30 of the most tasteless cars ever built

This is the car to blame for all those coupe-SUVs that flood the car market these days, from the VW Taigo to the Lamborghini Urus. Nearly 20 years ago, BMW decided it was a good idea to take an X5 and make it uglier and less practical, and enough people agreed that we’re now in a situation where nearly every car manufacturer has one of these rolling contradictions in its stable. Even among them all, though, we find the X6 particularly upsetting.

All Hummers are ridiculous, but somehow, the smaller and less serious they got, the tackier they seemed to become. The original Arnie-spec H1 was outrageous, but it was at least closely related to the military version, and the more luxurious H2, while a symbol of Noughties bling, was still a serious full-size truck underneath. By the time the smaller H3 came along in 2005, though, it was getting a bit embarrassing. You couldn’t even get a V8 at launch – what sort of self-respecting brash American 4x4 was this?

Ever looked at a perfectly good S13 Nissan Silvia and thought to yourself ‘nice, but I wish it looked like a terrible approximation of the sort of thing Cruella de Vil would drive’? No, us neither, but apparently Mitsuoka, Japan’s most baffling car company, did. The resulting mish-mash of a Silvia’s basic silhouette with some blatantly not-at-all-old styling add-ons is as gaudy as you’d expect. There is one plus point, though – because it’s a Silvia underneath, it’ll drift…

There are many good reasons why convertible SUVs aren’t really a thing. Every so often, though, a car company will forget all of those reasons, like Nissan did back in 2011. The regular Murano was already tailored towards the American market, so rather left subtlety at the door. Then, with seemingly its entire product planning division on holiday, Nissan cut the roof off. We don’t think we need to explain why it’s ended up on this list.

The Escalade’s clearly doing something right, because it’s been a runaway success for Cadillac, shaking off (some of) the brand’s Palm Beach retiree image and becoming a smash hit with everyone from David Beckham to Paris Hilton to Tony Soprano. Then again, if your core market is pro footballers, socialites and fictional mob bosses, you’re not exactly appealing to a demographic known for things like taste or subtlety, which might be why we struggle to see the Escalade as anything other than a vast, vulgar slab of chrome and cheap leather.

Hailing from Malaysia, the Bufori Geneva has a lot going for it. It’s a hand-made luxury saloon with a generously equipped, beautifully built cabin, it’s got a lightweight carbon kevlar body and it’s powered by Chrysler’s much-loved and powerful Hemi V8 engine. You can even have it with a tea-making machine in the back – not even a Rolls-Royce has that! So what’s the problem? Oh. Oh yes. We see it now.

Rolls-Royces have never exactly been cars for shrinking violets, but they’ve at least always had an air of refinement and grace around them. The company’s first SUV, though, the Cullinan, steamrollers that notion then smashes it to bits with a cricket bat for good measure. Like every other Roller, it’s exquisitely built and can out-luxury any rival that dares challenge it, but unlike every other Roller, it looks like a London taxi that’s been hitting the gym. Oh yeah, and as of the Series II facelift, the grille lights up. Eeesh.

It’s fair to say the latest generation of SL hasn’t exactly been flying out of showrooms, so to drum up some interest, Mercedes gave it the Maybach treatment. Cue a garish two-tone paintjob, some shiny wheels that you wouldn’t want to get within a bus’s width of a kerb and an interior whiter than a Beverly Hills dentists’ office and the teeth created there. Even its full, official name – Mercedes-Maybach SL 680 Monogram Series – turns us a bit green.

Aston Martin’s Noughties corporate look – that curving trapezoidal grille, simple oval headlights and C-shaped tail lights – was crafted to look svelte and elegant on slinky two-door coupes and low-slung saloons, and it very much nailed that brief. Smushed onto the puggish proportions of a Toyota iQ city car to create a bizarre emissions compliance special, though? Not so much – it looked more like something someone created in their garage as a joke. The Cygnet was no joke, though – it was a very real car that some people paid the 2011 equivalent of nearly £50,000 for.

The Chrysler TC by Maserati was conceived to benefit two brands that were struggling in the late ’80s – Chrysler would get a flashy halo car, Maserati would expand itself into a new audience. However, despite being styled and assembled in Italy, there wasn’t much Maserati DNA in what was, effectively, a slightly stretched, twice-as-expensive Chrysler LeBaron Convertible wearing a pair of fake Versace loafers. Now united under Stellantis, both Chrysler and Maserati seem to have been in a state of perpetual struggle since, but wisely, nothing like this has ever been tried again.

There’s a good chance that in the 14 years since this bizarre one-off first appeared, you’d largely banished it to an empty, dusty, seldom-accessed corner of your memories, in which case, we can only apologise for reminding you it exists. The understatedly handsome bodywork of a 12C was hacked up to create this bizarre and incongruous mish-mash of art deco design cues, gaudy chrome bits and a weirdly generic face. It’s very rarely been seen publicly since its debut at Pebble Beach in 2012. Perhaps whoever commissioned it realised what they’d done.

That said, we wouldn’t be at all surprised if the X-1’s owner has since added a Hispano-Suiza Carmen to their collection. Like the one-off X-1 did, this owl-faced electric Spanish hypercar does its best to fuse the trappings of Hispano-Suiza’s 1920’s heyday with the modern supercar buyer’s craving for bling. The result is like seeing a lovely art deco house having its parquet flooring and brass light fixtures ripped out and replaced with crushed velvet carpets and gaudy colour-changing LEDs.

Done right, retro car design can be excellent. See the original BMW Mini, the Alpine A110 and the new Renault 5 for some examples. Ford itself has form with the Noughties Mustang and the new Bronco. The eleventh and final generation of the Thunderbird, though, was retro design done very, very wrong. It was supposed to call to mind the elegant 1950s original. And it did, if that original car had been very vaguely described down the phone to someone who’d never seen it before.

Speaking of American retro designs that spectacularly missed the mark, may we introduce you to the second-gen Cadillac Seville, launched in 1980? From most angles, it looks like any other American car of the same era – a big, boxy slab of chrome, leatherette and body roll. But then you see the ‘bustleback’ rear, intended to evoke the silhouette of a 1950s Rolls or Daimler, but looking entirely out of place and unapologetically tacky on the otherwise steadfastly square Seville.

The logic behind Ford’s posh Lincoln division doing a more luxurious version of the F-150 was sound, but the result was never going to be an exercise in restraint. Unfortunately, the resulting truck, the Blackwood, was made immeasurably more tasteless by the thing that gave it its name: cladding its (laughably small) lockable cargo bed was what appeared from a distance to be black woodgrain which, on closer inspection, turned out to be faker than the average Beverly Hills smile.

Yeah, yeah, we know. We’ve already laid into one Chrysler product from the late 20th century. This just seems unfair. In our defence, though, the brand sort of made itself an easy target with stuff like the Town & Country, an attempt to put an upmarket spin on the dismal LeBaron by fitting it with 1950s-style wood panelling. Sorry, simulated wood-effect panelling. This sort of thing worked on those big ’40s and ’50s station wagons, but on the miserable LeBaron, it just smacked of desperation.

A really big, posh SUV is never going to be far from accusations of bling and tastelessness, and the gargantuan standard Mercedes GLS treads a very delicate line. That line is entirely crossed and scribbled out of existence by the Maybach version, though, especially if you get it with two-tone paint on those utterly ludicrous 23in wheels. This is a car for people who simply don’t care what you think – and for that, we almost have to love it. Almost.

Would you like some SUV with your grille? Logically, there’s no reason at all for the RS Q8 to exist when the cheaper, faster, lighter, better-looking, more practical, more efficient RS6 Avant exists. But when have car buyers ever been driven by logic during the last 20 years or so? As a result, Audi (and everyone else building huge, fast SUVs) will likely keep shifting these high-riding exercises in compromise and excess by the bucketload. Sigh.

Remember the EXP 9 F, the 2012 concept car that previewed Bentley’s then-incoming SUV? It speaks volumes that compared to that garish concept, the production Bentayga looks almost restrained because, detached from that context, it’s still about as brash and chintzy as cars get today. That’s especially true in embiggened EWB form, the extended wheelbase adding even more visual heft and sheer real estate to a car that was hardly short of it to begin with.

Enough has been said about the sheer beauty of the original Jaguar E-Type that we don’t think we need to wax lyrical any more. However, we’ll happily add to the chorus of dissenting voices around 1971’s Series 3 model. To bring the decade-old E-Type into the ’70s, Jaguar besmirched its gorgeous GT with a gaudy grille, inelegant tail lights and the worldwide loss of the pretty glass headlight covers – previously only an affliction for US-market cars. The final insult was the loss of the two-seater coupe, leaving the awkwardly-proportioned 2+2 as the only hardtop E-Type available.

We don’t know how many people looked at a new Jaguar S-Type and thought ‘it’s good, but I wish it had an even more questionable face, a cheaper interior and a badge currently best known for cheap, austere runabouts’, but the Kia Opirus arrived in 2003 to answer their very unusual prayers. Clearly, it was niche enough for Kia to never bother offering it in right-hand drive, which is good, because it means that in Britain, a company that now makes some comfortably class-leading vehicles doesn’t have its image tarnished by this abomination.

Honda’s posh Acura brand has stayed mostly confined to North America, meaning the rest of the world didn’t have to lay eyes on this weird, slab-sided, high-riding hatchback that attempted to cash in on the inexplicable success of the original BMW X6. It perhaps won’t come as a shock that the ZDX couldn’t mirror that success, and it was mercifully killed off before too many of them could find their way onto the road.

The regular Infiniti FX was exactly the sort of car you’d expect from a luxury-badged SUV geared largely for the American market – that is, a bit chintzy for most European tastes. However, Infiniti’s early 2010s sponsorship of the Red Bull F1 team led to this high-performance special edition bearing the name of Sebastian Vettel, then at the height of his dominance. To the already brash exterior was added a carbon rear wing and a spectacularly cheap-looking F1-style rain light on the rear diffuser. A real conceptual mess all around, even if it made a good noise.

The Lancia Thesis was borne from the 1998 Diagolos concept, a fairly spectacular, unabashedly retro luxury saloon that carried off its classical flourishes with aplomb. By the time they were toned down for the production Thesis a few years later, though, nearly all the visual magic was gone, the doe eyes, pouty, chrome-laden grille and admittedly exotic-looking swooshy tail lights entirely at odds with the car’s otherwise dowdy, conservative silhouette.

When Humphrey Bogart spoke the immortal line ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’, in 1942’s timeless classic Casablanca, we can only assume the object of his visual awe wasn’t the special edition Japanese-market Subaru Impreza of the same name. That’s partly because the Impreza Casa Blanca launched over 50 years after the film came out, but mainly because the only utterance likely to come from anyone clapping eyes on this neo-classical mess is something along the lines of ‘eurgh’.

Oh god, do we have to write about this one? Has enough digital ink not been spilled on this thing’s unabashed visual awfulness, its role as little beyond a rolling, overweight, stainless steel manifestation of... well, y'know, or the fact that its enormous heft and doorstop-shaped body make it literally impossible to homologate for sale in large parts of the world? No? Okay, fine. Just look at it.

If you’ve ever looked at footage of models strutting up and down the catwalk at fashion shows and wondered who exactly the stuff they were wearing was supposed to be for, then there’s a good chance you were looking at the work of fashion designer Jeremy Scott. So when he was handed a Smart Fortwo to create the Forjeremy (no, really) special edition, the result was predictably baffling, incorporating Scott’s signature wing motif onto the tiny city car’s rear pillars. Thankfully, so few were built that you stand very little chance of encountering one in the wild.

Done right, grand tourers are about as elegant and tasteful as cars can get, and the Ferrari 599 was certainly a grand tourer done right. That makes the one-off 599 China all the more egregious. Created by artist Lu Hao, the ‘china’ in question is the grandparents’ favourite ceramic that inspired the, erm, interesting exterior design. A 599 in a pearly colour resembling a china plate would have been okay, but why make it look specifically like a china plate that’s been dropped and hastily glued back together?

As a starting point, the Lamborghini Urus lands somewhere at the ‘neo-Grecian McMansion’ end of the good taste scale, but there’s always scope for the aftermarket to take things further. Few take it further than US outfit Rezvani, which, to create the Knight, gives a Urus a futuristic, Batmobile-esque carbon body then offers all sorts of military-grade protective kit including bulletproof windows and panels, underbody explosion protection, smoke screens and electrified door handles. Because if you genuinely believe you’re a target for assassination, nothing keeps attention away like an angular, V8-powered mega-SUV.

A cop-out? Maybe, but it’s too tricky to pin down any one crime against cars committed by this notorious modifier as more egregious than the others. If we had to pick one, perhaps it’s the utterly inexplicable short-wheelbase, convertible, Monopoly-themed Mercedes-AMG G63 it rolled out in 2025, or possibly one of its several eye-searing takes on the Ferrari Purosangue. Your mileage may vary, though. Whatever your pick, you may want to have some pictures of lovely old Astons and Alfas lined up to take the taste away.