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This is perhaps the most conceptually interesting Top 10 we’ve dreamed up here for a while. What do we mean by it? Well, this is quite an abstract category, and even we struggle to put our finger on it.
Basically, we all know about things that are so awesomely bad, they in fact so surpass themselves in badness that they pass into a new space-time continuum and come out the other side and into goodness again. There are many television programmes that fit into this category (perhaps the original "Doctor Who" for example) and many jokes. The cars here are either so bad we salute the triumph of them actually being made in the first place despite their manifest badness OR they succeed in some small and meaningful way despite all the badness, giving them a saving grace. It is not scientific needless to say...
Lincoln Town Car
Hurrah for the Lincoln Town Car! Why, you might well ask? It is a very large, extremely old-fashioned saloon car produced by Ford’s US luxury car division. It is very thirsty, and has a public image even in America that is undesirable to say the least; it is driven by disproportionately mature drivers and is full of bells and chimes reminding you to put on a seatbelt, and so on... HOWEVER, these cars are extensively used in fleets and limo services and after a long week working in New York, their sprung, wallowy suspension make them the most comfortable and serene cars to travel in ever, and as such taking one of these out to JFK I defy you not to doze off in the Long Island traffic – which is just fine as long you’re not driving at the time...
Citroen 2CV
Ah yes the 2CV. We published a "worst-ever" French cars article recently which excited much interest, half of it apparently from people who owned some of the cars mentioned and took offence (including people who assured us that the Renault 9 was in fact a classic), and half from people wondering about our exclusion of the 2CV. We didn't include the 2CV because, deep deep down, the 2CV is a terrific car. Sure it is somewhat basic transport, noisy, not very attractive, and a car most unwise to have a serious crash in. However, I once spent a wonderful summer rolling around in a borrowed one, and marvelled in its sheer simplicity, the fact that it was a convertible (and a 4-door one at that – how many 4-door convertibles can you count today?), its 600cc economical engine, and its weird walking-stick gearbox and its general-all round quaintness. Recently I have had to resort to "re-booting" cars, so complex and fault-prone are their electronic systems. You will never have to reboot a 2CV, and if you can drive a 2CV, you can drive anything.
Fiat Multipla
"Oh lordy" everyone said when this quirky new Italian MPV came out in 2000. Even Fiat got in on the act, dressing early models in “Wait until you see the front" rear-window stickers. The front of the car recalls a pregnant frog whose very happy about it. The dashboard is like one of these early 1970s Star Wars toys. It’s all quite extraordinary, and for the unimaginative, highly offensive. However I love it because clearly the designers were allowed to go stark raving mad and came up with a practical, inspirational, memorable car that its owners love and who flash each other on the roads. It seats three in the front, has lots of glass to look out of (make sure you get air conditioning), is a tasty drive, and is highly economical in diesel form. Unfortunately in 2004 Fiat bottled it with a banal facelift that robbed it of its character without making any notable improvements.
Aston Martin Lagonda
Aston Martin was about to go bust – again - in the 1970s and they needed a new car pronto to shore up their finances. In just seven months designer William Towns took the car from a back of the envelope sketch to finished prototype. The car he came up with was a 4-door limousine, the Lagonda, which made a smash appearance at the 1976 Earl’s Court motor show. The looks still greatly divide opinion and you either love it or you hate it, but we should perhaps be grateful that the 250 deposits taken for the car then helped save the firm. When the car turned up two years later it was woefully unreliable and came with suitably 1970s space-age LED electronic instruments, which worked about as well as you might expect: very badly. The rest of the car was little better; the aristocratic owners of the first production model had to be followed around by a low-loader in case it broke down, so common was this occurrence. The instruments were replaced a few years later by cathode-ray based systems which were perhaps even worse. Many owners gave up on them all and had them replaced with old-fashioned dials. The car itself is huge but has very little space inside, especially at the back, something that shocked buyers and neither were they impressed with a V8 that seemed to struggle to get the car going. Prospective buyers lingered not long with the Lagonda before returning to their SELs. However, the drop-dead look-at-me design still gets lingering stares today and for sheer chutzpah alone the Lagonda deserves credit. Just 645 were made before production ended in 1990, by which time the company was on its knees again – this time to be saved by Ford.
Rover SD1
We thought long and hard about including this car. The idea was brilliant, the execution horrible, as so often with British cars from the 1970s. Like every large Rover since, this car was supposed to save the British motor industry. Designed to replace the Rover P6 and Triumph 2000 at the same time, this big swooping hatchback caused a sensation at the time, and equipped with the famously brutish Buick-derived V8 certainly made an impact, as the police underlined with its large-scale purchasing of the car. The car won the European Car of the Year award in 1977 and buyers everywhere were crying out for it, so BL tool-makers decided to go on strike and the model was in short supply. Worse, the cars that were made suffered horrendous electrical problems, and indifferently fitting panels.
The oil crisis accelerated the need for less-thirsty models, with first the 6-cylinder 2600 arriving, and then, 4-cylinder 2000 and 2300 models. The former had just 104hp, never enough to budge such a large car around. They even made a diesel. For perhaps obvious reasons you don’t see many still on the roads today. I was lucky enough to journey in one a few years back; I marvelled at its comfortable leather-bound ride, the throaty rumble of its V8, its sheer self-confidence. The greatest incarnation was the 190hp Vitesse model of 1982, reminding us of what might have been: Rover as a genuine rival of BMW in the sporty saloon market, and Longbridge alive and thriving to this day...
Mercedes G-Wagen
I’m no fan of 4x4s personally as most of them don’t have enough space and drive badly, as well as being thirsty. However one of the few I do like is the Mercedes G-Wagen. Sure it too is uncomfortable and ugly and thirsty and doesn’t have enough space and drives badly too. However, I drove one quite often in the early 90s when I worked for Trevor "Waking the Dead" Eve and had to take his G-Wagen to the garage and on other errands and grew to love it. This was when 4x4s were cool simply for their rarity, unlike today where their sheer ubiquity has consigned them to the socio-ethical dustbin. I marvelled at its high-driving position and the fact that people kept well out of your way.
It was damned tough – Trevor’s one was adorned in Bundeswehr green - had an excellent utilitarian interior, including hose-down plastic floors, and felt like a proper 4x4 unlike those watered-down school-run jeeps that clog up our roads today. Extremely well engineered, the G-Wagens are used by the German army, and crucially were built by the Mercedes truck division – which meant they may not have been comfortable but sure were indestructible. It’s also looked more or less the same for well over twenty years – and still looks the business. They are about to re-design it, after which it will doubtlessly looks like all other 4x4s – shame.
Rolls-Royce Camargue
The eccentric millionaires and oil-sheikhs of the 1970s didn’t only have Aston Martin Lagondas to choose from – they could also buy a Camargue. A two-door Rolls-Royce coupe, it cost an eye-watering £83,000 – in 1983 – making it the most expensive production car in the world. It was designed by Sergio Pininfarina, and getting this famed designer of Ferraris and Alfa Romeos to design a Roller was always going to be a high-risk strategy, and so it was. The car is… not as attractive as it should be. Ungainly cabin lines clash with bulbous headlights and a frightful backward slanting grill giving it Lady Penelope comedy looks. However, there is something quite cool, in an uncool way, about being so gut-wrenchingly expensive in today’s terms, even 23 years ago. It is physically huge but not in an oafish 4x4 fashion but in a more restrained, almost lithe way, and despite its ugliness it is manifestly the sort of car a Rolls should look like if a Ferrari designer penned it. Plus, best of all, it had a gloriously pointless air-conditioning system that allowed different temperatures at top and bottom of the car. Just 530 were ever made.
Vanden Plas Princess
To be fair, the VDP Princess was always a good car. Its problem was that it was based on the Austin 1300, a rather ropey car that was prone to rust and had reliability issues; a recalcitrant 1300 was memorably thrashed by Basil Fawlty in 1975. It was undeniably kitsch – a miniature Rolls Royce Phantom of its age – but it was no simple badge-engineered job. They would take a basic 1300 away from the Longbridge treadmill and take it to a factory in north London where it would be properly hand finished with a wooden dashboard, a lot of chrome, and an over-the-top radiator grill. My granny had one, and I have fond memories of her picking me up from a country railway station in it, and then letting me change gear on the wonderfully clunky automatic gear-shift. Even at the age of eight I knew there was something special about it, with its fine leather seats, thick carpets and, best of all, walnut picnic tables that folded down from the back seats. It was very comfortable and had real presence, and there would be many more still around were it not for the fact that underneath it was a 1300 with all its attendant corrosion problems. The Princess was a true classic of a gentler age.
Alfa Romeo Alfasud (By Henry Biggs)
The Alfa Romeo Alfasud was the Milanese company's first front wheel drive production car and was a small entry level model built at a new factory in southern Italy, hence the 'sud' part of the name. Now the problem wasn't the styling, which was generally praised despite the fact that bizarrely it looked like a hatchback but wasn't. Or the engine which was an enthusiastic four-cylinder boxer which kept the centre of gravity low and helped with the car's keen handling. No the real problem was that cash strapped Alfa Romeo did a deal to acquire a load of dodgy sheet steel from communist Russia. As it turned out they would have been better off making the cars out of sheets of lasagne as buyers could virtually see the cars rapidly returning to their constituent elements, so rapidly did they rust. Leaving the untreated bodies outside during assembly didn't help much either. Find one of the rare ones which hasn't and it'll be a cracking drive although it will feel more like a collection of components flying in loose formation down the road than an actual car that someone has diligently bolted together.
Ferrari 308 GT4 (By Henry Biggs)
If you had a long-standing relationship with the world's premier car designer which led to such classics as the Daytona, the Dino and the 250GT California and had a challenging brief for a mid-engined four-seater sports car, you'd probably go with the established player wouldn't you? Not if you're Ferrari, who, when they were looking for a designer for the 308GT4, shunned Pininfarina, angering the firm in the process and gave the job to cross-town rivals Bertone. It was in fact the first production Ferrari designed by anyone other than Pininfarina and the resulting wedge shaped 2+2 was, at best, controversial, and looked especially ungainly next to the 308GTB released the following year in 1975. Squeezing an extra row of seats into a stretched Dino chassis wasn't an ideal way to create a four-seater either. On the other hand it is a mid-engined Ferrari with a three-litre V8 producing 255bhp and independent suspension all round gave it great handling. Still rather unloved to this day the GT4 is the cheapest way onto the (very) bottom rung of the Ferrari ownership ladder; you can pick one up for the price of a Ford Focus.
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