That Scarab looked that way because of its revolutionary design. I don’t have a problem with it. The 1934 Chrysler Airflow was a big failure, folks weren’t ready for its looks:
The Airflow was one of the best built, designed and engineered cars made before WW2. America wasn’t ready. Nobody was. It would have done great… if it hadn’t been released in a depression.
You’re right about its great engineering and technical design, but it was the looks, not the depression, that killed it. Chrysler was selling lots of conventional cars at that time.
The Airflow was voted the Best Looking car at the 1934 New York Auto Show…
It was also voted the Worst Looking car at the show…
The looks were just too polarizing for the public to accept it.
Chrysler also had difficulty assembling the cars because they had all steel bodies. The learning curves slowed deliveries so rumors started about the quality.
The Edsel had a reputation as an ugly car. My mother said it looked like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon, a phrase I assume she cribbed. It doesn’t look all that ugly to me - though I don’t remember seeing one on the road.
It assaulted the eye from every angle, and when it quickly turned-out to be a resounding failure, nobody at GM would admit to having greenlighted that abomination.
Ironically, the same chassis and mechanical elements were used to create the Buick Rendezvous, which was much more conventional in appearance.
Special props for the A$$crack… the nickname GM’ers gave it… but I think the Multipla still wins. The first one a coworker and I saw produced a “what the #$%& is THAT?”
I saw that Scarab in the Vero Beach FL art museum in an Art Deco display. It may look strange but it isn’t ugly IMHO..
While it’s not quite as ugly as the Multipla or the Aztek, you have to wonder about the people who paid really big bucks for an Aston-Martin Lagonda sedan. In addition to the strange styling, its typical gas mileage was 8 mpg, and its electrical/electronic components were very unreliable, in the English tradition at that time.