2000 Ford Excursion

GM had its H2. Ford had the Excursion, a Mount Rushmore-sized SUV based on the company's Super Duty truck platform. Dubbed the Ford "Valdez" by the Sierra Club, the Excursion was a passenger vehicle of gob-smacking proportions. It weighed 7,000 lbs, measured almost 19 ft. long and stood 6.5 ft. tall. At the time, Ford argued that many of its customers — ranchers, farmers, um, tugboat enthusiasts — needed a vehicle this big with over 10,000-lb. towing capacity. Maybe that was true, but that didn't keep Suzy Homemakers from driving them to the mall. To its dubious credit, the Excursion pioneered the use of the blocker bar, a kind of under-vehicle roll bar designed to keep the Excursion from rolling over anything unfortunate enough to be hit by it. The Simpsons wrote the Excursion's cultural obituary in the episode where Marge buys the "Canyonero." "Can you name the truck with four wheel drive, smells like a steak and seats thirty-five...Canyoner-oooo!"

1998 Fiat Multipla

"Multipla" is a time-honored name for Fiat. The company made an adorable microvan by that name in the '50s and '60s, based on the Fiat 600. The Multipla that appeared in 1998 was anything but adorable. With its strange high-beam lenses situated at the bottom of the A-pillars (base of the windshield), the Multipla looked like it had several sets of eyes, like an irradiated tadpole. It had this weird proboscis out front and a bulky, glass cabin in back, and the whole thing was situated on dwarfish wheels. I rented one of these in Europe and it worked beautifully, but it was just so tragic to look at. The Multipla (and the Aztek and the Consulier GTP) reminds us that cars cannot just work beautifully. They have to be beautiful. At least they can't look like this.