cars

The family in this picture look horrified as their industrial-strength pager bags have just blown off revealing their true identities. Austin Healey didn't realise that when you create a car with lights this silly they are supposed to be attached to a pop-up mechanism so that they remain hidden during daylight.

The name NSU actually comes from the initials of two rivers (the Neckar and the SUlm) surrounding a German knitting machine factory where these cars originated. The two products were produced with interchangeable parts. This NSU though was based on a combination of a septic tank and a cheese sandwich.

Another nail in the coffin of British Leyland. It looked about as appealing as a snog with Thora Hird. Later they changed its name to the Ital and tried to convince us that it was a different car - I wonder why that didn't work?

This sad Triumph pseudo-sportscar is known as "The Wedge" - whoever was in charge of the project should have been given a wedgie. The coupe looked so bad that it was decided to cut the whole top off and sell it as a convertible instead. They should have stuck with the TR6.

They say that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters would eventually come up with the entire works of Shakespeare. Citroen decided to try this technique with six monkeys and a bag of meccano. The BX took them 12 minutes to make (including a 2 minute banana break).

Perhaps this photo is quite flattering, but believe me, in the flesh the Sirion looks extremely unpleasant. It is rumored that BMW are quite worried about the new Sirion. Not as a direct threat to sales, but if it does become successful there will almost certainly be a world chromium shortage.

Well what can we say? Fiat have obviously produced this car especially to star on these pages - and we thank them for that. Combine the worst elements from a lavatory cistern, a banjo and a dead poodle and you would get something similar to the Multipla.

Going for a ride in one of these has all the appeal of going on a dinner date with Joseph Stalin. Worse still, if you parked up against a wall you couldn't get out of the thing. *update: we have recently been informed by a bubble car owner that these did in fact have a reverse gear.

The Tagora made a fleeting appearance back in the very early eighties - Brought to you by Peugeot, who owned the Talbot (formerly Simca) marque. This was actually quite a massive barge by UK standards and shortly after production was ended, twelve Tagoras from the last production run were stacked on top of each other to form a block of council flats in central Birmingham.

It seems likely that the name 'smart' represents the 'smarting' sensation one feels after paying good money for one of these plastic novelties. The car shown has suffered a 65km/h head-on crash, which initially seems rather good, but what the manufacturer failed to mention was that it was a 65km/h crash into a swimming pool full of marshmallows.