cars

If a person were to take a collection of blind kittens at a heavy metal concert and ask them to design a car whilst stabbing them repeatedly with a sharpened stickle-brick, then the result would almost certainly be an improvement on the Rodius. Why why why?

Having prototyped the X3 using some spare lego, bosses decided they may as well stick with it for the production model as exhaustive internal BMW studies had been totally unable to find any link between recent designs and sales volumes.

As the hyundai chief designer sat in his bath one evening, he glimpsed a spider out of the corner of his eye and immediately took inspiration. Toiling at his desk for at least the next few minutes he eventually finalised the coupe features and if you look closely you may be able to make out the similarity between the car and a Korean bathroom.

Had Henry the 8th ever needed to take all 6 of his wives shopping at the same time, he would almost certainly have chosen an R class. However anyone with even a small knowledge of history will tell you that petrol was not available in those days so he would not have got very far.

Plucked out of a big bag of 1970s fail, the Marcos Mantis 2+2 was launched in an era when the public would buy inordinate amounts of stupid stuff including space-hoppers, spangles, K-tel records, slinky springs, and Sanyo music centres. Unfortunately for Marcos, the public drew the line at shelling out for the Mantis 2+2, who's design, it appears, was sketched out whilst gyrating in a roller-disco to the music of Showaddywaddy, and subsequently the company suffered a financial collapse.

The scimitar SS is not so much a car as a lifestyle statement; it basically says "I'm mad, and I don't care".

Being the product of a poorly attended Eastbourne focus group, the fabia saloon was not designed as such, more it "came into being to fulfill a market segment". However it certainly ticks a lot of boxes, especially if you don't really need a car in the first place.

If you think that when you buy a small car with a boot, it's still a small car, then the Civic hybrid saloon is for you. Honda simply took a standard Civic hatch, added a 20bhp electric motor, battery, some chrome and a boot to make it heavier, and sold it to the Americans (and a few Brits).

Having failed to make these pages with the mk1 Matiz, a number of external changes were essential to gain a listing for the mk2.

"Those look fantastic" said an iguana I recently saw walking down the slipway in Kingsbridge, Devon carrying some deep sea diving apparatus and a tortilla.