Top 10 Ugliest Italian Cars

10 Nov 2017

Italy! It’s a place that is assaulting all your senses in an almost divine way. There is classical music for your ears, Italian cuisine for your taste, soft leather and smooth clothes that you touch, the smell of Mediterranean, and most importantly — a feast for your eyes: paintings, sculptures, design, vistas, nature, women, fashion, architecture, furniture… the lot!

Italy has it all, Italy has it beautiful!

Luckily for us, they do cars as well, and the same story goes. Ok, they may not be technically superior to Germans, or may not last longer in the rain than that dissolving tablet, and their electrical systems could benefit from some exorcism… but… we still love them because they please our senses, not the brain.

It’s shocking then that such a hedonistically driven culture can also create some really hideous looking cars, but it does happen. Often enough to make this kind of video.

Here are then the top 10 ugliest cars to ever come out of Italy!

No 10 - Alfa Romeo RZ/SZ

Rare and collectable Zagato cars were always a case of hit or miss, but never plain boring. This long running coachbuilder gave us the jaw dropping Vanquish on one end, and this…atrocity, on the other. Except this is not designed by Zagato at all, but by Fiat, who I presume used Legos to do it. Zagato just help helped putting it all together.

Either way, the eighties were over, designers learned how to draw curves again, so why so boxy?
And what happened to the back of it? They stacked it up so high, that it’s more like a set of closet drawers than a car. If you ever end up in a pile-up crash, you would’ve never noticed, because the front and back are already completely vertical.

As it is, not a single detail on this car looks good, and yet, as a whole, somehow it’s oddly entrancing. It was also nicknamed IL Mostro — The Monster. Some say that was because of the performance, but most people agree, it’s because of the questionable looks.

No 9 - Ferrari 512M

Ferrari Testarossa is an instantly recognizable iconic supercar of the 80’s. But that’s where it should have stayed… in the 80’s.

Sadly, instead of retiring it and coming up with a true successor for the next decade, Ferrari thought it would be a great idea to touch it up a bit with then trendy looking smoother lines, like the 355 had.

It didn’t work. Everything that was good about the sharp 80’s was diluted, awkwardly positioned and melted away. Headlights were bad, the front bumper was too busy, round taillights were forcefully crammed into its squared holes, wheels were bad, and the unchanged roof and sideblades were now completely out of tune with the rest of the car. In the end, only 500 of these god-awful medleys were ever built, and not for exclusivity.

No 8 - Lancia Ypsilon

Ever since the original Fiat 500, Italy was good at making tiny, simple, feel-good, zippy cars. They were like an excited tail-wagging little dog that would always put a smile on your face.

This Lancia Y will not to that. It will make you feel drab, cloudy and moist. One look at it and your face will resemble its face. Sad looking eyes, smirking nose, and a dribbling tucked in jaw. To make matters worse, it had this Salvador Dali moustache wrapped all around it. But while he was proudly pointing his up, Lancia’s would just lose its strength and simply fall of at the end.

But that is where the worst thing has happened. Because of the awkward proportions, they made the back of it look like a full size van — on a tiny city car. Just drive it into a wall… I’m sure it will look better then.

No 7 - Alfa Romeo 166

The 166 was a big, wide executive car that would show the Germans what a stylish businessman should be driving.
In reality, it showed nothing but an ugly face that only Ray Charles could enjoy.

For such a big car, they found the smallest saddest headlights they could, almost the size of fog lamps, and then they put them as wide apart as possible. Made the car look like Sid, that sloth from the Ice Age movies.

But that wasn’t enough because they also made the distinctive Alfa Romeo grill the smallest grill ever, and it sits too far up. “Out of proportion and out of place” perfectly summed up the face of this car.

So few businessmen bought it that Alfa completely abandoned the big executive car segment for good.

No 6 - Lamborghini Veneno

Let’s be real — it looks like a transformer that died half way transforming into a car. It looks like a car that crashed into a warehouse of Lambo spare parts. It looks like a Chinese replica of Aventador whose design was described over a phone. I could go on…

And so I will. It looks like it was designed using origami technique. It looks like someone drove it into a wood chipper. It looks like it came in a box with a set of AA batteries.

I know that Lambos were always crazy — this is the craziest of them all, and it is littered with cool details everywhere, but none of them look right. Everything is too big, too broken up and too wide for anyone to call it beautiful.

It’s also so rare that you will probably never see one. And that’s a good thing!

No 5 - Ferrari FF

This maniacal looking Fu… rrari was a couple of firsts for its company. First wagon, first all-wheel drive, and first Ferrari that kids hated to look at.

I’ll give it a pass for being a shooting brake because any other Ferrari for 4 people before it ended up looking awkward, but it’s impossible not to notice the elephant in the room. That huge grinning face with teeth retainers. It’s too high up from the ground, and it’s flanked on both sides by these ridiculous intakes that look like a frog inflating its vocal sacks!

The whole thing could have been done so much better, and it was when they made a successor, the GTC4 Lusso.
But this one will forever stay in history as that maniacal frog wagon Ferrari.

No 4 - Fiat 500L Living

In the mid-2000s, car world was obsessed with modern retro cars. There was the Mustang, Camaro and an absolutely adorable Fiat 500. It was a cute little city car that perfectly complimented those who had a handbag dog and a shaved pair of legs. Its size made it woefully impractical, but no one cared, and more than a million were sold.

After Fiat realized how popular it was, they went to make a more practical, bigger, and… uglier version. Something no one has asked for. It swelled up almost beyond recognition, just vaguely hinting to the original with its artsy details that ultimately made it look like a fat larva. It’s truly, deeply, ugly.

Did I mention that it could now seat up to 7 people? Talk about stretching it too far.

No 3 - Pagani Huayra

Yes, I’m calling it out. This rolling sculpture, this artform, the jewel of automotive industry is as ugly as it is fast. And that’s a lot!

Zonda was so cool because it was absolutely bonkers, littered with wild details top to bottom. For this one, Pagani wanted to tame it down a little bit but then went too far. The lines are now much cleaner, uninterrupted, and the whole shape is… boring. The back looks so bland, with the taillights looking like an afterthought. The side was inspired, it seems, by a spread of Nutella on a slice of bread, but that’s nothing to what happened to the front. Odd headlights, flapping nostrils, tall pointing nose and a huge gaping mouth, finished off with a double chin made it look like that aquarium poo eating fish.

It’s no wonder that more and more Huyaras were ordered with an optional front splitter and some more interesting color combinations. It’s less of a wonder that people are still ordering the discontinued Zonda.

No 2 - Ferrari 308 GT4

I know what you’re thinking. Is this a Ferrari? Really? … It looks a lot like a kit car.
Something that a sleepy student would make as their science project. But it was supposed to be far more advanced than that.

Enzo wanted to make a more sensible, cheaper supercar for the everyday boring people. One that is easy to see out of, can go over a speed bump, and can take your kids as well.

With all those things making precedents over what a real supercar should be, it ended up looking like a cheap knockoff from the eastern communist block. Even with a stretched out cabin that made you sit too far up front, the wheelbase looked awfully short, with huge and tall overhangs. Sensible thinking made it ill-proportioned and downright ugly, but it also meant that it had no interesting details about it. The back was boring, front was boring, everywhere boring. It’s so bad that on a scale of terrible things that came out of Italy, Fascism has more fans that this Ferrari.

No 1 - Fiat Multipla

It is widely considered as the ugliest car in the World! Just look at it.

It’s a muffin top that’s gone bad and is covered with mold spots. Like a bacteria infected car, bubbling out of sickness. As if they chopped up two different ugly cars and glued them back together. But they didn’t just stop on the outside, because the interior if anything, is even worse! That center console was designed in the dark… using a snail as a pen! And look at those lines on the steering wheel, they don’t even meet in the middle.

This car was made ugly on purpose, as if they tried their best to make is as atrocious as possible. And that for a country that gave us Pavarotti, Mona Lisa, high fashion and delicious cuisine is equal to a deadly sin. Shame on them!