There are many excellent retro car designs out there, but we cannot, in good conscience, let the stinkers go unpunished, starting with this hideous blob of chrome-plastered horror. It was supposed to look like the elegant original Thunderbird from the ’50s, and did… if the original had suffered a bad reaction to a bee sting and gone all weird and puffy.
Oh, god. Do we have to? Okay, fine. Somehow, when the PT Cruiser launched in 2001, Chrysler simply couldn’t build them fast enough, not just in the US, but pretty much everywhere it was on sale. What was going on? Were we all suffering from some kind of collective mania, like that time in 1518 when everyone in Strasbourg couldn’t stop dancing for several months? Look it up, it’s an interesting rabbit hole. Certainly more interesting than thinking about the PT Cruiser for any longer.
Just to provide some balance for our American readers, the UK has churned out some retro stinkers of its own over the years too. (Although the S-Type was developed when Jaguar was owned by Ford. Hmmm…) With its bug-eyed, lemon-sucking face, it’s proof that not every element that worked on an old car can easily be transposed onto a new one and, much like corporal punishment and polio, are best left in the 1950s.
We get what low-volume British company Eadon Green was going for here: it’s supposed to be a throwback to the big, dramatic personal luxury cars of the ’20s and ’30s, the sort of thing Jay Gatsby or Cruella de Vil would cut about in. Unfortunately, though, we can’t help but feel this Corvette-based coupe is just a slightly more upmarket interpretation of nonsense like the Mitsuoka Le Seyde and the Zimmer. We’ll just take a regular Corvette, thanks.
What are you saying about yourself if you drive a Hummer H3? ‘I wish I was in Delta Force but I still care about my car being slightly easier to park’? ‘A Jeep Wrangler was just too competent and good-looking for me’? ‘I have incredibly twisted, warped priorities’? Answers on a postcard, please.
We don’t even know where to begin here, other than by pointing out that the fact it’s called the Ora Ballet Cat somehow isn’t the most noteworthy thing about it. Then again, the fact it looks suspiciously like a certain German car isn’t, either. No, the most noteworthy thing about it is that it’s marketed towards women, and includes both a ‘Lady Driving Mode’ that cranks up the ADAS and a ‘Warm Man Mode’ for the HVAC, intended for use during… erm, certain times of month. Yep, you get some proper retro sexism to match the retro looks. Incredible.