The car is about as analogous to the internal-combustion engine as earth is to nature. Although they are two completely separate things (though not technically codependent with one another), their widespread usage as a combined unit have fused the two thoughts together in our minds so powerfully that the concepts will remain for the next 200 years—whether we still use gasoline engines to power our world or not. It’s just that deeply ingrained into our brains to think in such a way.
If one were to follow the evolution of the automobile across its timeline, from mainstream inception up until today, a clear trend develops—cars tend to get more powerful and faster as technology progressively advanced. Duh, that’s obvious, right? Yes, it is, but a closer look would be able to define oscillations and fluctuating design trends. For all the many changes that would transform the car over the last century, cars and internal-combustion engines remained married to each other for the duration of the 20th century.
Sometimes cars got faster and it seemed like speed was all anybody cared about. Other times, luxury was the target and automakers rushed to the far ends of the earth to deliver exotic offerings of fine linens and silky-smooth operation for none but premium buyers. There has been a lot of great innovation happening over this eventful 110 years. But, as with any party, there are always downers, and many sad excuses for a VIN number should have never been given the gift of that magical, ignition-actuated, rotating assembly in the first place.
19 Fourth-Gen Chevy Nova
I am a Nova guy, admittedly. They are probably one of my favorite little muscle cars of the mid-60s and that’s not just because I own one (although it does factor in). The small, compact design was hastily-expedited through the engineering process as the Nova was on a tight deadline to start production. In fact, former GM employees on the Nova project cite it as the fastest project they’ve ever worked on. It was never supposed to be as awesome as it was, but it turned out Chevy had thrown together an amazing little car almost by accident. As everything has a finite lifespan however, almost everything that made the Nova great had already fizzled out and was spent by the fourth-generation, as the design eventually gave way to plastics and smog pumps.
18 Rally Aztek
As bad as the Pontiac Aztek ever was, nothing could prepare us for what the defunct brand were about to do. They tried to encourage interest by conceiving special-edition lines like the Rally Edition to boost sales. Whether or not it worked is pretty apparent: no matter what they did to the Aztek, it was a doomed-by-design from the start and whoever was responsible for the architecture of the body lines needs to put their drafting pencils down and take up an exciting new career in customer service at the Department of Motor Vehicles because I wouldn’t even trust him to pour my coffee.
17 Pontiac Vibe
If you can’t tell just by looking at this thing what’s wrong with it, maybe there’s something wrong with you. One thing you’ll notice about many Pontiac Vibes are that many of their owners opt out of visual contact with very dark tint decorating the windows. Contrary to popular belief, the presence of tint doesn’t have anything to do with keeping the car cool in the heat or assisting its aesthetic appeal. In this case, it is usually installed to save its driver’s dignity and preserve the tiny bit of self-respect he or she still has while rolling around town in a car named after an atmosphere felt by others. (Or so the drivers can frequently participate in nefarious activity in plain view.)
16 Nissan S Cargo
It’s cute in almost every silly type of way, emasculating in every sort of way, and aims to capitalize on clever wordplay to boost its market appeal. It’s carved into a design closely-attributable to the fancy, land snail-delicacy “escargot” that combined with its cargo-carrying inclinations apparently gave Nissan the implicit green light to try their hand at wit. (They literally thought it was a good idea to make a car that looked like a snail, then go ahead and name it after one that has been killed, cooked, and served as a delicacy.) It got the job done, but you get the feeling somebody lost a bet somewhere in the process of the design finalizing.
15 Fiat Multipla
Italian automaker Fiat slapped this eighth wonder of the world together in the late-90s and they even reused a classic namesake to try to help it sell better. It wasn’t the only rolling junk-pile driving around China, but it was a classic example of something non-deserving of internal rotating masses actuated by the ignition of atomized fuel. As a marketing pitch, it boasted two three-seat rows allowing you to cram more flesh into the cabin and an additional mass of cargo. As great as this one sounds in a think tank, someone, somewhere along the line, took the liberty to add some completely unnecessary (and absolutely ridiculous) sheet metal contours to the business end of the car and enough extra headlights for a few extra cars.
14 Sebring-Vanguard Citicar
The General would be ashamed to see such a blasphemous act of treason committed to the likeness of his stripes, but on a plus side, this Citicar (because of the General’s livery) has never gotten so much action as it did the day of this photo shoot. The car was a reaction to the first fuel crisis of the 70s, but instead of cuting back on the cylinders, Vanguard decided to cut them altogether. The Citicar was so puny, nobody could even try to pretend an internal-combustion engine had any business inside of it. As far as all-electric cars go, the Citicar could travel about 15 miles on a full charge at a school-infraction zone pace of 40 mph.
13 Chrysler PT Cruiser
Circa 2000, there was a distinct shift in the local car market. It was as if our transition into a new millennium rejuvenated a passion for all the wonderful things a car could be. We started to shed the unflattering plastics and milk-box designs of the 1980s and 90s, and a retro muscle car craze began that’s still raging today. The PT Cruiser got in on the action way at the beginning of the retro performance trend, but then took it in a bad direction that no one was quick to follow. They tried (very unsuccessfully) to blend design cues of the big-fendered 50s into their rendition of retro with less-than-ideal results. They did sell a bunch of them and kept production running for 10 years, but it’s still not a better car for it.
12 Chevy SSR
The Chevy SSR is quite a capable machine. It started out fairly weak, but mid-production corrections saw a 6.0-liter LS2 V8—the same LS2 the Corvette and Pontiac GTO used, albeit tuned down about 10hp—and a manual six-speed transmission were paired up together. The SSR's 0-60mph times dropped from the mid-sevens to 5.5 seconds with the 390-horsepower LS power behind it. However capable, though, it was a convoluted design from the start and was barely good enough for old men that were never really car guys but wanted to pretend that they were, in fact, always really car guys.
11 SsangYong Actyon
It’s small, it’s ugly, it’s South Korean, and it’s coming back for seconds. SsangYong Motor Company (쌍용자동차 주식회사) has been producing things like this since 1954. As confident and sleek as they bend those sad slopes of sheet metal, it doesn’t look like they have any intent on stopping any time soon. Not with 2012 revenues reported at ₩2.874 trillion—sure, the South Korean won isn’t very strong against the USD, but that’s still a big number! They service almost all regions except for the States, so if you ever find yourself on another continent, you may be able to marvel at one of these in its native environment.
10 Buick GTX
Back in the days when most of Detroit was worried about keeping up with tiny, underpowered imports, the super-Buick of a Grand National was pounding the streets with more beef under the hood than anything was supposed to be able to have in the mid-to-late-80s. It was a decade of acclimatization to initial horsepower-strangling by environmental protection agencies, and the resurgence of horsepower wasn’t to really take place in earnest until later in the 1990s and 2000s. Buick wasn’t about to sit around and wait for horsepower to come knocking on the GTX’s door, though, so they intercooled and turbocharged its V6 to make it one of the most out-of-place hot rods of the day. Today, it’s a $165,000 car.
9 Vauxhall Lotus Carlton
Having a severely short two-year production run, the Lotus Carlton was from the early-90s and looked exactly like where it came from. The Carlton's design was clunky, boxy, and would only look stylish for a short time, even by 90s standards. You can almost see a Foxbody from the front if you squint your eyes hard enough. Hints of a Mustang aren’t enough to save something so far gone, though, especially in a foreign market that doesn’t care to know what a Mustang is in the first place. A 3.6-liter, inline-six was twin-turbocharged with a pair of Garretts and a bunch of other nifty engine work. So much nifty, in fact, that this sedan was pumping almost 380 horsepower into the pavement.
8 Isotta-Fraschini Blimp
The year is 1905, so definitely don’t expect much in the aerodynamics department. As a further consequence, the adjacent departments of safety, fuel-efficiency, and modern luxury are all, also, entirely absent. This car, standing (and running) at over 100 years old is a true testament to how far we’ve come. It’s also a perfect design to toss an airship engine into. There’s really no good reason to do so but with no equally good reason to not do it, a 16.5-liter, inline-six rated at 250hp and 3,000 ft-lbs of torque (yes, you read that right) found its way comfortably beneath the doghouse-shaped sheet metal of its new chain-driven home. It’s not that this car necessarily doesn’t deserve an engine at all, but does it need to have this one?
7 Project Brutus
This experimental car is something only history can get away with and anything constructed like this today would get a chastising to last a lifetime and be the laughing stock of an industry. About 110 years ago, however, this this was on-par with cutting edge. Today, it’s a time machine that weaves together two very important fabrics that played key roles in the modern world’s development over the last century: aviation and the automobile. The 46-liter V-12 is from a Heinkel HE-111 medium bomber and produces far more power than anything that should be chain-driven from a sprocket, but there you have it. Who am I to argue with the preservation of WWII-era aviation historical artifacts?
6 Mercedes Vision
It started out as a video game concept that Mercedes took another step and if we’re lucky, we may just see it debut as something more than a conceptual design. But for now, the German manufacturers seems content to tease us with something we can’t have. In the beginning, it actually had no driveline when if it first debuted. Now, the 20-foot two-seater is reporting an equivalent of 738hp with a 0-60 mph time under four seconds, plus a fully-charged range of over 200 miles (stators and field windings here, folks, not pistons). The behemoth roadster is humongous, but surely the shock-and-awe styling must be toned down for production, if that’s ever to happen. You can’t argue it’s a ridiculously cool-looking car, there’s almost no engine that deserves to lie between those frame rails!
5 Nascarlo
If you haven’t caught on yet, there’s a pattern forming that you might appreciate: this list could have all been beaters “too ugly to even deserve a reciprocating mass." But instead, we decided to throw in a few sweet rides that may not deserve a powerplant strictly for being anything other than a junkpile. Who wants to spent 10 minutes reading about junk? Speaking of junk, how about a Monte Carlo body so beat up it can barely hang onto the tube chassis it’s mounted to. You may remember it from an episode of Roadkill. It was an old stock car slapped onto a street-legal body and went to a race track and crashed into a wall after 10 laps. (Nascarlo, at that time, was still working on earning a set of ball joints.)
4 Boba Golf
It’s not that a Volkswagen Golf doesn’t deserve a motor, but over 1,000 horses of motor runs the line of unconstitutionally unnecessary for so many reasons. We weren’t even sure 1,000 horsepower could fit inside of a Golf, but it can, and with some pretty unexpected results to a former world record holders’ accomplishments. It’s all-wheel drive, so that explains a lot of things right there, but an 8.293-second Golf is ridiculously insane, especially when it’s going 175.10 mph. The 2.0-liter, 16-valve ABF motor was produced for the Golf MK3 from 1993-1997 and sucks 58psi of boost from a GTX4202R Garrett turbo. (All of that, and notice, no wing. Just saying.)
3 Roadkill Impala
It’s a beater 1969 Impala that looks a whole lot rougher than it really is. It’s a roller and (albeit a light coating of patina on her faded flanks) a top-notch heap, perfectly primed for some restoration and a little TLC. What she got instead was blown out and torn into on a TV show for the entertainment of a generation that forgot about her, but the tradeoff was halfway fair. In her new life, she was to see serious big-block power in the shape of the 489cid Crusher Camaro engine with a Turbo 400 transmission tied up behind it, which definitely takes care of re-gearing and ushering torque downstream.
2 1974 Mazda REPU
The REPU stands for rotary-engined pickup truck. The only thing about that is, it’s not a rotary-engined pickup truck, at least not anymore. If you lift the hood up to take a peek at what actually powers it today, you’ll probably be faced with a bit of mild confusion as you find yourself staring at a small gas tank where the engine should be. Moseying over to the bed will show you why the engine bay is empty: it’s just not big enough to stuff the 455cid Oldsmobile big-block into. Demon carbs, Schneider cams, and boat headers make this the poor-man’s Ferrari of a pickup truck and it was claimed that it did 10s and wheelies when it was purchased by Roadkill.
1 AZN Dung Beetle
There are two times when it’s appropriate to self-deprecate your car by naming it something so unflattering as the Dung Beetle: if it really stinks, or it’s so ridiculously fast that you can call it pretty much whatever you want and let your time slips do the talking. In the case of Dung Beetle, both apply, and AZN is proud to proclaim this rusty little Type 1 is a Lamborghini-killer all day long. It looks like a worn-out 1966 Punch Bug on the outside, but if you catch a glimpse of the huge wheels and the ridiculous rake on the deck lid before you try to drop a gear on it, you might think twice.
Sources: oddimotive.com, carbuzz.com, bergmansautogroup.com.au, autogen.com, roadkill.com, and engineswapdepot.com.