The Wildest Cars Ever Made
For at least as long, manufacturers have also come up with some pretty wild designs without necessarily meaning to. Many of their most apparently crazy cars ended up that way for sound technical reasons, or perhaps because they were simply following a particular fashion. Others can safely be described as unfortunate mistakes.
The possibilities are so wide that hundreds of cars could reasonably be described as wild. Here, in alphabetical order, are some which particularly grabbed our attention.
The Disco Volante was a sports racing car derived from Alfa's 1900 sedan and produced in very small numbers in 1952 and 1953. Manufacturers had been trying to manage airflow round their car's bodies for some time, but the Disco Volante took the idea to a whole new level.
Five cars were built, with three body styles. The Spider (pictured) most obviously deserved the model's name, which is the Italian for 'flying saucer'.
The most memorable Alfa Romeos are usually beautiful, and frequently curvy. Neither of these descriptions applies to either the SZ coupe (pictured) or the later RZ convertible. Based on a sketch by Robert Opron (1932-2021), the SZ was slab-sided and aggressive.
It was nicknamed il mostro ('the monster') by Italians, perhaps with a sense of approval and respect.
For a car produced in the US in the second half of the 1970s, the Pacer had an astonishingly modern design, featuring an enormous amount of glass. The radical shape was almost certainly a step too far for American Motors Corporation. Unlike Detroit’s Big Three, AMC was not big enough to offset the risk of losing money on the Pacer with profits from more conventional models.
The Pacer was not a great car, and there were several reasons to avoid it, but the styling was certainly a factor in AMC's decision to end production after just five years.
The Atom is an extreme example of a car's form being dictated by its function. There is almost no styling at all. The body of the car is also its spaceframe chassis, through which the driver and many of the components can easily be seen. There are almost no non-structural panels.
Despite all this, the Atom is one of the most immediately recognisable cars in the world. Hardly anything else looks remotely like it.
Designed by William Towns (1936-1993), the Lagonda was greeted with outrage when it made its debut in 1976. Until then, Aston Martins had been stylish and curvy. The Towns design largely consisted of flat panels joined to each other by sharp edges.
The one-off Victor is based on the limited-production One-77 hypercar, and features suspension from the Vulcan track car and an instrument display from the Valkyrie. Its 7.3-liter V12 engine was uprated by Cosworth to produce 848 hp, rather than the One-77’s 760 hp.
If the specification is wild, the appearance is even more so. The Victor's carbonfibre body uses styling cues from the V8 Vantage manufactured from 1977 to 1989. The shrouded round headlights and black paintwork help to make the Victor one of the most aggressive-looking road-going Astons ever built.
Although the Audi Type K was technically advanced, it looked pretty much like most other 1920s cars until Paul Jaray (1889-1974) got his hands on it. The brilliant Austrian aerodynamicist, formerly employed by Zeppelin, produced an extraordinary body which was also fitted to cars made by the less well-known German manufacturers Ley and Dixi.
Freakishly tall for their width, these development vehicles were at risk of toppling over in crosswinds or when being driven enthusiastically round corners. But they were also much faster in a straight line than versions with conventional bodies, as Jaray knew they would be.
Like the Ariel Atom, the BAC Mono and its successor, the BAC Mono R (pictured) look the way they do because they were designed to be fast, not pretty. These creations of the Briggs Automotive Company are built very much like racing cars, with an emphasis on lightness and optimal weight distribution.
They also combine a single-seater design with enclosed wheels. The advantages of this pairing are so great that it is banned in most forms of motorsport, including Formula 1.
The Bentley Bentayga luxury SUV is an imposing vehicle, but nothing like as wild as Bentley intended it to be. The Bentayga was first displayed to the public in concept form at the 2012 Geneva auto show, when it was known as the EXP 9 F. Reaction to its front-end styling, with two large, circular light units stacked vertically on each side, was loud and mostly critical.
Bentley gave the matter more thought and removed much of the wildness from the design before putting the Bentayga into production in 2015.
Did any car ever illustrate the culture of its time better than the Bond Bug? With its three wheels, wedge shape, opening canopy and bright orange paintwork, the Bug was almost a social comment on its 1970-1974 production life, when Flower Power was losing its influence and before punk came along to change everything.
Despite the name, the car was in fact produced by Reliant, which had bought Bond in 1969.
The most other-worldly luxury cars of the 1930s were generally fitted with bodies manufactured by specialist coachbuilders. That does not apply to this Type 57S of 1936, which was designed and built by Bugatti itself.
The regular Type 57 was dramatic enough itself. The Type 57S was a lowered version. Two examples of the latter (of which the car pictured is the only survivor) were named Coupé Aero, and had the wildest - and perhaps most beautiful - bodies of them all.
The Cadillac Eldorado serves as well as any other car as the poster child for glamorous American vehicle design in the 1950s. In this respect, the peak year for the Eldorado was 1959. In that year, the car featured quad headlights, jewel-like patterns in the front grille and colossal tailfins.
The tailfins became noticeably smaller in 1960. Eldorados remained eye-catching at least until the late 1970s, but they were never again as wild as the '59 model.
Although it looked very much like a concept, the SSR was a genuine production pickup designed to resemble the Chevrolet Advance Design trucks of the immediate post-War period.
The example pictured was the official pace car for the 2003 Indianapolis 500 race. The SSR went on sale right at the end of that year, but despite its eye-catching looks it found few takers. General Motors soon abandoned the project, and the last SSR was built in March 2006, but the model still has a significant cult following today.
Launched in 1934, the Chrysler Airflow and its DeSoto sibling were among the first production cars designed to persuade air to move around them rather than bashing it out of the way. The advantages in fuel economy and performance, among other things, are well known now, and were understood by the likes of Paul Jaray well before the Airflow models appeared.
On the other hand, introducing cars with such startling body designs during the Great Depression was a brave strategy. The DeSoto Airflow was discontinued in 1936, the Chrysler a year later, but they were enormously influential designs.
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