5 Ugliest Cars On Sale Today

Automotive design is a tricky thing. Apart from being a completely subjective matter, the design of a new car's exterior has to consider many different factors, from efficiency to beauty to simplicity to brand awareness. Very few people would buy a car which they did not believe was at least acceptably attractive to look at, if not absolutely stunning. 
Not every manufacturer gets it right though; sometimes car design goes horribly, horribly wrong. Here are the five ugliest cars you can buy in the US right now.

5 - The Nissan Juke

I prefer to call it the "Joke," because I feel like it was designed as a total goof somewhere in the Nissan design department, but somehow it was accidentally put into production. I suppose in the inundated "crossover" market it's difficult to make your product stand out, but there has to be a better way than making it look like this mongrel. For as little as $19,990, you too can drive around in a vehicle which is not spacious, fast, impressively efficient, or attractive.

4 - The Cadillac CTS Coupe

For some reason Cadillac decided that they weren't content with Florida pensioners being the only ones even slightly interested in purchasing their vehicles, so they asked their design department to get rid of any instrument capable of producing anything but a straight line. Now Cadillacs are hip, totally cool cars that everyone wants! Actually now they're just pointy messes instead of huge floaty boats. The worst offender is this, the CTS Coupe, mostly because the back half of it looks like they haven't finished designing it. I don't think I've ever seen a rear quarter-panel that big on any motor vehicle. If your favorite geometric figure is the rectangle, $38,715 will grant you the ability to drive around in one.

3 - The Hyundai Veloster

This really is a shame, because Hyundai seems to be on the right track with a lot of their cars these days. The Genesis is fairly impressive, for example. This though, this thing is simply inexcusable. It wouldn't be so bad if you never walked around the back of it. The picture doesn't really even do it justice; you need to see one of these mutations in person to take in just how staggeringly inelegant the rear half of this machine is. I think they've also reached bold new heights in terrible hatchback design; not only is the rear window about 8 inches high, but the whole hatch itself doesn't even begin until about 3 feet off the ground. There's also the name, "Veloster," shamelessly borrowing the completely faddish "-ster" suffix which you might remember from other such successful ventures as Napster, Friendster, and Netflix' ground-breaking Qwikster service. At just $17,300, you can't afford not to show people how much you don't value beauty in the world.

2 - The Porsche Panamera

I expect better than this from the Germans, really. First of all, I completely fail to understand the need for a 911 that holds 5 people, so really this car should not even exist. I would be much less angry about its existence if it didn't look like a distorted, diseased version of Porsche's iconic sports car. It is massively long - 16 feet - and just unbalanced and awkward from every possible angle. Just like the Cayenne SUV models, they've desperately tried to make it look like a 911, which is doesn't. Aston Martin have proven with their Rapide that it's possible to make a beautiful 4-door sports car. Porsche have proven that they don't really know how to design a car with more than two doors. It would be perfectly fine if they stopped trying. It'll cost you $75,850 to cruise around in this vomit-inducing gargoyle.

1 - The Toyota Prius 

 

The Prius is probably my least favorite car in the entire world, I happily confess. Everything about it infuriates me. It has the sex appeal of a rotting skunk carcass. It's the farthest thing from a driver's car that money can buy. It was conceived and designed by incredibly boring people and is bought and driven by even more boring people. Wonky and offensive from every angle, it puts efficiency ahead of style. Of course it fails at being everything it wants to be; there are smaller cars which get better mileage, electric cars which use no petroleum at all, and almost everything is more green to build and recycle than these abominations with their high tech batteries. Perhaps some of that could be forgiven if it just looked like a normal car. Not even a pretty car. Just something that wasn't doodled by a 5 year old. The Prius tries to save the Earth while being a horrible scourge upon it. If you're an incredibly uninteresting person with $24,000 and no concept of style or taste, run to your nearest Toyota dealer.