily against various forces, in the Sixties, and lived at the brink of financial oblivion. They truly could not get credit anywhere but at Ford. They had to buy some sort of Ford. They had three Thunderbirds, back then - rakishly floating between the cotton fields, in their small fleet of swashbuckling sports cars. Later, after bankruptcy and the loss of their plantations (bought on credit, not inherited), they moved up to Lincoln. Their bigger brains and bigger naughty parts and better looks, and their transcendent life philosophies, eventually moved them back into the bigtime. The generation I know share a fair-sized jet among them, and drive Jaguars. But while they were struggling, Ford had a class of cars for that class of people (Thunderbird/Lincoln).

However, for (as that family for decades referred to the ordinary people around them) The Dull Plodders, most of the Ford line, in the early Sixties, seems to have been deliberately designed to heighten the wretched hopelessness of their dreary lives.

http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/1960-1965...alcon-1962.jpg "Ahhhh.... (aspiringly, she muses), someday, I'm gonna find the right girdle and have a waistline, again. And I'll go down to Sears and buy one of those white vinyl purses and a nice new doubleknit outfit, and go to Velma's and get a real professional perm, and I'll look so nice, at the family's Fourth of July reunion." But then she snaps back to reality, and focuses on ladling slop into the stainless containers in the school cafeteria's serving line, hoping that the hairnet isn't ruining her new home perm, again.

[GnomadAK]

I'd forgotten (or blocked out) those mid 70's Galaxys. How they could take a car like the 67/68 Galaxy, such a clean, lovely design, and morph it into the monstrosity of that....boggles the brain.

[dazzleman]

AMC Pacer

[VTGal]

Originally Posted by h_curtis

The ugliest cars are mostly in the US and the 70's were really bad and most of the 80's. Pacer, Pinto, Gremlin, AMC in general, all SUVs and the empty showboat pickups. I would say the US takes the cake for the worst of the worst because we don't take driving and performance very seriously. All you need to do is look at what is being driven around here.

The AMC lineup was pretty pathetic, as well as the Ford Pinto
There are so many ugly US cars, it's difficult to choose just one!
The Range Rover is also on my list especially the older models

[495neighbor]

classic Brady Bunch station wagon with wood paneled look sides gets my vote

Also Lincoln Continentals just about every year, but especially the banana cream pie color ones. Surprising up in the Boston area how many people still drive these.

[495neighbor]

Originally Posted by judeK

To me the Karmann Ghia and Cittoen 1969 Citroen DS 21 are beautiful.

This to me however is Fugly;

The Plymouth Prowler,
even if I were given one for free, I'd beat it with a stick as if I was trying to kill a Cockroach!

That looks like something Speed Racer's opponent drives in cartoon land. Front details under headlights would fan out and cut the body of Speed's car in half.

[wamer27]

Originally Posted by Golden_Monkey

I didn't list any econoboxes in this thread, because that's too easy. But one of the ugliest cars in automotive history has to be the 300Z:



Or how about the Nissan Pulsar NX with those diagonal stripe tail lights?

Both those rims should qualify for the ugliest OEM rims thread on here.

[southernnaturelover]

See the pic I posted in the ugliest wheels thread... The Olds Achieva is one of the ugliest cars made in my lifetime.

[Headacher]

I would have gone with the Aztek, but even that has it's own very distinct styling. Many of the cars mentioned in these previous posts have their own distinct styling as well. As to whether or not that distinct styling is good or bad, is a separate matter.

I myself am more saddened at how "indistinct" so many cars are today. Toyotas that look just like Hondas, that look just like Fords, that look just like Chevys, that look just like Nissans, etc. Chrysler is currently making very nice looking vehicles though mechanically they may not be what they should or could be. Of course, most of these companies do offer some autos with distinct styling. There's nothing else on the road that looks like a Ford Mustang, for instance.

I consider the worst of all vehicles today to be any Lincoln product. Every Lincoln vehicle presently offered, is simply a Ford with the word "Ford" removed and the word "Lincoln" glued on. To me, it's an awful disgrace and a slap in the face to every designer of the past who ever worked for Lincoln. A company that produced the beautiful Continental, Mark Series and Town Car. Now reduced to putting their badge on another company's automobiles. There is not one single current Lincoln product which speaks "luxury" as a Lincoln should. Awful.

But yeah, that Aztek is horrid.