Steve's Crap Car Of The Day

PONTIAC AZTEK 2001 - 2005
This makes the list solely on its looks. I don’t care if it handles better than Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren, this is probably the ugliest car ever made. In fact it’s a contender for the ugliest object ever made.

It’s horrific. It looks like one car is emerging from within the bowels of another. It’s the Alien of cars. It’s a horror movie with four wheels and an internal combustion engine. Not even the Devil would drive it (he’s a Toyota Prius guy, obviously). It was the stuff of nightmares and scared the beJesus out of a generation of US kids: “Mommm! I can’t sleep, there’s a Pontiac Aztek under my bed!”

Interestingly – or maybe weirdly – the original Detroit Motorshow concept Aztek didn’t look all that bad. Still crap obviously, but not as catastrophically crap as the production version turned out to be. Detroit beancounters destroyed any slim chance of success the concept might’ve had by insisting it be built on an existing minivan platform, making the production Aztek taller and narrower than its progenitor. And that was enough to tip it from the very edge of quirky into the very centre of eyeball-hemorrhaging ugly.

Some revisionist-history nutters have suggested that the reason for the Aztek’s demise was that it was ahead its time… that the world wasn’t quite ready for a mid-size urban SUV cross-over. Oh they were ready. They just weren’t ready for the Aztek. There were audible gasps when it first appeared in Pontiac’s showrooms. We’re talking the type of gasps followed by screams and the slap-slapping of running feet…not applause.

With epically misguided hopes of selling 50 000 to 70 000 units a year, by the time Pontiac humanely put the Aztek out of its misery, less than 30 000 in total had been sold in 5 years.

Come to think of it, the car was doomed from the get go. What kind of karma do you expect a car to have being named after a bunch of people plundered, butchered, and diseased out of existence by a posse of hirsute Spaniards in tights and breastplates? There was freaky voodoo going on with this car, I’m telling you.