Worst Car Designs Ever: Late Entries in the Sweepstakes

Our series on "Worst Car Designs Ever" (starting just over a year ago, on 7/28/16 ) was one of the most popular ever with readers.  Could it be that while people have a preference for success in their own lives, they enjoy reading about failure in the lives of others?  In any case, a surprising number of people came back again and again to follow tales of industrial design woe…we didn't get into engineering disasters like the exploding Pintos, oil-glutton Vegas or shrapnel-in-waiting NSU rotaries because they've been so thoroughly covered elsewhere, and because those mechanical disasters were hidden under fairly smooth (and in a couple of cases inspired) exteriors. So instead we focused on things the consumer can see: packaging, proportions and massing, surface development and detailing.  You know, industrial designer stuff.  Frequent reader George Havelka sent some photos of the newest Honda Clarity fuel cell vehicle and nominated it as a late entry in our Worst Ever Sweepstakes.  Let's take a walk around the car and see what went wrong...

First you notice the fashionable (in Japan anyway) torturing of innocent light fixtures and air intakes into a vaguely hostile transformer face.  As with the BMW i3 we featured in "Worst Car Designs Part 4" (8/11/16), blackout graphics have been employed to erode any sense of structure, as where the white arrow shapes at the leading edge of the spoiler point at each other across a black void. The bright hockey stick shapes above these arrows attract attention, but only emphasize the floating, seemingly unsupported bumper mass.

At the rear we have the truncated barrel effect also seen on the Accord 5-door.  The rear window is almost horizontal, so you wonder why the designers didn't put a pane of glass between the tail lights for some outward vision.  Note the arc formed into the fender over the rear wheel well, maybe to remind us of the circular shape of the wheels…which is subverted by the diagonal slash which cuts off the top of the well.  More diagonal slashes form air intakes forward of the rear wheels; you can see these better in the front 3/4 view.  This seems to be as good a moment as any to remind ourselves that Honda has designed coherent, well-integrated, even inspired cars in the recent past.  Here's a Civic sedan from 2006:

Note the simplicity of the thing, and the way that embossed shapes, indentations and extraneous moldings have been held to a minimum.  Where they occur, as with the spear shape which crosses the lower doors and connects (in an imaginary way) the front wheel center and rear bumper, they are employed to enhance rather than subvert the overall form.  Note the way that spear points to the crisp crease which rounds the front bumper and forms a boundary to the lower air intake…The Acura TL sedan from the same year (below) is just as easy to admire.  Everything is simple and sufficient, from the way the shallow indent a few inches below the window sills houses the door handles as well as the side marker lights as it reduces the apparent height of the car, to the way the chamfered fold in the base of the door lines up with front wheel center and continues as a line forward of the wheels, which in turn merges with a bar across the center of the lower air intakes.  

Effortless and elegant, and replaced 3 years later by the overweight TL with the can-opener grille and the odd bump in the front fenders…

The new Toyota Mirai fuel cell car (shown in front and rear views below) is an even more haphazard collection of unrelated shapes and lines, with any apparent connections or themes gone AWOL.  As both the Clarity and the Mirai happen to be fuel cell cars, one wonders if there was some conscious decision to go for shock value to attract attention...

Too bad, as the fuel cell is an interesting idea, and deserves better packaging than a mass of seasick, heaving sheet metal and plastic.

After we featured a Citroen 2CV in our original survey of controversial designs, journalist Dan Baum wrote to defend the Deux Chevaux and to nominate one of Citroen's attempts at a successor to the famous "umbrella with four wheels".  I'd have to agree that the Dyane introduced in 1967 was not a happy design, though it was less polarizing than the Ami 6 (featured on 8/3/16), which was also based on the 2CV.  The Panhard design staff was allegedly responsible because the Citroen designers were at work on a remodel of the legendary DS; perhaps the Panhardistes took their revenge on Citroen for that company's long neglect of the Panhard product line.  In any case, the Dyane design gets off to a bad start with round headlights housed in bright metal housings which are rectangular.  Then there the doors, which have big concave indents below the window sill line which may have prevented the use of roll-down windows.  Like the 2CV and Ami 6, the Dyane made do with sliding front windows...  

By 1967, the 1940s massing of the Dyane, with its separate clamshell front fenders and squared-off bubble rear fenders, was at odds with the plasticky, halfhearted modernism of the surface indents and details.  It looked a bit like a full-scale plastic replica of a 1940s car which might've been made behind the Iron Curtain…The whole thing is enough to make you nostalgic for the directness and honesty of the original Deux Chevaux, whose designers never strayed from their assigned goals.  French farmers could indeed drive this vehicle across a rutted field with a basket of eggs without breaking any.  And they could carry their products to market by removing the rear seats, and then take out the front ones and hose down the interior when they were done.  What the 2CV has that most modern designs lack is, well…clarity.

Photo credits:
Top:  consumerreports.org
2nd:  motortrend.com
3rd & 4th:  wikimedia
5th & 6th: caranddriver.com
7th thru 9th:  wikimedia