{"id":2051815,"date":"2026-07-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2051815"},"modified":"2026-07-20T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T21:00:00","slug":"the-50-most-bonkers-american-cars-ever-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2051815","title":{"rendered":"The 50 most bonkers American cars ever made"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Spun off from the main Continental sedan in 1956, the Lincoln Mark series began as an elegant coupe and then spent several generations getting steadily more gaudy and tasteless. That downward trend arguably reached its zenith with the arrival of the Mark IV in 1971, which clumsily blended throwback styling cues like opera windows and a big, upright grille with of-the-moment stuff like hidden headlamps. This is why everyone laughs at \u201970s American cars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And \u201980s American cars, for that matter. The second-gen Cadillac Seville ushered in the decade of excess with its appalling \u2018bustleback\u2019 rear, a misguided attempt to evoke the silhouette of older Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The result was as inelegant as you might imagine, especially when paired with GM\u2019s optional and notoriously troublesome V8 diesel engine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kitty\/Karen, the protagonist of Cake\u2019s 2001 trumpet-laced funk rock classic \u2018Short Skirt\/Long Jacket\u2019, is said to be \u2018trading her MG for a white Chrysler LeBaron\u2019. Quite why she\u2019d do that is beyond us: we\u2019re not sure the Chrysler would be any more reliable than even a ratty MGB, and it certainly won\u2019t make her look any cooler, especially if it\u2019s the horrid faux-wood-panelled Town & Country version. Just keep the MG, Kitty. Or Karen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Speaking of faux wood, that\u2019s the entire reason the Lincoln Blackwood got its name: it came from the trim on the weird lockable cargo box that replaced its truck bed. The recipe was simple: take a Ford F-150, slap on posher badges, capitalise on growing early 2000s demand for luxury pickups. Unfortunately for Ford, just under 3,400 Blackwoods were shifted across two years, at a time when it moved nearly 2,500 F-series pickups a day<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This flight of early 1930s fantasy was designed by architect Buckminster Fuller, for whom those carbon molecules you vaguely remember learning about in GCSE chemistry are named after. His take on the car of the future was, with its emphasis on aero efficiency, very forward-thinking. Less successful was the choice of a rear-mounted V8 engine, front-wheel drive and steering handled by a single rear wheel, all of which made handling\u2026 interesting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In many ways, Ford did the best it could with the second-generation Mustang, a car that arrived in 1973, just as the American car industry was dealing with the oil crisis and stringent new fuel economy rules. Unfortunately, this also coincided with a period in which American car stylists decided that taste, restraint and decent proportions were concepts that should be left in the 1960s, cementing the Mustang II\u2019s unfortunate reputation there and then.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We must be careful what we say here, because the Youabian Puma\u2019s creator got a bit lawyer-happy after, for some reason, journalists reacted negatively to it following its 2014 LA Auto Show debut. So, the Puma: it is most certainly a car, and it was indeed designed. This, we can say without risking an angry email from Mr Youabian\u2019s lawyers. Everything else, you\u2019ll need to form your own opinion on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Saturn was a reasonably short-lived GM sub-brand which, in its day, did a decent job of selling unpretentious, interestingly styled cars at an attainable price. One of its stranger experiments, though, was the Vue Red Line, an attempt at a \u2018performance\u2019 SUV which in fact offered no extra performance from the standard car\u2019s 250bhp Honda V6, but did bring lowered suspension and, in hindsight, quite a questionable bodykit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We rather like the latest Jeep Compass at TG. It\u2019s more interesting to look at than most of its mid-size crossover rivals, and way better to drive and sit in than its very average predecessor. Said predecessor, though, looked like an absolute triumph next to the original <\/em>Compass, a car which, back in 2009, we called \u201ca brilliant symbol of Jeep’s disintegration into failure”. In hindsight, that might have been going easy on it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Irony is a notoriously difficult concept to clearly define, but from now on, we might just point people to the GMC Hummer EV. It\u2019s a name that was once the ultimate symbol of environmentally-driven anti-SUV hate, revived as an electric car to help clean up its image\u2026 just before a climate-skeptic US administration slashed EV incentives and effectively made fuel economy standards redundant. Things you simply cannot make up: this.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Most cars will maybe travel a mile or so at most as they\u2019re rolled along production lines during assembly. The Cadillac Allant\u00e9 covered nearly 4,300 miles. That\u2019s because Pininfarina not only styled this largely unsuccessful front-wheel drive Mercedes SL rival, but built the bodies near Turin, which then had to be flown across the Atlantic in a fleet of specially-modified Boeing 747s to have the oily bits fitted in Detroit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even relative to the rest of the US, \u2018small\u2019 and \u2018subtle\u2019 are not words you\u2019ll often hear in the Texan vocabulary. Where else but the Lone Star State, then, could be the birthplace of the VelociRaptor 6×6, an already very un-small, un-subtle Ford F-150 Raptor with the small matter of an extra axle \u2013 diff lock and all \u2013 grafted onto the back end? There\u2019s now a 700bhp one based on the supercharged V8 Raptor R, too. The mind well and truly boggles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The original Pontiac GTO kicked off the muscle car era in spectacular, fuel-guzzling, tyre-smoking fashion in 1964, an era that closed equally abruptly following the 1973 oil crisis. How did Pontiac respond? By taking its second-smallest car, the Ventura, and giving it a half-hearted GTO package that could only muster 200bhp and struggled to clear 60mph in under 10 seconds. Oh dear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When the Chrysler PT Cruiser was first shown to the world in the spring of 2000, people \u2013 perhaps still riding a high of Y2K bug relief \u2013 were tripping over one another to buy them. Yet, by the time it was finally discontinued in 2010, it was a total laughing stock, reviled for its sludgy handling, cheap interior and cargo-shorts-with-Hawaiian-shirt image. On balance, we\u2019re happy to side with the more recent consensus here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As one of the very first of the modern breed of crossovers, the Dodge Caliber was actually quite ahead of its time, but that didn\u2019t make it any less deserving of TG naming it one of the 13 worst cars of the last 20 years back in 2013. Could a hot turbocharged version that tasked the front wheels alone with handling 300bhp as well as, y\u2019know, steering, improve things? No. No it could not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Weirdly, the Pontiac Aztek has followed basically the complete opposite trajectory to the PT Cruiser we were talking about a few entries back. Met with nothing but mockery and derision at launch for its lifestyle faux-by-four aspirations and extraterrestrial looks, you\u2019ll now see the phrase \u2018ahead of its time\u2019 lobbed about with reckless abandon in retrospectives. Who\u2019d have thought Walter White would make such a good car salesman?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There aren\u2019t many homegrown American supercars, but the Vector W8, looking like it had escaped straight out of an \u201980s computer game, was one of them. Right down to the GM-sourced three-speed automatic it came with. Slushy. With an asking price of over $1 million in modern money, an unproven name behind it and some questionable build quality, the W8 was an inevitable flop, but that matters not because just look at it<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There was a lot of anti-SUV sentiment around in the 2000s, and when stuff like the Ford Excursion existed, you can sort of see why. Based on the vast F-250 pickup, it was as long as a Rolls-Royce Phantom, weighed 3.5 tonnes in its heaviest form, and, just to really annoy people, was offered with the option of a 6.8-litre V10. No wonder stuff like this was getting its tyres let down on a regular basis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lasting all of three years and costing Ford the late \u201950s equivalent of nearly $3 billion, the Edsel sub-brand has become shorthand for how not to launch a product. The problems were manifold: a lack of a clear vision for the brand, consumer confusion, a late \u201950s recession, styling that appeared to have been influenced by something unmentionable in polite company. The result was one of the biggest disasters in car industry history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Every so often, there\u2019ll be a visionary thinker in the car industry whose ideas sound good on paper but are just too plain weird to be successful. In the 1930s, William Bushnell Stout was one of those people. His creation, the Stout Scarab pushed boundaries with its streamlined body and effectively nailed the minivan recipe half a century before the segment boomed, but at the same time, it\u2019s easy to see why fewer than 10 were ever built.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here\u2019s something that\u2019s bound to shock you: an attempt by a group of 1950s auto executives to design a car exclusively for women came across as wildly misjudged and patronising. We know, right? <\/em>What Dodge thought female drivers wanted \u2013 instead of, y\u2019know, a normal car <\/em>\u2013 was pink paint, floral-patterned upholstery and a smattering of half-hearted beauty accessories. Surprisingly enough, the La Femme flopped hard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Over a remarkable 10 generations, the Ford Thunderbird went from a stylish \u201950s two-seater Corvette rival to a generically gaudy \u201970s lump to a genuinely sporty, upmarket Mustang alternative in the \u201990s\u2026 before Ford went full circle and made the 11th and final generation an homage to the first, except with that genuine 1950s elegance replaced with a tacky, pale Noughties imitation. So close, yet so far, Ford.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Imagine if extraterrestrials visited Earth, and we explained to them what a car was. They\u2019d probably be able to grasp the logic behind them perfectly well. And then, we\u2019d show them a Chevrolet SSR, and their heads would explode. Part pickup truck, part two-seater roadster, part muscle car, part retro homage, it sounds like the worst kind of design by committee. Indeed it was the target of much derision when new, but we can\u2019t help but sort of love it now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We thought it was pretty silly when Dodge first gave the Challenger the 707bhp, 6.2-litre supercharged Hellcat V8 engine, but it turns out that was just the tip of a brilliantly silly iceberg. Enter the Durango Hellcat Jailbreak, an ancient seven-seater SUV that just so happens to have more power than the average supercar did not too long ago and a soundtrack that could bring entire mountain ranges crumbling to the ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea of turning a military 4×4 into a civilian go-anywhere vehicle is nothing new. It\u2019s how cars like the Jeep Wrangler, Mercedes G-Class and Toyota Land Cruiser got started. But those cars were at least a slightly sensible size for the typical road. Not so for the Humvee, which swapped its army fatigues for a suit and tie to become the Hummer H1, still one of the most ridiculous vehicles ever to go on sale to the general public.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Not many cars spawn an entire memeworthy phrase, but the Chrysler Cordoba did: its adverts, featuring the dulcet tones of actor Ricardo Montalb\u00e1n, gave rise to the endlessly lampooned concept of \u2018rich Corinthian leather\u2019. Just one problem: \u2018Corinthian leather\u2019 isn\u2019t a thing. Neither the modern nor ancient Greek cities of Corinth have any association with leather production, and it was just some vaguely exotic-sounding marketing speak.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Chevrolet HHR was an unashamed attempt to cash in on the success of the Chrysler PT Cruiser. It was even styled by the same man. The HHR, though, launched in 2005, when the Chrysler was already well into its journey from object of overwhelming desire to embarrassing laughing stock, sealing the Chevy\u2019s fate from day one. Even the slightly insane 235bhp SS model couldn\u2019t save it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With the Toyota Prius the car of choice for anyone wanting to flout their Noughties eco-cred, other car companies were scrambling to jump on the hybrid bandwagon, including GM. For reasons that remain baffling to this day, though, the vehicle it chose to hybridise was the 6.0-litre V8 Tahoe SUV, which gained a hilariously small 1.53kWh battery. Precisely nobody was fooled, except the panel who somehow voted it 2008\u2019s Green Car of the Year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sim simma, who got the keys to my\u2026 Zimmer? Not to be confused with Hans or frame, the Zimmer car company is part of the ill-advised \u2018neo-classic\u2019 subgenre, which involves taking contemporary underpinnings (in this case usually a Ford Mustang) and clothing them in a body which you might be convinced hails from the 1930s. If you\u2019re squinting. And standing a couple of hundred metres away. And it\u2019s dark.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The former, unfortunately. There\u2019s a reason the Pacer was selected as the wheels of choice for Mike Meyers\u2019 and Dana Carvey\u2019s down-at-heel wannabe rock stars in Wayne\u2019s World<\/em>. For all of AMC\u2019s earnest effort to build a compact car that would appeal to Americans, the Pacer just looks funny. Oh, and about the \u2018compact\u2019 part \u2013 the Pacer was wider than a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. Hmm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Is this the most \u201970s vehicle in existence? An early (and for its day, potent) crack at a performance pickup, Dodge could have stopped at giving this special edition D-series truck a 225hp, 5.9-litre police-spec V8. Instead, though, it also received some semi-truck-style vertical exhaust stacks and one of the kitschiest names ever bestowed upon a factory-built vehicle. Imagine if Prince had chosen this <\/em>as the basis for a sleazy metaphor instead of a little red Corvette?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For proof of quite how bad things got for the US car industry in the \u201970s, you need look no further than the era\u2019s Cadillac Eldorado. In 1970, Caddy had introduced an elephantine 8.2-litre V8, which initially made a healthy 400bhp. Partly thanks to a change in the way power was measured, but mainly due to the effects of the oil crisis, it was producing just 190hp by 1976 \u2013 less than 24<\/em> horsepower per litre. Oh yeah, and did we mention this era of Eldorado was front-wheel drive too?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How many people were really crying out for a Cadillac pickup truck? Not many, apparently, but that didn\u2019t stop Caddy building one anyway, for two generations and 12 years, no less. Only in its first two years did the Escalade EXT manage to (just) break into five-figure sales numbers, but the figures shrunk almost every consecutive year it was on sale, leaving it looking like a bit of a white elephant for the company. Quite literally, if it was painted white.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ah, the Plymouth Prowler. You\u2019ll either adore this car or think it\u2019s a ridiculous, underperforming, gaudy abomination for the people who refused to accept that the \u201950s were over 40 years ago when it launched, but one thing\u2019s for sure: we miss the car industry being the sort of free-spirited place with enough disposable cash to allow silly stuff like this to happen. Maybe if something similar made a comeback today, people would be a bit less rude about it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The original Ford Taurus had breathed new life into the American sedan market in 1986, but a decade on, it was starting to look a bit stale itself next to fresher, more daringly-styled rivals. We\u2019d venture the 1996 third-generation car was something of an overcorrection, though. Unquestionably a good car, enough people were nevertheless scared off by its, erm, interesting <\/em>styling that just four years later it was given a thorough, and much safer, redesign.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You\u2019ve heard this one a bazillion times by now: sports car of the future, promising concept, flawed execution, production problems, commercial flop, drug trafficking charges, Back to the Future<\/em>. The DeLorean\u2019s story has been retold so often that it kind of overshadows what a strange beast this gullwing-doored, stainless steel, rear-engined sports car was compared to everything else being designed in America at the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Seriously? Do we really need to explain this one to you?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If there\u2019s one thing you can give credit to the Chrysler Group for during the Noughties, it\u2019s the fact that it wasn\u2019t afraid to chuck stuff at the wall and see what stuck. Some things, like the Dodge Charger and Challenger, were runaway successes. That same attitude, though, led to the Dodge Nitro, a boxy SUV which certainly looked distinctive, and\u2026 No, never mind. We\u2019ve run out of nice things to say about it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An early response to the growing late \u201960s popularity of imported compact cars, the AMC Gremlin\u2019s design originated on the back of an air sickness bag, or so the story goes. AMC design boss Dick Teague allegedly sketched out a version of the company\u2019s Javelin coupe with the back arbitrarily cut off to turn it into a hatchback. The finished product was a bit more complex than that, but it still resulted in one of the oddest looking American cars ever.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spun off from the main Continental sedan in 1956, the Lincoln Mark series began as an elegant coupe and then spent several generations getting steadily more gaudy and tasteless. That downward trend arguably reached its zenith with the arrival of the Mark IV in 1971, which clumsily blended throwback styling cues like opera windows and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-2051815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2051815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2051815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2051815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2051815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}