Styling is one of the most important aspects of an automotive build. The body lines and styling cues are what we judge a car by, whether correctly or incorrectly so. The aggressively straight and low lines of a Dodge Challenger suggest it’s a mover and a shaker while the abstemious curves of the Toyota Prius suggest style is a word you’re only vaguely familiar with. Those who say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover have clearly never laid eyes on any of the cars we're about to showcase. The fact is, it’s an evolutionary survival mechanism that’s evolved with us to keep us out of trouble over the centuries.

But after we get done making snap judgments based on book covers, there’s a whole car underneath to explore. Some have big motors, some have roomy interiors, some have more creature comforts than a day spa. Some, however, have nothing but heaps of disappointment by the shovelful. Although the monumental task of building an exceptional automobile is far beyond the scope of most folks, the guys that get the big bucks for doing this stuff are supposed to know what they’re doing, right? One would think so, but the following 20 cars suggest this isn’t always the case. Sometimes poorly conceived concepts slide through all phases of production unchecked only to make it to the end of the assembly line in a product that someone really should lose their job over.

20 Chrysler Crossfire

jalopnik.com

Chrysler has been flirting with a dangerous trend for a long time now and it’s one of those things that everybody sees and we all know it’s there, but the elephant in the room never gets addressed and the trend just exists perpetually until the brand goes away.

It was developed during the union of Daimler and Chrysler and heavily based on a Mercedes-Benz platform, sharing 80% of itself with its sister car.

What seemed to not transfer over were the stylish body lines of the German automaker. Instead, we’re left with Chrysler junk wrapped around an otherwise great little roadster. The styling in the front was already pretty far on its way down in history as a styling dud, but the design of the rear end just sealed the deal.

19 Smart Car

flickr.com

Forever will the Smart be a dirty stain in our history books. Sure, there have been worse atrocities to befall man, but the embarrassingly underpowered, short-wheelbase, eco-friendly, tuna can Smart is a wayward pile of anti-patriotism that should be burned with the prejudice of Salem witch hunters. Having a starting price point next to some of the cheapest, new cars to date, the Smart car should have done much higher sales numbers than it ever did, but people could see right through the guise of economy onto the real evils of zero utility. My hand-me-down computer chair reclines further than Smart car seats and good luck if you have more than a laptop’s worth of cargo.

18 Cadillac Catera

wikipedia.org

The German-engineered Opel Omega B was rebadged for "luxury" after some fool at Cadillac thought it wise to adopt this stray and a legacy of sorrow begins. It’s not technically a Cadillac, so cut the Cadillac designers a little slack on this one, but scoff no less because, believe it or not, the car is even worse than it looks.

The entire driving experience from before you even start the car to the last moments before key-off is lackluster and disappointing to say the very least.

The most uncomfortable part of a Catera, besides owning one, is having to transition the conversation to a positive subject gracefully when your buddy tries to brag that he has a Cadillac and you find out this is what he’s actually talking about.

17 Plymouth Prowler

bestcarmag.com

Most of the time you can look at a car and have a pretty decent idea what demographic is being targeted - telltale design cues along with equipped features and specifications all paint a picture as to who’s face you can expect to be popping up from the driver’s seat. In the case of the Prowler, I can only assume it’s a middle-aged man that maybe wears camo-cargo shorts with a striped tee shirt and tube socks – at the same time. This car is a perfect example of what happens when retro goes wrong past the point of salvage and not all the flames in the world can hide the ridiculousness of a design that tried and failed to emulate the roadsters of the ‘30s.

16 Dodge Grand Caravan

miamilakesautomall.co

A close scrutinizing of any lineup of a particular model car throughout its production life will reveal a lot about it – and a gander at many Dodge models can connect a few dots about who’s in charge in the aesthetics department. I don’t quite know what it is, but something in the clunky-looking styling of the entire body seems to amplify as the lines converge into the front end with boxy and oversized headlights. The entire van seems to have a hard time pulling away from the ‘90s. The rendition of the design features passed down into subsequent models still captures the Dodge spirit, but renders it in an unpleasing fashion that looked dated the moment it rolled off the assembly line.

15 Scion XB (First Generation)

csfrace.com

In an attempt to win over a young, style-conscious generation with trendy designs and raging fuel economy, Scion injected into the market the likes of a vehicle which has seldom been seen before.

It was basically just a box, as square as could be, that boasted no sweeping body lines or intricate styling. Instead, the XB was all about utility’s fusion with economy.

The paper-thin body panels easily deflect with light pressure from a pinky finger and weak points all around the car are prone to excessive breaking under normal use. If that’s not enough already, there’s enough torque steer from the wimpy little 103hp 1.5L engine to plow the lunchbox into the next lane if you’re not careful.

14 Nissan Quest

All Car Review

If you happen to be a proud new Quest owner, let me just hack and slash your pride down to size right now – the build is ugly, spacious but lacking style and personality. The outside lacks more swag than the inside ever had and although some of them prove reliable for owners, it’s not without its flaws. Others have been documented to go through multiple sets of lower control arms, sway bar links, struts, tires, shocks and a myriad of other mechanical failures leaving the verdict that the Quest traverses a fine line just north of complete junk but far south of a quality car, especially if you care about looking even halfway respectable driving down the street.

13 Lincoln Blackwood

classiccars.com

Everybody likes luxury, and the Ford F-150 was the best-selling pickup truck in history; it should have been a winning combination to fuse the two together, right? Wrong! $52,000 for a pickup truck as powerful as my $13,000 Silverado with half the load-carrying capability was further incapacitated by less cargo space than a Crown Victoria. At the end of the day, it’s not much more than a standard F-150 with a lightly brushed coat of luxury. On the plus side, if you ever happen to catch a Blackwood owner out in public, pick up the nearest rock you find, call it magic and see if you can sell it to him for $100 by calling it a luxury rock.

12 Ford Edsel

syyenergy7

Sometimes, the hammer of innovation misses its mark. If your hand is the one holding the nail when it does, you’re about to be in for a small dose of instant regret. Ford’s hand held the proverbial nail on September 4th, 1957 when the biggest flop they’d ever seen would eventually cost the company over $250 million.

The release of the Edsel was preceded by a year of teasers and growing anticipation that built up the car to epic proportions. The actual car never even had a chance to fill those shoes.

None of the 18 variants of the Edsel ever sold very well. The overpromised car of the future couldn’t have launched at a better time than in the midst of the uncertainty at the beginning of a recession.

11 Pontiac G3

gr8autophoto.com

Not necessarily known for the propensity to make good decisions as shown by history, the Pontiac brand’s timeline is littered with regrets and bad choices that follow the car line all the way down to the chopping block in 2009 when a bankrupt General Motors had to make cuts to stay afloat. The G3’s one claim to fame is its unfortunate distinction of being the shortest-lived Pontiac model in history although its sister Aveo model continued to live on. Perhaps this was a pre-emptive strike at keeping this heap from rotting on the roadways as its design was actually rooted in the Korean Daewoo line – yet another GM wonderchild.

10 Subaru Baja

bestcarmag.com

The innovative little Baja was, in a brave attempt, trying to bring back the versatility of the Brat in style with an available turbo and standard all-wheel-drive system that should have been a home run for millennials of the day and the fanny-pack wearing weirdo, right?

In reality, the line saw a short-lived run from 2003 to 2006 and was subsequently discontinued having never enjoyed the success Subaru was looking for.

Albeit different from the Failure of the Blackwood, the fact remains that you can’t just throw a pickup bed at something and call it a Swiss army knife. Useless utility and wasted economics are harder to hide behind a veil of gimmicks than Subaru gave the public credit for.

9 Suzuki Kizashi

Thomas Bondan Oto Motif

The Kizashi could have probably benefited from a more domesticated name, but even then that wasn’t enough to save the red-headed stepchild of a car that didn’t have a solid identity in the first place. Positioned in the ambiguous area between mid-sized and compact, it was a cut above the compact market offerings while still maintaining sportiness and economy greater than that of the more luxurious mid-sized category. This move to assert itself into a respectable place in the car market cost the motorcycle company more credit than it ever earned them and the Kizashi was discontinued in 2016.

8 Acura ZDX

usatoday.com

It has been seen time and again; a model will attempt to stray outside its genre’s realm of familiarity in an attempt to tackle another desirable attribute to fuse the two together, usually with disappointing results. The ZDX was no exception to this unfortunate generality in their attempt to blend a smaller crossover’s economy with the versatility of a large four-door. The ZDX ends up somewhere in the middle as both attributes suffer. Moving the rear door handles up to the C-pillar location didn’t make it any less of a door, small as they were, and despite the size of the car, passengers north of five feet tall were not riding anywhere in comfort. Swing and a miss!

7 Mitsubishi Raider

conceptcarz.com

I’ve found the absolute coolest Mitsubishi Raider to feature here while simultaneously placing before you the worst trophy truck history has ever seen. Rather than sticking to what they were good at (small, econo-beaters with the occasional sensation here and there), Mitsubishi decided that they wanted a piece of the truck market too. So what did they do?

Rather than do it right, they transitioned their ugly styling and girly attitude into a pickup truck aimed at contending with the Tacoma and Dakota – two of the best mid-sized pickup trucks in history.

When you’re shooting a test probe into an unfamiliar environment, those are the last contenders you want to go heads up with. The short-lived Raider, despite the gritty name, lasted less than five years.

6 Dodge Dart

motortrend.com

We’ve seen this tragedy play out multiple times before, and lessons tend not to be learned the easy way from other people’s failures. The legendary lineup of nostalgic muscle in an era that put little emphasis on clean air was a playground for raw horsepower to run rampant and the cars of that day took full advantage. Today, it’s a much more controlled environment but the memory remains even to those of us who’ve never lived it. Bringing back a namesake from the past inherently comes with a large set of loafers to fill. If you’re going to try, try to do it right. The Dart, seemingly forgetting everything that made it a Dart, tried and failed. Maybe if they’d have named it Pushpin or Thumbtack, expectations wouldn’t have been let down so much.

5 Jeep Compass

via canadian auto review

Straight out of the box the Compass seems to be misguided by bad direction. The R&D department responsible for this machine failed just about every expectation a Jeep owner could reasonably expect from their wares. It’s earned itself the lowest rating in its class despite the booming mini SUV market. Crossovers being all the rage, one has to wonder how come the legendary Jeep couldn’t put something, well, legendary out. This is unknown and beyond my comprehension, but when 180hp doesn’t feel like 180hp, when a 2.4L struggles to transfer power through nine speeds adequately, 24mpg doesn’t even feel like a value anymore. Synopsis: it would have been great for a Kia. Realistically, we should expect more from Jeep.

4 Chrysler Sebring

via chagnon honda

The Dundy Award for the most poorly executed "luxury" car made many appearances on The Office as Michael Scott’s Dunder Mifflin company car. As prideful as Michael was of his Sebring, that didn’t stop others in the office from poking fun at it. Perhaps indicative of its life off the set, the Sebring never amounted to much more than a typical Chrysler nightmare of styling that we couldn’t get rid of fast enough. Production in various forms ran from 1996 to 2010 which was, in my humble opinion, far too long for such a pile. The car was never up to par with competitors or anywhere even with the times.

3 Kia Amanti

via ontario cars

They say a rating is only as good as the reviewer. Nonetheless, a 4.5-star rating on any rating platform sounds good with over 150 contributions, right? You’d surely think so, but thinking can get you into trouble and if not for my distaste for this car in the first place, I’d still be inclined to do some further research before following the leader on this one. Dealing with more cons than Alcatraz, the Amanti can only claim an upper-class luxury feel on a budget, with a presidentially large rear seat. If that’s something that floats your boat then great, but don’t expect any high-fives for this one!

2 Pontiac Aztek

via zonderpump

You needn’t dig long or hard to find a formidably overwhelming presence of negative public opinion on the Aztek; the styling is yet another in a long line of dumpy-looking cars that Pontiac continued to try to jam into the driveways of style-blind consumers nationwide.

You also don’t have to look at it very long to see why people hate this thing. 

The car was originally released with half of the exterior covered in, of all things, plastic. Later, a bare version was released of an updated body with no plastic-clad panels – and still ugly. The Aztek was literally built to be hated.

1 Chevy SSR

ericpetersautos.com

The Super Sport performance legacy suffered a tarnishing drag through the mud when a design team at General Motors was allowed to proceed with the highly-confused SSR. The target market for this car is very ambiguous, and that’s one of the reasons this car was so ridiculous.

Notwithstanding all the ugly here, it featured a retractable hardtop that folded into the trunk, thus taking up valuable payload space.

The 4,000lb heap may have featured the 6.0L LS2 V-8 and a Tremec T-56 manual transmission, but the blasphemy of attempting to fuse truck-utility with Corvette-performance wrapped around a retro-roadster styling just wasn’t anything that should have ever left a drawing board.

Sources: classiccars.com, motortrend.com, caranddriver.com, usatoday.com, consumerreports.com.