Mitsubishi remains one of Australia’s best-selling brands and has a better image here than in other markets such as the US and Canada. As a result, I see a lot of Mitsubishis around. Do I think they deserve this level of success? Well, they don’t build anything offensively bad but much of what they sell is outdated and yet just competitive and well-priced enough to stay relevant. But that’s not why I dislike Mitsubishis. The main reason? Their back-up cameras.
Mitsubishi doesn’t even try and integrate the back-up camera into the trunk handle or the badge or the license plate surround, like other manufacturers do. It just sticks out like a wort. It makes me irrationally angry because, typically, the rear-view camera is only on the higher-end models.
This means buyers are paying more for their Mitsubishi, only to get something that looks so cheap slapped on their trunk lid. And to make matters worse, it’s not even centered on the back of Mirages, even though it is on the Lancer and Triton/L200.
Lincoln also used to slap a reversing camera on their MKZ, even though other models had a more integrated design. Fortunately, they cut that nonsense out with the 2013 redesign and also integrated the formerly extruding keypad lock, too.
What obvious visual afterthought irritates you?
“Add-on” fins on early ’50’s cars.
Olds here — at least they contain back-up lights.
But add-on fins of ’54 Plymouths make my skin crawl !
……. as if the designers were at Happy Hour, and one of them said, “Hey let’s slap some fins on ‘er & see what GM does”
The fins tacked on top of fins sported by the last Packardbakers are even worse!
What makes the ’58 Packard fins especially egregious is that the taillights they are sitting on top of, originally designed for the ’56 Clipper, were themselves grafted onto a ’56-vintage Studebaker body they were never intended to fit. So the Packardbaker fins are a tacked-on afterthought on top of another tacked-on afterthought. It’s especially glaring and obvious in lighter paint colors where the cut lines are all too obvious.
So , what is your’s Doug score for Mitsu overall ? He has recently lower the quotation of the Mirage in a condescending way .
Front license plates. Seriously, no car designed since the 1930s is designed for one, every car looks better without one, and most factory promo shots have it omitted. Worst offenders are the cars with offset plates to clear the grilles, like the second gen Camaro (excluding 70-73 non-RS)
I prefer license plates screwed on as an afterthought vs. nestled in an over-engineered, tacky, cavernous escutcheon as some manufacturers will. Very unnecessary and superfluous when half the trunk of a car is used to emphasize a license plate.
Also, why is that Camaro brushing its front teeth?
I think the offset-to-the-side thing is bad-ass on the front for some reason. Looks great on the Camaro and works well on many other US cars.
How do you feel about the REAR plate on the ’71 Riviera?
I like it better on the 73 Riviera 🙂
Land Rover, with its rear add-on to make a standard-sized oz plate fit
My personal pet peeve was the early integration of rear parking sensors. You can sort of see it on the picture of the MKZ you posted: they just looked like someone slapped them on at the end and didn’t much care what they looked like. The end result ruined many cars’ rear bumpers for me; possibly the worst offender was the Volvo S60 of the late 2000s: they look like little protruding pustules. More modern cars are vastly improved, but many of the early adopters just looked like terrible aftermarket units.
I completely agree. When I first started seeing cars with them when I was a kid I thought they were badly hidden screw covers to hold the bumper in place. Just like car bras, it’s an a solution to prevent light damage to the bumpers in a way so aesthetically unpleasing that a scuff or two would be more attractive.
(Yes I know I’m glossing over the child safety aspect, sue me)
I will take “slapped on” protrusions 8 or 9 times out of 10 if it means easy to repair. Rather than, for example, the $1000 taillight/radar assemblies on the F-150. Too much integrated stuff is making modern cars disposable.
I’ve got quite a few! First up is the 2011-2012 Honda Accord’s tacked-on trunk lid “reflectors”. Obviously the cheapest way to “refresh” the car. Unfortunately, in this case, it’s not very refreshing.
I believe in some other markets (Australia, most of Asia) this was actually the original design from 2008. We only got it as the refreshed model. I’m not a fan of it either but wonder what I would think of it if I didn’t know it any different.
the 1993 Crown Vic used a reflector strip that look liked it was bought at Pep Boys and glued on.
Yeah, the trunk lid reflectors don’t even match the tail lights which are right next to them in any way. An inexcusably bad model year update.
In the opposite side, I think the extremely functional European way of see the things kinda very irritating, like the reverse light in the VW Polo Classic in only one of the tail lights.
Rebadges where they force the new logo into the original’s shape, with often hilarious results. Most often seen in Latin America and Eastern Europe, but there have been some examples in the US and Canada, like the 2000 Dodge/Plymouth/Chrysler Neon, where only one grille and logo cutout (designed to fit the Dodge logo but not the others) was used.
The long-established Vauxhall griffin badge was redesigned from a rectangle to a circle, so that it could be fitted on to an Opel mount. When they fall off, you can see the Opel flash shadowed beneath.
Apparently this is very common on Vauxhalls, but Opels losing their front badge is rare. Seems the Vauxhall badge is poorly attached, not just in the literal sense.
“
AllOne of the pieces falling off this carareis of the finest British workmanship”.GM pulled the same thing with their last two generations of medium-duty truck, where brand differentiation was felt to be less important to commercial users than on light trucks. Chevy and GMC got the same grille, and the base for badge mounting is a parallelogram slanted on both sides – a Chevy bowtie without the “knot”.
Your observation re. the Chevy/GMC badges is interesting enough.
Why did you feel the need to preface it with an insult to Britain and its’ citizens, including me?
I’m serious, I would really like to understand your thinking there. What purpose does that comment serve? Is it meant to be amusing? Is it intended to make you look or feel superior in some way. Seriously, WTF is the purpose of this kind of negative stereotyping?
I just don’t get it.
I find the propensity for participants on this site to do this to be very annoying and completely unnecessary.
And the site owner shows no interest to ever call anyone out on it. Why would he? He is one of the worst offenders.
Yeah, yeah, I don’t have to come here if I don’t like it. Blah! Blah!
I wish you all a nice weekend.
Simon, when I saw your comment I assumed someone had said something really nasty about all Brits, or called the country a shithole. But I’m sorry, that comment that so insulted you is very minor and obviously tongue-in-cheek. Every country has examples of mediocre workmanship, and most of his comment was aimed at GM in the US.
If you’re really that sensitive, you may just have to stop visiting here, because I’m not going to get worked up about this type of comment.
Have a good weekend too.
I’m about 90% certain that’s a slight paraphrase of a Jeremy Clarkson crack from a Top Gear episode. The one where they ran a Rover SD1 down a cobblestone test track while multiple pieces (incliding a door) fell off.
Brazilian Chevrolet Astra A and Calibra take the cake, they have both Vauxhall’s square root and the bow tie instead of the lightning inside the circle.
The tacked-on rear fender skirts on the FWD 1989-1993 Cadillac Fleetwood. This just looks lazy and cheap, and makes a design that I already find awkwardly proportioned (especially the coupe) even worse.
I’m all for fender skirts —
But what WAS Olds thinking in ’55?
The 98 hardtops had a refreshing swoosh outline ……. pre-dating Nike by 30 years ……
…….. then, Olds puts fake-swoosh ( ! ) fender skirts on the 88’s.
If I’m reading MT (above) correctly — I think we’d prefer full-coverage skirts !
@MT. I think those series of Fleetwoods are ugly, too. In fact, I think they’re ♦hideous♦-looking in their awkwardly proportioned way. Ugh!
Funny, but I actually find the tacked-on rear fender wheelwell moldings for deVilles of this vintage to be much more “infuriating.” As you can see in this photo (from a 2011 CC feature by Laurence Jones) GM welded the metal “lip” into the spot cast to accept those Fleetwood fender skirts, leaving a sizable gap that, once noticed, can’t be unseen.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/uncategorized/curbside-classic-1991-cadillac-sedan-deville-almost-doesnt-count/
I always assumed those were removable just like normal full-size fender skirts are; didn’t know they were welded on.
Also, similar moldings on the 1978-’79 Lincoln Continental which (unlike the Cadillac) was originally designed to have regular fender skirts on all models, and looked that way. The skirt on the ’75-’77 models is beautifully integrated, connecting the bodyside molding to its left and right to form a straight line.
I don’t know if the revised, lip-only fender skirts shown here are removable or welded in place. Note that unlike the ’89-’93 De Ville, the Continental had tiny pieces of rub strip on the rearward side of the lip molding, unlike the Cadillac which just extended the rear overhand fender molding onto the welded-wheel lip. This leads me to believe the Lincoln wheel lip may be removable; OTOH maybe this was done so as to not have to redesign the ’75-’77 molding to be slightly longer on the ’78-’79s.
That’s interesting! I wasn’t aware the Continental had a similar styling quirk a decade before Cadillac.
Wow, quick to the trigger with that comment! I added additional notes in the 15-minute revision window you may not have read….
I saw the entire post. I’d also be curious to know if the Lincoln piece was welded on.
The radio/XM/Sat Nav antennas mounted on the roof of GM trucks. In some cases, they mounted multiple BLACK antennas on the FRONT edge.
Making them uniformly black saved on both painting and stocking costs, and using the front edge of the roof made for a shorter antenna cable, saving even more pennies
Cheap, Cheap, Cheap!
Finally, I’ve been saving the best for last – the Buick Rendezvous and its dangling rear suspension. Who signed off on this?
The same people who signed off on that godawful oval license plate surround that’s been jammed onto a body design primarily based on horizontal lines (an effect they repeated in the front grille).
The Rendezvous wasn’t as actively ugly as the Aztek, but every design element appeared to be phoned-in and half-baked.
The most infuriating thing about that rear treatment is unique to Maisto’s 1/25 scale diecast model of the Rendezvous – Maisto (reflecting GM thinking?) chose to cast the taillights as part of the main body and paint them flat red when they could have had a much nicer model with the same parts count and number of production steps by casting the body with taillight buckets and extending the rear quarter and hatch “glass” (3 separate pieces, because the model’s hatch opens) to incorporate the taillights.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one that hates dangling visible stuff under the car.
Couple more that annoy me:
2001-07 Chrysler minivans–they have this huge rusty hideous exhaust pipe clearly visible all along the right side of the car. Horrible!
Current gen Nissan Rogue has what looks like some kind of radiator or cooler behind the rear axle that is a bright silver, and is immediately picked up by headlights and is extremely obvious.
For me it’s the way Porsche fulfilled the CHMSL requirement for the Porsche Turbo (or any Porsche with the whaletail) at the time. Could anything look more tacked on? Alfa Romeo (!) was able to engineer theirs to actually fit it INTO the rubber spoiler on their Spyder at the same time, but Porsche? Nein.
The early-CHMSL era brought a lot of tacked-on warts.
I suspect they did it that way so it could be easily removed by the owner. The law says it has to be sold that way. There’s no law that says you have to leave it.
Oh, just thought of another one: the FAKE “grille” on the Fisker E-Motion that looks like some AutoZone chrome “fender vents” (remember those?) glued together.
Oops.
How about when pieces of black plastic are made to look like edges of windows; dishonest and vain, over nothing.
Like the 2015 Camry? Probably one of the worst offenders, IMO.
I made one as well- I think this may be worse.
Always works better with a photo…
That was the first one I thought of, even before seeing the picture
That kind of works for me, as a counterpoint. But I was no fan of the prior Camry box design. That ’15-’17 Camry refresh was, IMO, one of the better Toyota efforts of late. Add privacy glass to it and it becomes a non issue.
Good call, Sir D. They’re automotive band-aids to fix up dud styling.
Once you start spotting these you’ll begin to hate almost every car made after 2008ish on the road. The ones on the A pillars are particularly infuriating, often it’s an ugly solution to unnecessarily moving the side mirrors onto pedestals…
Only blight on the otherwise good looking current Mazda lineup
I’d much rather see something like that, where at least the plastic blank is relatively small and framed within the window surround, than when it’s tacked-on ahead of the door to the A-pillar itself.
The Mazda looks positively elegant by comparison.
May I call a sub-fail here? That little fixed glass pane on the front door….
Mary Walton’s book had a good anecdote about Ford engineers spending many man-hours at a rented Lockheed wind tunnel to find the cleanest way to mount the Taurus door mirror. Result: pedestal was best. Nonetheless, this was vetoed by the suits who thought it was prettier on the wing.
This gives credence to the claim that Toyota was also more efficient in controlling engineering costs, as well as manufacturing.
“DLO fail” has become my all-time automotive design pet peeve.
Sadly, C-pillar blankout panels have now grown even larger; they’re especially heinous on the 2018 Buick Regal hatchback, where it’s obvious that a rear quarter window should be there instead. This makes the Camry and Ciera examples shown above look positively dainty in comparison:
GM(Opel) seems to be the biggest sinner with those, the first gen Cruze was just as bad.
Gord bless ya, Mr XR7, gor bless. The Cruze fill-in has always utterly ruined an otherwise innocuous design for me, and I always thought it was just me that saw it, til now. If the bloody thing was a re-skin, maybe – if barely – fairly enough, but they had a clean (or near enough) slate and yet STILL didn’t anticipate the misalignment.
However since this is an Opel car originally, one can argue that this has been either a design feature of their models for around 20 years in the 70s-90s (or that they were guilty of laziness back then too). See the Opel Kadett from the late 70s and mid 80s
70s Opel kadett
and of course the Opel Omega/Rekford did the same thing
BMW has the ‘Hofmeister Kink’; Opel has this.
Ditto for Jaguar XJ (X351, 2009-) and its blacked out D-pillar that stood out awkwardly as if the black electrical tape was used.
Several owners had requested this blacked out panel be painted to match body colour. So much that Jaguar still didn’t see the error of its way and refused to peel the electrical tape off during the 2013/2014 facelift.
I searched for “DLO Fail” and found this one from TTAC back in the day (2010-2012 Lincoln MKZ). Once seen, it cannot be unseen!
The earliest 1974/onward high-impact, ‘add-on’ bumpers were ALL horrendous.
But what they did to the MG’s was a crime against humanity.
Here’s a ’73 Midget whose nose is just right —
By ’75, the Midget & it’s big brother the MGB were Utterly Destroyed.
At least this one gets bonus points for wire wheels …….. altho knock-off hubs would have been better ……
(As small as they were, any high speed impact would have done major damage to the car [& driver] anyway)
The MGs were awful, but the ’76-’77 Lancia Scorpion had the worst US front end conversion of an import IMO. The huge bumpers, the round-peg-in-a-square-hole headlights, and the black-painted surround intended to hide whatever was used to make it fit would have bad enough by themselves, but it’s the headlamp that had to be raised and tilted just slightly from its resting place that was particularly appalling. When not in use, they pivoted back against the bumper which made the lights look badly misaimed.
Would’ve been cheaper to use quad headlights.
I said it the other day, worst is the 1974 Toyota Corolla. The indents for the old clean dainty bumpers are right there in the open, and make the 5mph bumpers look like they came off a completely different car. At least the Midget and MGB actually tried to disguise the old nose.
My pet peeve is an interior one: a big slab of featureless dashboard plastic with nothing in it except a cassette or cd slot. Nissans and Infinitis were particularly bad examples for a while.
I’m surprised no one has already mentioned my pet peeve… navigation screens tacked onto the top of the dashboard. The Mercedes CLA 250 providing the most glaring example. It looks like a high school kid tacked a Samsung tablet on top of the dashboard. Mercedes and other car makers need to aim higher.
This is mine too. It is Mercedes that also has the best-integrated panels in the S-class and E-class though.
Paul got me thinking about another interior add-on —
What’s up with this center console, when there’s still a steering-column mounted shifter ?!
T-Birds had this from ’58 all the way through ’66!
But, gotta love that wrap-around windshield ……
Center consoles were basically pioneered by these thunderbirds, so there was no dictation that there needed to be a shifter there as we’re now accustomed to 60 years later. The real reason they even used consoles was because the driveshaft tunnel was so tall on this chassis.
yes, right you are Matt.
I do recall reading about the tall driveshaft tunnel on these low road-clearance models. Thx!
I can’t speak for everyone else, but one of my mom’s favorite features of those T-Birds was the bucket seats with the COLUMN shift. Going back to those days, the T-Bird had something going with that interior.
Recent Hondas did a terrible job of integrating blind-spot cameras when they were first introduced, simply slapping a sensor protrusion onto the mirrors. Useful, sure, but ugly.
Strange, senseless lines in the sheet metal. I really liked the Mazda5 – until they did this.
Yes! A nice, clean original design completely ruined by the restyle.
Just unbelievable! I am so thankful we don’t get this THING in my country.
Oh my god, it actually looks pre crashed, I sincerely hope Mazda doesn’t ever trickle that sculpting into the 3s and 6s.
Also posesses plastic the other afterthought mentioned; ugly plastic DLOs.
They’re speed lines. They add horsepower.
An add-on that appears to be so inconsequential, that it’s a quaint reminder of another era …….
High-placed. almost insignificant tail-lights on this ’37 Olds ….
I’m amazed they were legal, being so far from the rear of the vehicle.
Tail-lights were so small during that period, you’d think they were for blackout convoy driving, like those on army vehicles.
The tonneau cover that converted a Bullet Bird into a 2-seater —
Even as a kid, I thought, “who are they trying to fool ? “
Few manufacturers have managed to seamlessly integrate forward radar cruise control sensors, but the Hyundai/Kia approach strikes me as both oddly inspired yet stylistically lazy.
The Kia might be a bit of a mess, but you’d think that Mercedes would have found a tidier solution than the obviously blank panel in the grille of the $90K+ S-class.
The blank panel on the Merc raises to reveal a camera …
KJ in Oz
For most manufacturers, the plastic panel in the grill or front header covers a fixed radar unit. Camera units are typically mounted in the passenger compartment between the rear view mirror and the windshield glass.
The issue with the grille panel isn’t that it supports a function, but that it is a flat piece of plastic set in a textured surround. No amount of paint trickery is going to make this flat surface match the rest of the grille surface.
Dave has it right.
This is one I can get on board with. If Mazda can come up with a solution as brilliant as hiding the radar in the actual brand badge of our CX-5…
Yep, Mazda did it right.
The one that’s been annoying me lately is that almost every car now has moved the rear red reflector out of the taillight to its own separate thing, usually mounted lower on the bumper. You can see this on all the example vehicles above except for the Mitsubishi pickup.
Many of these look like total afterthoughts, like they had designed the entire vehicle then suddenly remembered that they needed a reflector, and rather than redesign the taillight they just cut a hole in the bumper and slapped a generic $3 reflector into it.
Hadn’t thought of this until you mentioned it, but definitely! I wonder why they started doing this instead of continuing to integrate the reflectors into taillights.
Agreed. Takes me back to the early fifties, when all British cars sold here had separate reflectors added on. Is there any major market that doesn’t require rear reflectors these days?
I figure it’s for the rear fog lights in countries that require them, and for the US they stick the reflectors in there with a shrug of “well, it’s not as cheap-looking as blanking panels would be”.
It’s cheaper solution meeting both US FMVSS and UN-ECE regulations without building two separate taillamp designs. They specify different types of red retroreflex lenses.
You can see lot of tacked lenses on North American vehicles sold in Europe through official channel or grey import.
A single fin above the headlights of the 1957 Hudson would have been more than enough, but noooo…. Hudson just had to put twin fins on for each light and chromed them too. And don’t get me started on the bright “V” in the grille.
good one, Tony !
Well, that was a desperate update on an old outdated body, done with no budget. On the other hand, the similarly desperate Kaiser update on an outdated body is one of the best facelifts ever.
Front view:
A facelift that looks better than the original.
Spotlights on 1950’s cars —
Were they for police car wannabes? Did these guys wanna spy on kids at Lovers Lane? More likely, they were just more ‘shiny objects.’
I never understood it, yet these were factory options …..
Don’t get sucked into the “air vents” in the A-pillars of this ’57 Turnpike Cruiser —
yikes!
And don’t forget the matching fake air vents (or are those lights?) above the headlights! These, along with the foot-long chrome molding where the headlights meet the front fender, are the result of trying to squeeze two headlamps into fenders that were obviously designed to fit only a single 7″ sealed beam. Even the awkward headlight pods added to most ’58 Studebakers and Packards for the same reason weren’t as bad as this.
The thing that annoys me to no end is the front turn signal being integrated into the same housing as the headlight. The turn signal flashing gets lost in the glare of the headlight. Some new cars cancel the headlight when the turn signal goes on. It should be required for all of them.
The good people at Driven To Write infected me with a rather unhealthy obsession with shutlines on the A- and C-pillars.
I know how you feel… 🙂
Vinyl tops are meant to evoke canvas convertible tops. Sometimes they have creases and even seams like a convertible would have, which is fine, even nice.
When the door cuts right through a vinyl top, it makes me nuts!
A sunroof in the middle of that fake convertible roof with the door cutouts just completes the effect.
In the USA, all new 2018 model year vehicles have to have backup cameras so I would not be surprised if we see more oddly tacked on rear cameras on cars and trucks. Especially on the vehicles that are due to be redesigned or dropped in a year or two. There is no point on spending super amounts of money to redesign the rear end for a back up camera on a car that is to be redesigned or dropped.
This type of thing happened in 1986-1987 when all cars had to have center mounted 3rd brake light and in 1994-1995 when all trucks had to have them.
As for the most annoying design on a car? To me it is Jeep’s propensity to stick round headlights on almost every vehicle they make that is not called Wrangler. AMC spent money they really could not spare to update all their Jeeps to get rid of the round headlights because they looked dated then and they look dated even more now. The only one of their vehicles that look good with them is the Wrangler.
But speaking about afterthoughts added to vehicles, Creating a 4 door Wrangler was a stupid afterthought (at least to me) The Wrangler is a 2 door truck. Adding 2 more doors does not really improve the ride or rear seat room. It does not even look like a Jeep, it looks like a Hummer like monstrosity. If it was designed by GM it would have a Hummer grill and a H4 slapped on the back of it.
From what I have read, 60% of Jeep Wrangler sales now are the 4 door. So not so much a stupid afterthought as a brilliant market extension.
I miss round or square headlights. Don’t know how we got to amorphous blob shapes being normal or making sense.
I thought the Dodge Daytona/Plymouth Superbird was taking tailfins to an extreme, not to mention the nose extension.
Agreed. To me the nose looks like a modern effort, but the body behind it old. The rear wing a carrying handle. But at least both of these features had a purpose in being designed specifically for NASCAR (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Superbird) and not done in vain.
Fake grilles or semi fake grilles look quite dumb. When the sun shines on the front of your semi fake grille, everyone else can see that only 40% of the semi fake grille actually breathes. The rest is just modern day useless tailfins on the wrong end of the car.
Stretching an existing car, truck, or van can sometimes result in better proportions – the first-generation Grand Caravan/Grand Voyager look more natural to me than the original shorter minivans that debuted in 1984. The extended-body (but not extended-wheelbase) Ford full-size vans sold from 1978 to 1991 on the other hand were an incredibly lazy stretch job that looks more like a homemade hack job than something that left the factory. It didn’t just look bad; the rear-heavy van when loaded with 15 passengers in its four rows of seats became infamous for having scary handling, a trait exasperated by often being driven as a church bus by drivers inexperienced with heavier vans or trucks.
The Econoline Super Van and Club Wagon Super Wagon had a 20 inch long slab of sheet metal spliced in just ahead of the rear cap and behind the rear wheels and rear side windows (when so equipped), something that was likely obvious to even the most casual observer. The Econoline’s width swelled just aft of the rear side glass where a vertical ridge swept upward from the rocker panels to the roof. This looked fine on the regular-length vans but ridiculous on the stretched version where there was still another two feet of van behind it. The scooped-out side contour, a traditional aesthetic signature of Ford trucks and vans of the period, also ended abruptly before the spliced-in section. The stretch required the rear side marker lamps to be relocated; to fill the hole in the original location at the back of the “scoop” a painted blank panel was inserted. Lest you missed all of this, there were also the two vertical cut lines announcing where the stretch was made. In Club Wagons, the side windows of course ended before the spliced section so the D pillar is huge.
The Super Van was a response to the Dodge Maxivan that had been offered since the B-Series vans were new in 1971. The Dodge took the same basic approach Ford later used, but its styling was much less jarring due to being designed to offer stretched rear quarters from the get-go. The side contours extended into the extended section, there was no plug in the old marker lamp location (later models had the lamp located in the rear cap rather than the side panel), and Mopar shelled out the cash for a separate extended rear cap so there would only be one cut line instead of Ford’s two. The only obvious shoutout to the stretch was the wide D pillar on window vans, and the same year Ford brought forth their 15 passenger van Dodge lengthened theirs and added a neat wraparound window to the stretch section, further improving its appearance (and visibility) compared with the Ford. GM took until 1990 to add an extended length Chevy/GMC full-size van but did it right, extending the wheelbase and using specific long rear side windows rather than adding lots of overhang to the standard wheelbase.
That really does look like a body-shop job.
The Superbird and its Dodge counterpart were NASCAR “homologation specials.” They were limited-production cars designed to improve on the mediocre aerodynamics of the Chrysler intermediate body. Chrysler produced just enough of them to qualify as “stock” (wink, wink). The modifications were tuned in a wind tunnel. Like today’s F1 cars, they look ridiculous, but it’s functional.
The real production car add-on I always cringe at is the flat, blunt-edged, useless spoilers found on so many sedans. I’m not talking about the shapes integrated into the trunk/boot lid, but the ones that are clearly bolted on and look like a total afterthought.
Boss: “Hey Bob, that rear deck looks too clean. We need to balance it better with the Angry Anime look on the face of the car. Here’s some clay [throws some lumps on and flattens them].”
Bob: “Oh, thanks boss, that looks SO much better. You’re a genius!”
True on the Superbird/Daytona, but the rear fins and bar didn’t need to be so high because of aero. It needed that height so the trunk lid could be opened on the series-production cars.
This is an earlier channelled effort that preceded the official program
Per Steve Lehto’s recent book on the Superbird, the height of the wing was to put it in clean air, not for the trunk to open:
http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a29732/daytona-superbird-reason-for-wings/
Interesting. I’m using Automobile Quarterly, 4th Qtr, 1980; article ‘The Winged Warriors of Chelsea’ by Anthony Young.
‘The rear deck horizontal stabiliser was a Clark Y inverted airfoil having a 7 1/2 inch chord and was adjustable from plus 2 to minus 10 degrees. It was mounted 23 1/2 inches above the rear deck on vertical stabilisers having a NACA 0012 symmetrical airfoil section. The horizontal wing could have been lower but it was pointed out by (Chrycorp Product Planner, Dale) Reeker, to the chagrin of all concerned, that the trunk would have to open on the production car.’ (p369)
Anthony Young spoke directly to a number of individuals who were involved including John Pointer, Dale Reeker and Gary Romberg who worked the wind tunnel and wrote an SAE paper on their findings.
Also, when Pointer and another aerodynamicist Bob Marcel were first asked by Special Vehicles Group’s Larry Rathgeb to sketch out their ideas, both came to something similar but neither had the rear fin arrangement. (Lehto states Pointer had all the components on his first sketch.) That came later from Pointer after it was determined a spoiler would end up being something that ‘looked like a barn door back there.’
I’d say both stories are true. The red car above was the first prototype, albeit on an ‘illegally’ channelled body. On that example is a high mounted horizontal fin, but it had to be higher up for trunklid clearance. It corresponds with Pointer’s remembrance in Lehto’s piece that his wing was ‘roughly at the roofline of the car’.
I think Lehto went off on a tangent regarding NASCAR rules for trunklids. This car had to sell off the showroom floor, or else the whole project was a non-starter.
Thanks for the link though. It seems Lehto didn’t do enough diligence chasing down the source of the ‘myth.’
As long as we’re talking homologation specials, how about the mid-’80s Monte Carlo and Grand Prix 2+2 with the fastback rear windows? These fit terribly and reduced the trunk opening to mail-slot size, especially on the Pontiac which was even more sloped than the Chevy’s was.
I’m sure I will get some loud disagreements on this one but what about the new Honda Civics in general? Especially the sportier ones. The late 70’s Trans Ams used to get a lot of “boy racer” comments back in the day for all their spoilers and stripes. They look boring parked next to a new Civic SI.
And a Civic Si looks boring parked next to a Civic R
have you seen the rear bumper? it looks like the holes were meant to mount foglights or something
Authentic wire wheels are functional, “sporty,” and exotic.
Still, the time they were phasing out in the ’70’s & ’80’s, you’d be hard pressed to find a garage that would actually mount tires on them.
………. but the “wire wheel — wheel covers” of mid-80’s luxury cars were chunky, clunky, gaudy imitations of the genuine article.
Those fake wires look cheap and crappy fitting them to luxury cars just makes the entire car look like shit
Those look like genuine wire wheels to me. Fake wire covers for FWD cars like Cadillacs don’t have that deep hub inset.
My parents had a Celebrity(!) that had wire wheel covers. The quality was not awful, but the cleaning. My father used to disassemble them to clean the “rim” and the spokes. Ugh.
Great subject William. Been thinking the same thing myself lately.
Civic underlight aero aid…
And M-B newschool splash guards
For me, it’s stand-up hood ornaments on anything made after 1960. They were originally ornaments on top of actual radiator caps in the Brass era, but arguably at least remained important brand identifiers through the 1950s. They almost became extinct (except for Mercedes) in the 60’s but staged a functionless cosmetic comeback in the Brougham era. Below is an example of how crackerjack-prize pathetic they became, from a 1978 Chevy Monte Carlo. Buicks of the era also had them, just a cheap looking, and of course Cadillac still had them as late as 2004.
They always reminded of a Neiman Marcus T-Shirt kind of status symbol.
Is there a nice Pleiades hood ornament for my Forester? I haven’t had a vehicle where I can see the hood in ages. I think it needs a hood ornament.
I’ve always liked the hood ornament that Lincoln used through 1967. Just don’t fall on the pointy bits.
This one on 64-66 Studebakers was a favorite of mine.
I’ll go with Chief Pontiac, lighting the way …..
The script under the round Studebaker ornament was the only time they used their modern font logo adopted in 1962 on the actual car. The main chrome nameplate remained in that peculiar ’50s cursive style right up to the end, and it looked hopelessly old fashioned by 1966.
I LIKE hood ornaments, cosmetic or not. They work well on cars of that era because the hoods are long and straight. In the 1980s, any car without a hood ornament looked like a cheap stripper – only budget models lacked one. They were STILL brand identifiers, every car-savvy kid knew what car each one stood for, even if it was a design contrived for a specific model instead of a brand ornament. Kids used to steal them and make them into keychains – they were a status item. As a teen, I originally learned to drive on the highway by lining up the hood ornament to the lane markers, so there was a functional aspect to it, too, kinda sorta. I agree that the hood ornaments were much better in the 1950s. I also agree that they look silly on cars built after the sheer look ended. But don’t be dissin’ my third-gen Monte, that ornament belongs there.
Where to start…
Two current peeves. Just about any Toyota Camry has the muffler hanging below the rear fascia panel and the exhaust pipe hanging under everything else below the car. I always imagine one of the engineers saying “Ichi ban! We forgot to leave room for the muffler – AGAIN!”. Get out the black paint.
The other one is when a spoiler is added to the trunk with an LED centre stop light and the original stop light is still there on the package shelf inside the rear window. Thankfully spoilers are a thing of the past. Come to think of it almost all spoilers fit this category.
My pet peeve is the shiny plated aftermarket license plate frame that says “Lexus” or “Mercedes” in a script that bears no relation to the brand’s logo or font, not to mention there’s usually already a brand badge on the rear of the vehicle. Not to mention tacking on $5 worth of cheap plastic on a $50000 car. But I always remove dealer frames as soon as I get home. And fortunately in California, dealer trunk badges or stickers have always been rare. I would not buy a car with dealer advertising glued or stuck on a body panel.
A frame is necessary in CA now, to cover up the awful DMV URL they added to the bottom of the plates; almost enough to make me pay more to get an “arts” plate, in order not to look at that.
What I hate the most is those ‘non-functioning’ amber turn signal indicators. The offenders are 1994-1995 Dodge Spirit, 1991-1996 Ford Escort Sedan, and 2011-2015 Volkswagen Tiguan (all are North American versions).
Ford Escort Sedan (US)
Don’t forget the originator: the 1976-’77 Chevy Vega
It’s funny, I was looking on my phone this morning so could only see the headline and no picture/description from the mobile site, and the first thing that popped into my head was Mitsubishi….however, what’s always annoyed me is the chrome-plated plastic covers they use to replace the side indicators on the higher-end versions where they’re moved to the wing mirrors. It looks so cheap—worse than the large blanking plates on higher-end FG/FG X Falcons and the SY II/SZ Territory.
Triton
Territory
Same with Mercedes-Benz A-Class (W168, 1997-2004). The little ‘Cindy Crawford mole’ on the front wings replaced the side turn signal repeaters after 2001 facelift.
Thank you for pointing this out, as I’d never noticed it before! It seems that this may have been a later change on Aussie W168s, as a quick search on Carsales shows only some 2003 and all 2004 models with this feature….
The rear turn signals on the newer Kia Sportage always annoy me. It’s like they finished the car and then someone smacked their forehead and said “Oh shit we forgot the turn signals!” … ” Ehh just slap ’em in the bumper.” They’re too small, way too low and almost distracting.
Infiniti EX35 comes to mind, as it predates Kia.
Land Rover Freelander, too.
I’m not sure about infuriating, but interesting no doubt.
Job #1 would be the ’60 Edsel’s rear treatment. There have been a host of other similar slap jobs, more recently the Honda CRV (or was it Passport?) had a rear panel that screamed: …we were going to place the tail lamp here, but maybe next year.
Medium/heavy trucks that utilized light truck cab components commonly had a ton of afterthought looking spacers, fillers, etc. Again, more interesting than infuriating.
But we’re looking for infuriating….
I’m going to vote for the practice of leaving an obvious, blank, dimple, crease, etc. to denote where a cheapskate buyer declined some superficial trim or accessory for a couple of bucks. To name names I’m going to call out the Niedermeyer type Ford pickup… if a buyer was too thrifty to opt for the fancy side-view mirror option (or maybe she needed west coast mirrors?) at the would-be mirror location he got an obvious hole punched in the outer door skin with a bump of a rubber plug stuffed in it to remind forever about the $5 mirror he wouldn’t pop for. LOL
Here is the absolute worst IMHO – the 1990s Subaru Legacy “Brighton” base model without a tachometer and an enormous blank.
MT, that’s a great example.
Where to start?? Those hideously AWFUL black plastic fake grills on the front and back of the new Civic…I’ve seen them referred to (& also started calling them) “asteroid impact craters!” The newer BMW’s also seem to suffer from adding various shaped flaps to theirs! I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the “spindle” or “Predator” grilles on the various Lexii, and the “bottom feeding fish” grilles on any number of new cars.
The Jeep Cherokee and Nissan Juke low-mount headlamps.
Three spoke wheels, aside from the 16″ Saab 900 wide-spoke wheels from the 1990s.
Fog lamp housings on cars without that option, which have a convex black plastic pustule in the shape of a fog light instead. What happened to a discreet black plastic molding inside what looked like an air duct, or an actual air duct?
Honda LaneWatch mirrors.
The Chevy Impala’s steering wheel. Also, any two-spoke steering wheels with airbags. Saturn Ion steering wheels looked like a chicken pot pie.
Volkswagen’s seperate DRLs from a couple of recent years (prior to LEDs) that were impossible to replace, insanely underspecced (a 194 bulb that runs all the time!?), and so poorly mounted they would shatter when closing the hood from more than 6″ up.
The transitionary LED DRLs from recent years, before carmakers redesigned the whole car with LEDs in the lighting unit. Many just got tacked onto the bumper or someplace.
The Lexus IS seperate Nike swoosh DRLs.
Door windowsill trim that is chrome plated plastic covered in cheap black paint, which fades/peels after a few years. Why chrome plate it, then paint it?
Newer, glitzy chrome wheels with the utterly stupid plastic chrome applique on the face. Mostly on larger wheel options, adorning higher trims on already expensive vehicles. The plastichrome is fragile and in no way replaceable separate from the wheel. I understand why they did it (chrome dipped wheels pit, corrode and peel eventually, leading to tire leaks, inability to adhere weights, and nasty visuals).
Multiple-piece rear lighting units with a body cut in the middle that don’t all illuminate all the time (NF Hyundai Sonata and first gen Chevy Cruze-outer body mounted lights are brakes, inners are tail lights only, making the brake lights look perpetually partially burned out).
Cars with obvious differences in front/rear track widths (90s Camry platform cars, Dodge Ram Vans, late Ford Panthers).
Cars with track widths that are too narrow for their bodies.
Volvo 740. They put a diagonal line in the c-pillar separating the roof from the body. It ruined the design of the car for me, and just looked like they were too lazy to weld.
The gaudy “illuminated star” in Mercedes-Benzes, and the “diamond grill”, and if we move to the inside, the infotainment unit that looks like a stuck-on iPad
Seriously, what were they thinking with that B-pillar?
They were thinking, “we need to make the Fleetwood look different than the cheaper Sedan de Ville, but we don’t want to spend the money on a distinctly different body style like the Fleetwood had in 1976 when a fat B pillar distinguished it from the pillarless hardtop with opera window used on de Villes, so let’s just make the B pillar a weird shape so the only other thing we have to change is the rear door window frame”.