5 Car Designs You Won't Believe Were Actually Approved
After more than a century of automobile design, it's understandable that a few of those ideas were less than genius. In fact, some were quite profoundly retarded.
The Flying Car Was Too Heavy to Fly
People have long been dreaming of the day when flying cars would become a reality and make traffic accidents 100 percent more fatal. Enter the AVE Mizar:
This masterpiece of engineering was exactly what it appears to be: a Ford Pinto attached to the back half of a Cessna Skymaster. Trouble is, the maximum load for a Cessna Skymaster is less than the weight of a Ford Pinto with no passengers and an empty fuel tank. Predictably, the car completely detached from the right wing midflight, monumentally succeeding at the second part of the dream we mentioned above.
The Blackwood Pickup Couldn't Carry Anything
In 2001, Ford decided to introduce an upscale pickup truck called the Lincoln Blackwood. For $52,000, consumers could own a pickup built to haul little more than some groceries and a yoga mat, because for some inexplicable reason Ford transformed the truck bed into a lidded trunk with bat wings.
This effectively destroyed any function the Blackwood had as a pickup, because it couldn't carry anything taller than a garden gnome. So, instead of looking like the blue-collar salt of the earth, you looked like an asshole who spent 50 grand on an amputated station wagon.
Congratulations.
The Corvair Poisoned People
The Chevrolet Corvair had a nasty habit of leaking oil like the Tin Man caught in the desperate throes of a sexual awakening. The oil would drip down into the exhaust and burn, at which point the Corvair's heater would helpfully channel the noxious fumes into the front seat until you either rolled the windows down or dove the hell out and walked home.
The Corvair thought you could use the exercise.
The problem was so bad that Chevrolet was forced to recall all of the heaters on the 1960-68 models, a repair that it gallantly forced Corvair owners to pay for themselves.
"After all, the heater works fine. It's the oil leak that's put you all in immeasurable danger."
The Trabant Had Nothing in It
The Trabant was a car designed for the working people of East Germany, and it had all the charm of the Bay of Pigs.
After being on a waiting list for up to 18 years to get one, people would find that their Trabants were missing basic things like turn signals and brake lights, although to be fair, after spending two decades in the Eastern Bloc, you would probably just start driving in a straight line with no intention of ever stopping.
Much like a weed eater, the Trabant burned a mixture of gas and oil, but the appropriate time to refuel was pretty much a guess, since the Trabant didn't have a gas gauge, just a horribly unreliable fuel dipstick that you had to stab hatefully into the tank. Presumably because the manufacturers were looking for creative ways to dispense with the last few fucks they gave, the exterior of the Trabant was made of compressed cotton and was occasionally eaten by goats.
If that puddle were any deeper, the car would disintegrate.
The Bricklin Trapped People Inside
The Bricklin SV-1 (the "SV" stood for "safety vehicle," so brace yourself for hilarity) was designed with every conceivable safety precaution, including a roll cage, reinforced bumpers and a fiberglass body.
And zazz.
Except for the fact that the doors were electronic, meaning that if the battery died, there was literally no way to open them. The driver and passengers would be stuck inside the car unless they could muster a meaty front kick through the windshield or were lucky enough to have lost power in a catastrophic accident that had also broken all the windows.
Xavier Jackson has a Facebook page. Like it.
