Guest Cars

The Aurora was conceived and built by a Catholic Priest called Father Alfred Juliano in 1957. It was an experimental safety car constructed from fibreglass with a clear plastic dome roof and shoved on a Buick chassis. It was quite a novel development at the time, the body was rust proof (although the chassis would no doubt rot away leaving you with no more than a stationary plastic lump with seats), it had integrated hydraulic jacks to help you change a wheel, seatbelts, a rollcage, padded panels, side impact bars and a collapsible steering column. Handily it had seats that could swivel around - not for conferences with rear passengers when stationary, but so that in the event of an impending head-on crash you could quickly swivel 180 degrees to lessen the damage to your body on impact. The rather odd looking bloated front was designed to scoop up wandering pedestrians rather than squashing them. Sadly nobody ever wanted to buy one, not helped by the fact it broke down 7 times on the way to the press conference for its unveiling, and Father Juliano's company went bankrupt. The one and only example is now owned by a collector in England.

The zany guys of Commuter Cars in Spokane USA have managed to take an extruded cat-litter tray and convert it into a mentally fast psycho-rocket no wider than a peanut butter sandwich. Indeed this baby can reach 60mph in 4 seconds and will keep you secured in your seat via a 4-point harness until you are finally mashed into an articulated lorry at over 150mph. At a mere 108 thousand dollars (in kit form) you will be overcome by smugness as you survey your exclusive choice of new parking places such as stairwells, shop doorways, old ladies handbags or between the buttocks of corpulent bystanders.

Nissan executives gathered together in a steam bath in 1989 and came up with the idea of building a new car in the style of a 1950's domestic appliance. The result was the Figaro and it was available in such delightful colours as "Solitary Confinement Grey" and "Festering Wound Green". Not available directly in the UK, but was extremely popular in Japan, and was imported to the UK in small numbers for the likes of Vanessa Feltz.

In the classic episode of The Simpsons where Homer meets his long lost brother, he gets to design his dream car. Well it turned out to be so good we had to include it here. Unfortunately for homer it cost $82,000 to build and ruined his brother's business - but at least it played "La Cucaracha" when he sounded the horn. There is no truth in the rumour that Citroen tried to license the design.