BusinessWeek’s Baffling “Ugly 50”

BusinessWeek has put together a slide show of the “Fifty Ugliest Cars of the Past 50 Years” that has the auto blogosphere scratching its collective head. There are some usual suspects: the Pontiac Aztek, the Yugo, the Cadillac Cimarron. But there’s also the Ferrari Enzo, the Chevy El Camino, the Volvo 240, the Aston Martin Lagonda, the Honda Element, and the Toyota Prius, as well as some offbeat models, such as the Corbin Sparrow. Particularly disturbing is BizWeek’s apparent hatred of El Camino derivatives: any non-truck-like car with a bed, including both the Subaru Brat and Baja, gets clonked. But the El Camino is one of the greatest cars of all time. It’s good to be both a car and a truck!  It lives on, in fact, in Australia. Also, taking a whack at the Tata Nano is a cheap shot—this is a car that has to revel in its inexpensive smallness. Finally, BusinessWeek could have been sharper with the lingo. The DeLorean DMC-12 makes the list, but its rear is referred to as “especially disconcerting with its window shading and cubed tail lights.” Window shading? That’s a louvered back window, sometimes called a “backlight,” gentlemen.