East German Trabi Traban – in NEON PINK!
Here is another East-German lovely. Funny enough, it looks to be not far off in design from our previously posted Wartburg. Maybe they were all like-minded over there. Oh wait, they were forced to be like-minded during communism – so it would be no surprise if that transcended into every dimension of life, including design. Maybe it was because tastes were the same? Either way, this thingy might have been able to pick up the ladies in its day – but in neon pink?! This dude must have been ultra-desperate. I hope it worked for him – cause I’m sure his ‘bros’ definitely must have alienated him after he got that paint job.
Wartburg 353 Rusty Multicolored
Here is a non-classic and non-classy wanna-be classy classic. Straight from the source of its own motherland in East Germany, the Wartburg 353 is aptly names – as it’s just as appealing as a wart. In fact, funny enough, multi-colored warts are even more infected and bothersome than just continuous single-colored warts. Who wouldn’t want a nice “sky-and-clouds” themed (Wart)burg in their garage?!
The Ford Kidnapping Van
What’s the easiest way to fall into the attention of that nearby police cruiser? Simply drive the standard-issue kidnap van made by Ford and popularized by mobs, gangs, and criminals worldwide (and by worldwide we mean America):
This one clearly has some visible damage from an action-packed kidnapping that must have gone wrong as Police started chasing them. Who knows which side won. At least we know that the kidnap van clipped something on the way. Would be sweet if it was a fire hydrant that created a big scene at the site of collision (or rather, scrape). What’s missing on this kidnap van? Just the marketing signs. The fella who owns this need to get a big label/decal/sign that says “Bob’s Kidnapping Service, LLC” and several special offers such as “Kidnap Two People, Get One Free” or “One Child Free with Every Kidnapped Mother”. Oh, and don’t forget to tape people’s reaction – as well as take pictures of the arrest.
How to Make an Audi Look Ugly in 3 Steps
You’d think that, overall, Audi’s are ugly-proof cars. In general, this car-maker fits with the German bunch well in terms of appealing aesthetics. But that doesn’t mean that the evil capacity of the average man can’t ruin machine by rendering even a normally attractive Audi into something ludicrous. It seems from our case study at hand that only three steps are required – and this can certainly apply to any car:
- Spray-paint the front of the car. To avoid an even and smooth look, use a sponge to “blot” the wet paint and smear it a bit. You may also use a brush to distribute the paint unevenly.
- Without unfastening any screws, rip off the back bumper. It is preferred that you also remove the front bumper, but just one is also acceptable. Make sure you expose some bare and unfinished metal from underneath so that it gets a good layer of rust. The more the merrier. Oh, and have a friend ram you in the back with their car to give your ride a “rough ‘n tough” look.
- Lastly, replace all four wheels with spare tires. Start with the one at the bottom of the trunk. Make sure that the wheel is smaller than the normal one and that the rims are black. To find extra spare tires in addition to the one supplied with your car, ask friends or relatives if they can “spare” one. It doesn’t matter what car make/model it’s from. Give them your full-size tire in return. And say “thank you”.
The outcome will be an amazingly sa-weet looking car – and so unique that you’re guaranteed to get some looks and stares on the street. Don’t hesitate to rev your engine at the red light to attract some attention – not that you’ll need to work hard to market your ride. Eyes will surely be drawn to your pimped out Audi without any effort on your part. And one last thing: make sure not to wash the car too often. In fact, never would be best. You don’t want to risk scrubbing off some of the spray paint. Trust us on this one.
The Suzuki X-90: A Japanese Nightmare
Check out this little hot-shot. It probably thinks that it can attract the ladies, with its tight frame and rounded figure. Problem is that the ladies don’t have much buying power without the men out there (oh, snap) – and no guy would buy this weird looking ride. We’ll give it to Suzuki that they’ve got some nice bikes, and their ATVs aren’t bad either. But what have they ever done for the car market? Nothing, except for put out these unappealing vehicles that make absolutely no sense design-wise. The Suzuki X-90 is no exception. Too bad it doesn’t have another two X’s in the name – then we could censor it legally.
You can clearly tell that this is a Japanese car just by looking at it. The thing has got that “small” trend that all people, gadgets, and food follow over there. It’s just a little nation with little people. The problem with Suzuki seems to be that they haven’t realized that the rest of the world is different. Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and Mazda all do well because they understand who they’re selling to overseas. Even Mitsubishi gets it. Suzuki seems to still be catering to Japanese clients. I mean, only a “Hello Kitty” fanatic could love the look of this car – and all Hello Kitty fanatics are too young to even sit behind the wheel of a car.
What is this thing? A simple car by design it’s clearly not. You can’t call it an SUV. It seems like it wants to be a Jeep, but isn’t quite there. A van, definitely not. On top of that, it only seats two people. What the heck! Ugly and inconvenient. Sure, you buy a sports car with 2-seat capacity – but not some unidentified riding object that embarrasses you on the streets.
Instead of just turning it into a hatchback and leaving it there, the Suzuki peeps decided to make the back look like the front. It kinda looks like some space-shuttle when you stare at it for a while. That weird “pod” in the middle seems like it’s “forced” (included out of necessity) just to be able to accommodate the vertical space that a person needs. The whole thing just looks misshapen and disproportional. The spoiler doesn’t make it any better. Clearly it serves no function. It’s not like this is a back-wheel-drive racer that needs a good aerodynamic wing to help it grip the road better at high speeds. The sole purpose of that decorative strap in the back is to make it even more ridiculous and imitate your standard radio-controlled car from Toys R Us. Oh, and the great design on the side of the car in this picture: stellar! And the rims? Super quality. Can I get those aftermarket for my ride?
Oh, and did you think that this car couldn’t be made to look any more pathetic? No sir-eee. You are wrong, ma’am. There are freaks out there who not only buy this life-size toy, but they even go out of their way to make it look even more ridiculous and pathetic. Take for instance, the oversized wheels:
By the way, those are standard size 15″ rims. They just look like that on the X-90 because the car is ridiculously small. Some people even think they’re cooler than that, putting the standard-size wheels everywhere. Maybe that’s roll-over protection? Either way, the only oversized thing seems to be sitting inside the car:
Now that’s one tricked out ride. While we strongly disapprove of the above modifications to the Suzuki X-90, we fully and wholeheartedly endorse submerging your uggler in water. In fact, just drive it into a huge body of water to make sure that it’s getting a real good bath. Yeah, baby! Drown! Drown! Drown!
The Fiat Multipla Will Scar Your Eyes
We will take the great wisdom and advice of a PWoT Moderator in the forums of Cracked.com who goes by the name Ripper, and we will attempt to make this site a bit better and more appealing to your sense of sight by including more pictures and having less text. He pointed out that at times the paragraphs turn into a “wasteland of text” that is distracting from the potential it might have for spurring the occasional chuckle. So for chuckling’s sake, we will start busting out the visual media a bit more. Enjoy.
Here is a car that just causes immense pain when you look at it – your eyes hurt, your spirit dies, and any hope you had about the goodness of human civilization just evaporates. The Fiat Multipla is one sorry attempt at design. And to think that this is the exact same company that also produces Ferrari’s and Maserati’s, some of the best-looking cars on the road. Maybe they purposely put all the crappy designers in the lower-end brand of the family to make the high-end cars stand out more. Wouldn’t be a bad strategy – and it’s clearly working. The front of this car looks like some type of insect with a horrible disease that causes its mouth to swell up and bulge out. Those little itty-bitty headlamps just make the car look outright ridiculous and blatantly pathetic. If it’s indeed true that humans are attracted to cars with angry faces, then everyone must inherently hate the Multipla. Its face looks like a Japanese cartoon character that’s just oh-so joyously happy and simply can’t contain his extreme excitement through that awkward grin.
The back is also no good. The paneling is just too flat and too simple. The lights in the back bulge out and the sides look a bit like love-handles. Sometimes you’ve got a car that has a sexy front but an ugly back or vice versa, but here both ends are just unacceptable. At least the back window is big enough that it’s easy for anyone to just smash it into pieces. Whether you’re a good shot or not, when you swing a bat at that (which you should absolutely do if you see one of these) then you’ve got some good surface area and there is a high chance of you just getting it right in the sweet spot.
Worst of all though is the way that the Multipla looks from the side. It gives me goosebumps to look at this and just consider that it’s actually real and not just from some messed up Sci-Fi movie. What the hell is that awkward extra bulge between the hood and the windshield? Sure, when designing a car you might hope to make it “different” and there is not much to change since a car is a car – but why do you have to just go out there and offend people by putting something misshapen and deformed on the roads? The whole thing is just so incredibly disproportional – with windows too big and that weird curvature. Instead of getting a tax credits such as for hybrids and electrics, anyone who is driving one of these should be paying double taxes for imposing a very strong negative externality upon the rest of the world.
VW Thing – The Name Says it All
This is one hideous, despicably ugly, horrendously unattractive, just blatantly disgusting wanna-be car. How in the world did they produce these? It’s easy to understand how someone designed it though – this thing took absolutely no work to plan out. Draw a straight line for each side, a straight line for the hood, a straight line for the windshield – and you know what, since we’re going with the theme of straight lines, why don’t you also draw several straight lines on each straight panel of plain metal that you can find. Yet despite all of this straightness, the car is as gay as anyone could have ever made it. And what the hell are those handles or bars in the front? Do they expect that people will hold on to those? When? While driving? Pulling the car when it doesn’t start? Are you suggesting it’s unreliable? I was hoping that at least it would be reliable since it seems like there is nothing else redeeming about it. This better be one of those cases where the performance makes up for the looks.
If you think a bit about it though, it might not be too surprising that this car was made as it is – considering that it’s from the Germans. Their whole culture relies on the premise that “everything must be in order.” They’re military people. A nation of systematic planners, strategists, and the enforcers of “order” – yet based on their own (often unfortunate) schedule. This car is just another example of that. What better way to ensure “order” and keep everything perfectly organized than to embody it in a concoction that symbolizes the easiest formation of geometrical order? This attempt at a car probably made the German people proud. Under a German brand, embodying German orderly perfection, and distributed across the world, it was a perfect example of German culture. Does that make it any better? Not at all. That just makes it worse – since it blinded the designers even more and misguided objectives, once again ruining aesthetics. Great job, Deutschland. At least you’re good at soccer though.
So they made a military vehicle that symbolized their people and hoped that the rest of the world would embrace it. Well, apparently there are always people on both sides. Even until today there are many fanboys and clubs and websites for the Volkswagen Thing. Ideally, VW should have been “disqualified” in the game of making cars after creating this crapper. Yet they stayed in the game – but only after creating more “Americanized” designs. That’s a win for the U.S. of A. Take that!
And a last word: Those rims are crazy-ugly. The black bumps look like tumors. Way ugly.
The Extinct Daewoo Matiz
This is the case of one of those ugly babies that only a mother could love. And since a car has no mother, there is thus no one to love the Daewoo Matiz. In fact, its “mother” even disowned it several times. It has lived in more foster homes than the average ghetto thug that is responsible for your local weekend shootings. When you check the Wikipedia page on this ride, you’ll see that it was passed from parent company to parent company. Its misfortune came from day one, when the company that it was designed for, Fiat (in Italy), rejected the design. It then clawed and fought its way into the arms of other makers, but only for a bit at a time. Believe it or not, this car has amazingly made it through so many different caretakers that its design exists as the following models: Chevrolet Matiz, Chevrolet Spark, Chevrolet Joy, Pontiac Matiz G2, Pontiac Matiz, Pontiac G2, Chevrolet Exclusive, FSO Matiz, Chevrolet Taxi 7:24, Chronos UZ, and Daewoo Matiz. Yup, that’s pretty crazy. Agreed. But at least we can learn a valuable life lesson from it – it’s apparently the ugly kid that sleeps around the most.
Why the car is so ugly isn’t very hard to tell. Just looking at the front of it, what’s up with that weirdly disproportional and just “off”/lob-sided slant of the hood? I’m pretty sure that only minivans keep the same diagonal angle from top of windshield to bottom of front bumper. But then they also have that massive size to somehow “make up” for it and at least that’s just the way we’re used to seeing mini-vans. But a small, (very) compact car? It just looks awkward. Then there are those headlights. Clearly the genius designer must have thought to himself that Mercedes has round headlights and Porsche has round headlights – and they’re doing stellar, so it must be that the round headlights are it. They undoubtedly make the whole car. Well, apparently not. For one, you would need to pay attention to the rest of the design, not just the headlights. At the same time, Mercedes has two round “eyes” on each side, and Porsche’s is a bit off-angle so that it’s not flush with the hood. It’s the small details that apparently matter. For this Daewoo hottie the two round headlights just look like they’re trying to imitate a scared facial expression. What could it be scared of, you ask? Well, I think that’s pretty clear as well. Any car within 10 yards of this toy is enough to pose an incredible safety risk, and the little sucker knows it well. So he’s already bracing himself for a head-on collision. In fact, a slightly larger flying insect might put a hefty dent into that chassis. I doubt that it’s solid construction. It targets cheap markets, looks cheap, and definitely can’t have much “thickness” to the exterior sheets, even if they are indeed metal. They should be putting a quarter next to this thing in all pictures for size comparison. It’s so small and stumpy looking that a Prius would eat it for breakfast (if the Prius, or any cars, ate breakfast, that is). The one claim to fame we’ll grant the sizzling Matiz is that it was ahead of its own time by being such a tiny ride even way before the newcomers of the “green” revolution started coming along (which is pretty much just now). And ugly it was, just as hybrids and enviro-amicable cars are today. Take a good look at this one, car manufacturers of today, and consider why Daewoo went bust. Maybe take this as a warning and stop while you’re ahead. Oh shitters – you’re not ahead of anything. Never mind. You’ve got nowhere to go but up from here, so keep on “pioneering” and “inventing” as you do.
The Communist Pick-up Truck: Live from Poland
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, loyal readers and disloyal readers, randos who ended up here while exploring the inter-connectedness of the interwebs aimlessly, and pedophiles who misunderstood what this site is about: we present to you the first FuglyRides.com original production. Featured today is an unknown-brand and unknown-model communist-era pickup-style truck shot LIVE! in Poland. This sexy two-axle roller was spotted while members of the FuglyRides team were vacationing in the post-soviet satellite-state only several months ago. This all-rights-released original photography was done with our professional snap-shooting equipment, which is comprised of a larger-than-pocket-size 2.1 megapixel super-cam from 1999. And don’t you dare criticize our “amateur” equipment! Back in the day this sleek point-and-shoot machine was top-of-the-line and a serious wallet-buster at the prices back then. No question about it that we’re a professional outfit.
But take a look at this rugged vehicle. It introduces a new category into the site that features old rides. Anything that has made it from mere paper into the actual physical world is fair game. Of course it has to be fugly, but there is no shortage of that here.
Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram, move over. Despite its humble roots in the USSR and its classification as an almost-extinct species, some modern car maker will no doubt pick this up and redesign it for new, mainstream production. I mean you would be stupid not to. Take at it, Detroit! Lead the world with another “great idea” of yours. Why should it be revitalized? Well, let’s just appreciate the beauty and craft that went into this truck even so many years ago. What happened with the super-idea of having rims match the tires? Why did we start making rims in clashing colors? Tires clearly never were made in various colors, so why not just leave it matching? This surely makes no sense. Look at the uniform and calm beauty of those wheels. We wouldn’t have to worry about keeping the rims clean. Today, when the rim matches the tire, we know that the owner has been neglecting his car and failing to have his 4-year old wash the rims with a toothbrush or having his dog lick off all the dust after smearing the rims with bacon-lard. We forgot the good old days where it all didn’t matter, since everything was just plain black. Ah, do we miss the old times… (not!)
And check out the geometry of that pick-up truck. You think you’ve started a new revolution with your boxes and cubes – Scion, Ford, and Honda? Oh you have not! You blatantly copied the brilliant concept from the red-hats to the East. You should be ashamed. But at least this makes it clear why it was indeed such a “great idea” after all. And another feature to note on this Soviet car is the careful selection of colors. While the cab in front is a light yet powerful green, the back is a communist yet dull red. Oh do we wish the mud flaps in the back were a sunny yellow to round it all out. Yet we can’t have everything. But this makes you think. Did they not have enough of one color rationed during communism to finish the full car? Was the amount per color that was shipped over to the factory just enough for the respective halves of the car? Only by the time one truck was sold did another can of each color come in? Of course we can only speculate. But to give them the benefit of the doubt, we would be best to assume that the makers of this F-150-killer truck were well ahead of the times and used different colors on purpose. Only now do we see “smart manufacturers” reviving the trend, such as with the black plastic panels on the Honda Element and the white roof on the Ford Flex. At least we now know that they took their ideas from an excellent source of inspiration.
What makes this crappo-truck such a contender for new best pick-up in its class is undoubtedly the cargo space. Just take a look at that ingenious use of vertical space. I mean c’mon Ford, Dodge, Toyota, and all the other pick-up producers out there. Don’t you realize you can make those walls in the back higher and let people fit more stuff? Just imagine the possibilities. Anyone could be filling up their bed with oranges during their trip to the Sunshine State, with peaches on their way through Georgia, or ping-pong balls to deliver to bored college kids. And imagine the possibilities for landscaping companies. Can you even comprehend how many more Mexicans would fit in the back without the risk of having them fall out on turns?! Get on it people, and start exploiting that vertical space which is so endless. If you’re going to copy some of the exemplary features of this truck, make sure you copy them all!
And you ride on, little truck! Roam the streets of Poland and explore your roots. You must have been a true pimp-wagon back in your day. I’m sure that there is even more to your beauty than is visible on the outside. It’s the MPG that counts.
Even More From The Pros
BusinessWeek wasn’t the only place to capitalize on people’s fascination for ugly cars. In fact, in the last year, many websites created lists of the “Top 10″ this and “Top 10″ that for sucky cars. As a primer for you to become experiences and intelligent readers in our field, you may take a look for educational purposes only (and if you want pictures, click on the link of the source – don’t be a lazy wuss):
AskMen.com voted as such:
10. Chrysler PT Cruiser Convertible
9. Datsun B210
8. AMC Eagle
7. Fiat Strada
6. Subaru Baja
5. Chevrolet Lumina APV
4. Suzuki X-90
3. Dodge Rampage
2. Citroen 2CV
1. Pontiac Aztek
During the summer, Jalopnik.com put together a list of “currently sold” cars in the US that are fugly:
10. 2009 Honda Pilot
9. 2009 Acura TL
8. 2008 Chevy Uplander
7. 2009 Nissan Murano
6. 2009 Toyota Venza
5. 2008 Jeep Compass Rallye
4. 2008 Subaru Impreza Sedan
3. 2008 Chrysler Sebring Convertible
2. 2008 Toyota Prius
1. 2009 Ford Focus
Even more recent (from only a week ago) is the Spike TV list:
7. Yugo GV
6. Mercedes Benz G-Class
5. Ford Mustang II
4. Pontiac Aztek
3. VW Thing
2. Citroen 2CV
1. AMC Pacer