Section · 10 stories
Numbers that make accountants weep and enthusiasts grin.
Headlights that steer, doors that sink into the floor and a roof that folds into the trunk. Five genuinely clever car features that were ahead of their time.
Weirdest quirk The Ford Skyliner's folding hardtop used seven electric motors, ten limit switches, ten solenoids and 610 ft of wire.
A Lettuce, a Thing, a Naked and a Mysterious Utility Wizard. Here are the strangest car names ever put on a tailgate, plus two famous naming 'blunders' that are total myths.
Weirdest quirk Kia put an apostrophe in the Cee'd because 'CEEED' had too many E's. It finally dropped it in 2018.
Longhorns in downtown Detroit, a Mustang on the Empire State Building and a 'shatterproof' window that shattered. These are the most absurd car unveilings on record.
Weirdest quirk At the 2019 Cybertruck unveiling, both 'Armor Glass' windows cracked when the chief designer threw a metal ball at them.
Wedges, wings and V12s you could only afford in paper form. Here are ten classic poster cars, why they got pinned up, and the deeply impractical quirk each one hid.
Weirdest quirk The Ferrari F40 had no door handles, no carpets and no sound system. The first 50 had sliding plastic windows.
Is the Cadillac Escalade really the king of in-car TVs? We counted every factory display in the most screen-happy cars on sale. The winner isn't a Cadillac.
Weirdest quirk The Jeep Grand Wagoneer can be ordered with seven touchscreens and a digital rearview mirror, roughly 75 inches of screen in total.
Subaru put two rear-facing plastic seats in the cargo bed so the US government would call its little pickup a car. It worked.
Weirdest quirk Two rear-facing jump seats bolted into the cargo bed, there mainly to dodge a 25% light-truck tariff.
Nissan's Pike Factory built a little van that looks like a snail, is named after one, and was made to be a rolling billboard.
Weirdest quirk It's a working delivery van styled like a snail, and its name is a pun on the French word for snail.
The world's smallest production car didn't bother with reverse. If you got stuck, you got out and picked it up.
Weirdest quirk There's no reverse gear. To turn around you get out, lift the tail by its chrome handle and drag it around.
Lamborghini tried to sell an off-roader to the military, failed, and sold it to everyone else instead. Thirst included.
Weirdest quirk It needed tires that didn't exist yet, so Pirelli developed the Scorpion specifically for it.
The wedgiest wedge ever drawn had almost no rear visibility, so owners invented the 'Countach reverse.' Pure spec-sheet theatre.
Weirdest quirk The traditional way to reverse it is sitting on the door sill with the scissor door up, looking backward.
