Number 10: Fiat Multipla - Fiat, 1998-2010

From the back, it appears normal. From the front, it looks like an AI image generator got confused. The 1998 Fiat Multipla was actually incredibly well received in it’s early years, receiving several accolades for its beauty and design on the original incarnation of Top Gear and sold very well in Italy, but less so elsewhere.  It was restyled in 2004 to look “less like a psychotic duck” as one Daily Telegraph columnist eloquently described.

The tragedy of this car is that underneath the “Elephant-man-esque exterior,” as the Sunday Times described it, there was a novel interior design with plenty of space for a family to enjoy a comfortable journey, but unfortunately the strange looking chassis turned people away from it. It had a three abreast seating configuration, which allowed for adjustment of the front seats and total removal and relocation of the rear seats.

Number 9: Peel P50 - Peel Engineering Co.,1961-65, 2010-present

This microcar, built from 1961-65, holds the 2010 Guiness world record for the smallest production car ever made. The original model had no reverse gear, so if you missed your turning, you’d have to get out of the car and carry it! With a top speed of a whopping 28mph, it was designed as a city car and was advertised as “being able to carry one person and a shopping bag.”

At 54 inches long and 39 inches wide, the car is well-known for its ability to fit through doorways and enter buildings, as demonstrated by Jeremy Clarkson in an iconic episode of Top Gear where he drove it through BBC’s Television Centre. In 2010, production began again after a successful appearance on Dragon’s Den, with a petrol model priced at £14,879 being popular in the UK, while the US favours the electric model at £13,679. All the cars are built by hand to order, and Peel Engineering sell around fifteen P50s a year!

Number 8: Amphicar - Quandt Group, 1961-65

Half car, half boat, and not as good as either, the Amphicar is a spiritual successor to the Volkswagen Schwimmwagen (no points for guessing what that translates to). Unlike the Schwimmwagen, which was mass produced during World War II for military usage, the Amphicar wasn’t practical whatsoever. After every use in water, it required oiling in 13 different places, one of which required removing the backseat!

It had a top speed of 7mph in water, and wasn’t much faster on land, taking 40 seconds too accelerate to 60mph and topping out at 70 – and because of these impracticalities, production only lasted from 1961-63. It’s main claim to fame is that 36^th US President Lyndon B. Johnson enjoyed scaring guests by driving his Amphicar full speed towards the lake on his property, claiming he couldn’t stop due to faulty brakes.

Number 7: Tesla Cybertruck - Tesla, 2019 (concept), 2023-present (full production)

The Tesla Cybertruck, while not nearly as much of a deathtrap as some other cars on this list, has a distinctly strange, polygonal appearance (oddly reminiscent of PlayStation 1 era video games!) that earns it its spot on the list. The unusual pickup comes with a noble purpose, to provide an electric and ecological alternative to the approximate 6,500 ICE pickup trucks sold every day in the United States. Critics have expressed concern that the tall, flat front and angular body could exacerbate injuries during collisions.

The Cybertruck has an incredible wealth of features, such as a Wade Mode that allows it go into 2.5 feet of water undamaged, and is infamous for its debut appearance at a 2019 show, where the famously unbreakable windows were smashed when a steel ball was thrown at them to demonstrate their toughness. Elon Musk could be heard muttering under his breath, and was forced to give the rest of the presentation through gritted teeth, later putting the mishap down to the door being hit with a sledgehammer moments prior to the steel ball test.

Number 6: Iso Isetta - Iso SpA (1953-56), BMW (1955-62)

This bizarre microcar was designed by Italian fridge manufacturer Iso, and it’s safe to say they stayed well within their comfort zone with this venture, as evidenced by the singular door on the front of the car. Unlike most other entries on this list, the Isetta eventually proved popular under a heavy redesign from BMW, and sold well in Germany throughout the 1950s and has gone on to become one of the quintessential “bubble cars“ of the era. Originally running on an Iso motorcycle engine and constantly rolling over on its three wheels, the widely sold BMW four-wheel version holds the accolade of the top-selling single cylinder car in the world, with 161,728 units sold.

Number 5: ACOMA Mini-Comtesse - ACOMA, 1972-84

France’s answer to the Peel P50 was the bizarre Mini-Comtesse (left), and like the P50, it had one singular wheel at the back and two at the front. These odd cars had two gears, which we’ll label as “slow” and “slightly less slow” as they boasted a lightning-slow top speed of 20 kilometres per hour! This slow speed was for the best, however, as these cars were classified as an L category vehicle in France, which means it can be driven with no license at all. Interestingly, of all the L category vehicles at the time, ACOMA microcars were the most popular, taking up 30% of the market share.

The success clearly fuelled them to create increasingly bizarre models, such as the Super Comtesse (middle) and the especially strange Comtesse Break (right), which owed it’s bizarre shape to a large cargo storage area in the back, and its ability to seat two people – although, they’d have to really like each other. The cars had a Sachs air-cooled 49cc single cylinder, 3 horsepower engine, and were produced from 1970-1984.

Number 4: Stout Scarab - Bill Stout, 1931-45    

The Stout Scarab, believed to be the world’s first minivan, was the brainchild of Bill Stout, an executive of the Ford Motor Company. He went on to design an aircraft that eventually became the Ford Trimotor, but every genius has his missteps! The oddball shape of this Egyptian dung beetle namesake comes from it’s rear-mounted Ford V-8 engine, and a wide, featureless, aluminium unibody.

Despite the odd presentation, the Scarab had several innovative features for the time – each passenger seat came with an optional card table and all seats except for the driver’s were configurable and could be removed if so desired. The minivan also had independent suspension using coil springs on all four wheels, providing a smooth and quiet ride, which was very rare for the time. Unfortunately, despite lots of media attention, few could stretch to the $5,000 price point to buy one ($105,444 in 2022) with only nine ever built. All were built by hand, and no two were ever identical. Of these nine, 5 are reported to survive today – Stout owned and drove his own, accumulating over 250,000 miles in travel around the US.

Number 3: L'Œuf Electrique - Paul Arzens, 1942    

L’Œuf Electrique (The Electric Egg) was quite the spectacle when it was created in 1942, at the height of not only the Second World War, but also a huge drought in EV sales. Once popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, improved ICE technology had rendered EVs utterly obsolete, due to miniscule range, slow speed and lack of charging infrastructure.  When Germany occupied France in mid-1940, petrol shortages plagued the stricken nation, and lots of ideas were drafted.

Paul Arzens falls into the category of automotive engineers who attempted to revolutionize the industry, but ultimately flew under the radar. While other French engineers of the time turned to the wood-powered generator to propel their vehicles (with 12% of passenger cars and 58% of trucks registered in France in 1944 using wood power), Arzens identified a gap in the market – because wood generators were bulky, they were better suited to larger vehicles, there were no small 2-seater passenger cars for sale in France at the time. With the goal to create a small car that could get the driver around traffic-dense Paris, he hatched the idea for the Electric Egg.

Because of this, it didn’t need to be comfortable or offer a long driving range. Power came from an electric motor linked to five batteries packed under the seats. Arzens quoted a 60-mile range and a 45 mile per hour top speed, and he regularly drove his Egg through the streets of Paris, turning heads wherever he went. Sadly, they were never commercially sold; it is likely that with the bubblecar trends of the 1950s, they would’ve sold pretty well – especially because, once petrol became available at the end of the war, Arzens swapped out his electric drivetrain for a 5.5-horsepower, 125cc Peugeot motorcycle engine. The Egg was incredibly easy to park due to it’s small size, and it’s clever yet simplistic design meant that Arzens was able to continue using and maintaining it up all the way up until his death in 1990.

Number 2: Dymaxion - Buckminster Fuller, 1913, 1915, 1919-27    

Built in 1933 by esteemed architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, the Dymaxion (a portmanteau of “dynamic”, “maximum” and “tension”), is one of the world’s first three-wheelers, but not as you know them! This topsy-turvy vehicle almost resembles a submarine, has a rear-mounted engine that powers it’s two front wheels, while the steering is all done from the singular rear tyre, which endows the driver with the eclectic mix of a very tight turning circle and incredibly wobbly handling. It's resemblance to a sea vessel is no accident – the Dymaxion was intended to be the first vehicle to master the land, sea and sky. If it’s handling on the ground was anything to go by, it would’ve been a death trap, so we should thank our lucky stars that only three were built before Fuller dissolved the company. Of these three, one was wrecked, one was scrapped, and one was converted to a chicken coop!

Number 1: Leyat Helica - Marcel Leyat, 1913-21    

French biplane designer Marcel Leyat had been working in the aviation world long before the First World War, and he believed he had a thing or two to teach the rapidly growing automotive industry. He believed that cars, like aircraft, should be designed to be aerodynamic and lightweight, but with driven wheels (gears) and other heavy components, this was hard. He decided that gears were a needless complexity, requiring clutches and differentials and all sorts of clutter.

So, he created this.

Horsepower was a rare commodity back in 1913, when Layat built his first Helica, which used a 1000cc Harley Davidson engine in a light-weight plywood body that weighed just 250kg. His goal was to extract as much speed from that power in the most efficient way, and in this goal he succeeded with a terrifying top speed of 106mph. And when there’s a giant propeller spinning and blowing air in your face (the original designs had no windscreen to speak of) as well as obscuring your vision, that’s more than a little bit dangerous. The original design also had no mesh enclosing the propeller, meaning that unsuspecting pedestrians and unfortunate wildlife would be blended up in the case of an accident, and rear-ending another vehicle would surely make for a fireworks display of shrapnel! Needless to say, propeller cars didn’t end up catching on.