Worst Concept Cars of the Past 20 Years

After the disaster of the previous year’s Signia, Buick returned to sedans for 1999, but the unfortunate result was the melted-looking Cielo. The grille supposedly took its inspiration from the famed Y-Jobed Y-Job, and the roller-coaster body sides also referenced classic Buicks, all of which suggests that sometimes it’s best to leave the past in the past.

We hate to pile on the poor Aztek, but this list just wouldn’t be complete without it. As we’re seeing, General Motors built plenty of bad concepts in the late ’90s. But only one was put into production almost unchanged, and a punchline was born.

The automobile as rolling miniature nightclub. Meaning that the passengers stand rather than sit, the doors are lined with speakers, and the steering wheel looks like a turntable. Youth marketing run amok.

For Mercedes-Benz, the SL defines the roadster, and for that reason, the brand has a hard time with the roadster idea once it strays too far from the SL’s grand proportions. Never was that difficulty more evident than with the Vision SLA. Mercifully, most of what we see here—the exposed shock towers, the mesh hood sections, the side-view mirrors that grow out of the fender tops—never made production, although the phallic nose did adorn later versions of the SL, the SLK, and the Mercedes SLR McLaren.

Basing a two-door coupe on the X5 chassis automatically sounds like a bad idea, and the X coupe does nothing to dispel that notion. Instead, it slathers the awkwardly proportioned creation in BMW’s signature flame surfacing, which never makes anything look good. We probably should be grateful the X6 didn’t turn out like this.

The wraparound windshield with its reverse-canted A-pillars is a 1950s look we’d never thought would return, but during the retro-mad era at the turn of the past century, Dodge trotted it out for the Super8 Hemi. The strange sedan employed other ’50s touches such as bench seats but also had one tire in the future with a system called Infotronic that enabled limited internet access.

Who wouldn’t want to be seen in this shapely six-wheeled Honda? And seen you would be, given that the bodywork is composed entirely of clear polycarbonate panels. It does, at least, include a navigation-equipped shopping cart (just the thing for Costco) and two fold-up motorbikes.

The Tokyo auto show has seen dozens of, well, podlike show cars, so why single out the Pod? First, there’s its melty-looking bodywork, the tiny headlights lost in the multi-grooved face, but mostly what creeps us out is that the Pod was designed to emote with its occupants: Exterior lights flash and change colors to reflect the occupants’ moods. There’s also the fact that the car, which was designed in cooperation with Sony, was pitched as the automotive equivalent of the electronics company’s robot dog.

The Bel Air was intended as a homage to the iconic ’55–’57 Chevys, but instead this design whiff hammered home the fact that GM’s mid-20th-century era of world-beating styling was long, long ago. With no available rear-drive passenger-car chassis, the Bel Air instead was based on the TrailBlazer SUV. Thus, it ended up looking thick-waisted and steroidal, kind of like an old flame you just barely recognize at your 30-year high-school reunion. Beyond the bow tie in the grille, it’s hard to see anything here that evokes classic Chevys.

The KCV-II is a reminder of how lost in the woods Kia styling was before the arrival of Peter Schreyer. Particularly disturbing is the brushed-metal band that appears like a retainer attempting to rein in the buck-toothed grille in this pickup/hatchback/SUV amalgamation. Schreyer probably flashes a picture of this thing every time he asks for a raise.

VW sprang the Concept T on the 2004 Detroit auto show, where it surprised and no doubt frightened show goers. It’s a special kind of Teutonic heavy-handedness that can take an idea as lighthearted and fun as the Meyers Manx dune buggy and turn it into something as off-putting as this, with its quarreling front and rear fender treatments, a fascia that appears lifted from the pedestrian Passat, and the thick-as-a-brick rear quarters.

Paranoia was the inspiring theme of the 2005 SYNus (“Sinus”?). With its bank-vault-inspired styling—including a windowless tailgate complete with four-spoke spin handle—the SYNus would appear to have been designed to assuage the concerns of a jittery public. Gun-slit side windows and deployable metal shutters complete the picture. Just the thing for nervous suburbanites forced to drive through spooky urban areas.

With the Chrysler 300 having successfully aped Bentley styling, the Imperial took aim at Rolls-Royce with a package that was more than a foot longer and nearly six inches taller than the 300. Despite the center-opening doors, upright grille, and 22-inch wheels, the ungainly sedan looked less like a Rolls than like a Chinese knockoff of one. Worryingly, Chrysler seriously considered this car for production before cooler heads prevailed, saving the Imperial nameplate from one final indignity.

This otherwise anodyne sedan introduced the “beak” grille that marred the brand’s production models for years to come. Only now has Acura design begun to recover.

At the time of its debut, we described the Regina as having elements of the NSU Prinz 4 and the Citroën DS—but that may have made it sound cooler than it is. The bloblike Regina, which Suzuki threatened to set loose on the world as its next global subcompact, managed to combine multiple dorky elements: a frowning fascia, eyelash-like cornering lights, and rear-wheel spats, to name a few. Now that Suzuki has ended passenger-car sales in the U.S., even if the Regina does surface in production form, there’s little danger we’ll see it here.

That Bentley would eventually succumb and build an SUV wasn’t exactly shocking, but when it took the wraps off the EXP 9 F concept that previewed its upcoming SUV, plenty of jaws hung open. Bentley execs then spent the next two years backing away from assertions that the production version would look just like it. In the end, the concept vehicle was scrapped, and Bentley’s design team had to start over to create the Bentayga.

If the current Lexus design language is aesthetically challenging, the LF-SA concept sears the retinas with extra-concentrated efficacy. Looking like a balled-up Lexus RX, the pint-size LF-SA is likely too small ever to be sold here. Thank God.

Weirdest Concept Cars of 2015

From the Aptera Motors 2e to the VW Phaeton, check out the biggest failures, oddballs, and notably unsuccessful cars in recent memory.

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