The Good, The Bad, and The Incredibly Ugly Cars

#21: 2006 Mitsuoka Orochi

In Japanese mythology, Yamata-no-Orochi was a gigantic eight-headed dragon. Orochi is one of those names you give to something when you want it to sound cool and fearsome. Mitsuoka’s Orochi does look kind of fearsome, though more because its front grill looks like a piranha mouth and piranhas freak me out.

Despite looking like a really flat gremlin, the Orochi was still a sports car, and had the muscle to back that title up. With a 3.3-liter Toyota V6, the Orochi packed about 240 horsepower. Not that special on its own, but combined with the frame’s light weight, you could actually do some pretty cool cruising in this thing. Just don’t stand in front of it, or I swear it’s gonna eat your feet.

Now we go from flat man-eaters to literal boxes on wheels. Talk about contrast.

#20: 2009 Nissan Cube

If you asked a little kid to draw a car, they’d probably draw a Nissan Cube. In other words, a big box with wheels. The Cube, at least as a concept, has been around since 1998. It had its second generation in 2002, and its third and current generation in 2009. In all of its incarnations, the general idea has been the same: a pint-sized minivan.

Credit where it’s due, the Cube’s hatchback does have quite a bit of space. It’s just that to accommodate that space, it has to look really doofy and disproportionate. They stopped making Cubes in the States in 2014, with other territories like Canada and Europe dropping even sooner, but Nissan still sells them over in Japan. There’s a market for everything, I suppose.

I think I’d rather be in a box on the highway than a this next car.