Here are 37 of the worst concept cars ever built

Remember the Renault Scenic RX4? Of course you don’t, there are more important things for your brain to keep track of than obscure jacked-up French people carriers. But if, for some reason, it does live on in your memory and you’ve ever wondered what it would look like with some Alfa Romeo styling cues crudely grafted onto it, this otherwise forgotten 1997 concept is your answer. Hope you’re happy.

We get what Audi was going for with 2000’s W16-powered Rosemeyer. We really do. It was an attempt to transpose the styling cues of the gleaming silver Auto Union grand prix racers of the 1930s onto a modern sports car. Unfortunately, trying to make a turn-of-the-millennium sports car resemble a 1930s open wheel racer resulted in one of the only cars we’ve ever laid eyes on that looks like it’s genuinely in pain. We feel sorry for it.

If you find the production-spec Bentley Bentayga a bit garish and vulgar, then you may want to avert your eyes from the 2012 concept car that previewed it. When it was unveiled at Geneva that year, nobody wanted to talk about its 6.0-litre twin-turbo W12 or its gorgeously-appointed interior, because its styling summed up everything people were increasingly finding stomach-churning about massive luxury SUVs. We can only be grateful it was somewhat toned down for production.

The BMW X6 can be blamed for the plague of coupe SUVs on sale these days, but this 2001 concept shows it could have been so much worse. This unholy fusing of Z4 and X5, penned by BMW’s contemporary opinion-splitting design boss Chris Bangle, took a lot of heat when it was unveiled. While we’re happy to retrospectively admit that lots of Bangle’s controversial work has in fact aged gracefully, though, the X Coupe… hasn’t. Sorry, Chris.

Giorgetto Giugiaro is one of those car designers who it sometimes appears could do no wrong, and fair enough – his back catalogue is full of all-timers like the Mk1 Golf, Lotus Esprit and BMW M1. Unfortunately, this melty, insectoid look at what a mega-luxury Bugatti saloon of the ’90s could look like is proof that even the greats have off days. Perhaps it’s for the best it doesn’t get talked about much these days.

Buick invented the idea of the concept car as we know it back in 1938 with the gorgeous Y-Job, so it’s a company that has form when it comes to wowing a motor show crowd. Unfortunately, when it was working on the Signia for the 1998 Detroit Autoshow, somebody must have pranked the design team by crossing out the word ‘wowing’ on the design brief and replacing it with ‘making all the attendees get reacquainted with their lunch’.

Cadillac has knocked out some spectacular concept cars over the years – the Cien supercar, the V16-powered Sixteen, the gorgeous Sollei EV cabriolet from a couple of years back, to name just a few. To balance out all that loveliness, though, 2021’s SocialSpace was a look at a pretty bleak hypothetical future for luxury travel, where the wealthy are shuttled about in featureless, windowless autonomous boxes. Stops the riff-raff from seeing them, we suppose.

The final, retro-styled Ford Thunderbird may have been largely hideous, but it at least somewhat resembled the ’50s car it was inspired by. Chevrolet’s similar Noughties take on one of its midcentury icons, the Bel Air, which arrived in concept form in 2002, barely looked like the slab of ’50s Americana it supposedly echoed at all. Instead, it was just a generic, slightly ill-proportioned drop-top. It did have a turbo five-cylinder, though, which was interesting.

Anyone remember this one inexplicably being featured in Gran Turismo 2? Like the Bel Air, 1997’s Chrysler Phaeton concept looked to the mid-20th century for inspiration, but its styling went too far in the other direction, becoming a garish, over-exaggerated and rather vulgar pastiche rather than an apt tribute. Again, the only really interesting thing was the engine, a 5.4-litre V12 made by grafting two of Chrysler’s 2.7-litre V6s together.

The production C-Crosser, Citroen’s first attempt at a modern crossover, was pretty forgettable, but at least it didn’t look anything like the 2001 show car with which it shared a name. The C-Crosser concept actually appeared to be two entirely different cars crudely welded together. This was to allow it to transform between being a six-seater people carrier and a single-cab pickup truck, a function that precisely nobody was asking for.

Unveiled in 2001, the Dodge Super8 concept sounded great on paper. A burly rear-wheel drive saloon, it introduced the world to Chrysler’s reborn Hemi V8, an engine that would go on to feature in a series of power-mad muscle cars and pickups over the next couple of decades. It’s a shame, then, that Dodge had to go and ruin it by making the Super8 gaspingly awful to look at with its gaping grille, wonky proportions and whatever’s going on with that windscreen.

Do not – we repeat, DO NOT – screenshot or download the picture of the Ferrari F76 you see before you. That would be tantamount to breaking into the Louvre and making off with the Mona Lisa, because the F76 isn’t a real, physical concept but an NFT. To own it, you have to be part of Ferrari’s Hyperclub programme which gets you… we’re not sure, actually. The same picture, but in slightly higher definition? This one’s lost on us.

We’re well on board with the thinking behind the Fiat Ecobasic. A low-drag, fuel-efficient city car with almost entirely recyclable bodywork is the sort of thing that would sound fresh today, never mind in 1999 when it was conceived. What a shame it seems to have been styled by several different people, none of whom had ever spoken to one another. Small van combined with sad cartoon duck is an aesthetic we’re glad never caught on.

Are you an incredibly high net-worth individual who refuses to make transactions in anything other than cold, hard cash? The 2005 Ford SYNus (baffling capitalisation Ford’s, not ours) could have been the car for you, because it was essentially a bank vault on wheels – a personal armoured van with bulletproof glass, retractable metal window shutters and a rear compartment accessed by one of those big spinny handles like in a movie. No, us neither.

Every so often, a car company will feel compelled to cook up a concept that imagines a bright, shiny future for personal transport, and the result is almost always universally depressing. Take the 2001 Honda Unibox. Designed as a modular, highly personalisable living room on wheels, it missed one key tenet of a good living room: privacy. With those wholly transparent body panels, the entire world would get a look at the ketchup-stained trackies you’d chosen to wear that day. Nobody needs to see those.

Yet another clever idea undermined by rubbish styling, 2001’s Isuzu Zen boasted a roomy, light-filled and highly modular cabin that looked as appealing to spend time in as the calming Japanese gardens that likely inspired it. There was another good reason to spend as much time as possible inside the Zen, though – it meant you didn’t have to get out and look at the mismatched insult to automotive design you’d been driving.

Oh dear, we’re going to tear apart another Giugiaro design. We’re really sorry, Giorgetto. The V12-powered Jaguar Kensington, a 1990 proposal for a next-generation XJ-sized saloon that was supposed to drag Jag’s conservative styling kicking and screaming towards the 21st century, just wound up two things a Jag should never be: bland and forgettable. Its basic details and proportions found their way into Giugiaro’s design for the Daewoo Leganza, which tells you everything you need to know.

Unveiled at the 2003 Tokyo Show, the three-seater Jeep Treo (hence the name) was aimed specifically at students. There are just two major problems with this: one, most students can barely afford a four-pack of cheap lager, let alone a brand new car; and two, the ones who can afford one don’t tend to want it to look like a spaceship’s escape pod from a second-rate ’80s sci-fi movie.

We’d question the random apostrophe in the Kia Soul’ster’s name, but it arrived in 2009, just a few years after the Cee’d, so this was clearly just Kia’s thing. Anyway, the Soul’ster: it was basically the likeably boxy little Soul hatchback turned into a weird semi-convertible pickup truck thing. We have to assume sitting in the back at motorway speeds would feel like standing in an Arctic gale in shorts and a T-shirt.

Aston Martin was right at the very top of its styling game during the Noughties, which makes it all the harder to explain this absolute shocker from 2009 that previewed the planned return of the Lagonda brand. The more we look at it, the fewer kind words we can say about it, which makes it a relief that it was quickly squirreled away and Lagonda’s short-lived comeback was instead led by the much prettier Taraf saloon. We certainly didn’t love the LUV.

Fun fact – six years before he led the styling on that Lagonda concept, Marek Reichman (who, in total fairness, also penned some absolute corkers like the 2008 Aston DBS), then at Ford’s posh Lincoln division, came up with this… thing. Seemingly drawing inspiration from the AMC Eagle, it was the posh saloon/high-riding SUV mashup that nobody was asking for, and happily, nobody got.

Although it took until 2013’s Levante for Maserati to jump on the SUV bandwagon, the company was hinting at it as far back as 2003. Had that year’s Kubang concept gone into production, it would have given Maserati a serious leg up in a rapidly growing market, but the fact that it didn’t spared us a car that looked like the gorgeous Quattroporte V had been involved in some sort of horrible science experiment that also involved a Fiat Croma. Swings and roundabouts, and all that.

We’ve already seen a couple of times on this list that ‘luxury saloon crossed with jacked-up SUV’ is generally a recipe for horror, but Mercedes seemingly hadn’t received that memo by 2018. That year, it gave us the Vision Mercedes-Maybach Ultimate Luxury, a car with a very literal name. Although not as literal as the Mercedes Oh God Our Eyes, Please Make It Go Away.

This 2012 concept from the early stages of MG’s modern day rebirth looked designed to tackle the Nissan Juke, but its styling was a random assortment of bits from British Leyland’s past. You had the curved haunches from an MGA, the grille and tailgate from an MGB GT, the contrasting colour roof from the classic Mini, the high-mounted mirrors from, erm, a Leyland National bus, and the sense of faint despair you get when you clap eyes on a Morris Marina.

Apparently, this 2003 kei car concept was aimed specifically at men over the age of 35. We weren’t aware that was a demographic particularly keen on cars that looked like a futuristic airport people mover had accidentally come loose from its tracks and sprouted wheels, but there you go. Perhaps sensibly, the Se-Ro never went into production, but its underpinnings essentially previewed those of the eventual Mitsubishi i, one of the few kei cars ever sold in Europe.

With its fully rotating cabin that allows the car to be driven facing in either direction, the 2005 Nissan Pivo concept was designed to make stressful reversing situations a thing of the past, at the small cost of having to drive around looking like a human hamster rolling about in a giant ball. There was lots of ahead-of-its-time tech on display here, including a 360-degree camera and drive-by-wire tech, but we’d still rather just do a three-point turn.

Well, we can’t fault the accuracy of the name. The Opel Frogster does indeed bear a striking resemblance to a small, ribbiting amphibian. Whether or not that’s a good thing to model your car on is another thing entirely – it worked for the Renault Twingo, but for this 2001 oddity that hopped (pun intended) on the inexplicable early Noughties trend of concept cars that could convert into pickup trucks, we’re less sure.

What the merry heck is going on here? Clearly, this is a quad bike, just one that’s slightly too long and features an even more maniacally grinning version of Peugeot’s Noughties corporate face. Unveiled at the 2004 Paris Show, it came with a 37bhp hydrogen fuel cell drivetrain and had fully independent suspension. And yet, would you ever be able to get past those looks?

That spelling is deeply upsetting, but arguably not the most upsetting thing about this tiny 1994 concept, which, with its blobby shape and giant porthole windows, was seemingly modelled on a closeup of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. While it was refreshing to see American companies experimenting more with small cars in the ’90s, we can’t say this one got us perked up like its namesake sleep-ruining coffee.

2000’s Pontiac Piranha is another concept that bears a genuine resemblance to the animals it’s named after. Look, it even has a dorsal fin! Unfortunately, piranhas are not fish known for their natural beauty, but rather for being rather stumpy, bitey little so-and-sos that would make you not want to get into a river, and so it goes for the car too. Although at least if it lived in a river, we wouldn’t have to look at it.

The Porsche 911 has always been quite practical by sports car standards, but seemingly not enough for the company in the late ’60s, when it commissioned fabled Italian design house Pininfarina to come up with a more practical take on the car. The resulting 911 B17 did the job, but only by replacing that legendary 911 silhouette with an awkward hunchbacked look. We’ll stick with having to leave any older children at home, thanks.

Renault’s avantgarde ’90s and early Noughties design language, spearheaded by styling boss Patrick le Quément, divided opinions at the time, but we reckon it’s aged quite well. The original Twingo? A stone-cold classic. The big-bummed Megane II? Getting better every day. The Avantime? Insane, but brilliant. But this concept from 2002? Yeah, we could have lived without this one.

As part of its drive to expand its range beyond the core Fortwo city car, Smart gave us this in 2005, which was… a Fortwo with a hybrid powertrain that appeared to be doing a poor impression of a Jeep Wrangler – specifically, one of those ride-on ones for children with rich parents. Unlike the much more agreeable Roadster and Forfour, this one remained a concept.

Hailing from 2003, the Subaru B9 Scrambler is an intriguing thing on paper – a hybrid-powered, all-wheel drive roadster with 272bhp on tap. Yes please, sign us up, etc, etc. Unfortunately, it also comes from a time when Subaru’s design language went rather off the rails, resulting in some challenging looks. That grille arrangement is supposed to look like an airliner viewed head on, which we suppose it does – doesn’t make it a good bit of design, though.

A 2011 Tokyo Show debutant, the Suzuki Regina was designed as a lightweight, low-CO2 petrol-powered runabout, a notion we like very much indeed. Less successful, we think, was the way it looked, its weirdly angry face at odds with the rest of the car’s soft curves and its overall shape just not quite gelling with us. It seemed to take ideas from lots of old French cars, and smash them all together in an order that didn’t quite work.

The 2007 Toyota RiN went big on what we’d now call wellness, with features like “an oxygen-level conditioner and pinpoint humidifier". Whatever they are. The standout feature, though, was an ECG system in the steering wheel that detected your mood and altered the interior lighting in response, just in case you didn’t realise you were angry that you’d just been cut up. Still, park one of these in a field in the Cotswolds and you could charge hundreds for people to spend a weekend in it.

2022’s VW GEN.TRAVEL is yet another glimpse at the all-autonomous future of cars that’s seemingly been just a few years away for the last three decades, and another one that frankly, makes us want to go have a little cry. It was actually designed as an alternative to short-haul flights, although until it can get you to Vienna in two hours for half the price of a one-way London to Manchester train ticket, we doubt the budget airlines are too worried about it.