1976 Aston Martin Lagonda

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In the disco days of the 1970s, even supercars were cocaine-thin. Meet the Aston Martin Lagonda, a four-door exotic that lived on dinner mints and hot water. Designed by AM penman William Towns — undoubtedly wearing a very large cravat at the time — the Lagonda was as beautiful a car as ever resembled a pencil box. Mechanically, it was a catastrophe, Aston Martin's Dunkirk. The company decided to build the Lagonda with a brace of cutting-edge, computer-driven electronics and cathode-ray displays, which would have been very impressive if any of them ever worked. NASA couldn't have built this car, much less the heirs to Joseph Lucas, the British electronics' famous "Prince of Darkness." Still, I'd kill to have one of these cars, and the O-scope and multi-meter to fix it.

1975 Trabant

This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness (actually, the body was made of a fiberglass-like Duroplast, reinforced with recycled fibers like cotton and wood). A virtual antique when it was designed in the 1950s, the Trabant was East Germany's answer to the VW Beetle — a "people's car," as if the people didn't have enough to worry about. Trabants smoked like an Iraqi oil fire, when they ran at all, and often lacked even the most basic of amenities, like brake lights or turn signals. But history has been kind to the Trabi. Thousands of East Germans drove their Trabants over the border when the Wall fell, which made it a kind of automotive liberator. Once across the border, the none-too-sentimental Ostdeutschlanders immediately abandoned their cars. Ich bin Junk!