The Subaru WRX is one of the ugliest things on wheels. The blue paint/non-shiny gold wheel combination is hideous. The hood has so many little air vents in it that it looks like someone took a can opener to it. The wing looks like a shopping cart handle. It's kinda boxy, and there's basically no sense of style to it at all. Then you drive it and all of the above is irrelevant. The thing accelerates like a rocket, handles like a Lotus, and can take any racing condition you throw at it, from autocross to roadracing to rally. After driving one at a recent autocross, all I can say is I WANT ONE.

By contrast, older Jaguars (the new ones look like a Ford Taurus from the side and rear, and therefore don't count) are gorgeous cars. There's nothing about them that is not extremely good looking, but the general rule of thumb is that you drive it (occasionally) in the summer, then have it in the shop all winter. They're about as reliable as a drug dealer.

With cars, beauty is far more than skin deep ;)







> I have to make just a few more points about ugly cars. Ugly is a matter of taste. I had a '74 Maveric that I thought looked pretty good. It was a 4-door, which means it had a longer wheel base and thus didn't have the chopped-off look of the 2-door. But it got ugly when you hit the brakes. From the day it was new, it refused to brake straight. It would stop, but there was no way to predict which way it would be facing. By the time it hit 20,000 miles, it got uglier. The handling got terrible. It was a bad-to-worse situation caused by the settling of the right front suspension. You could see it lean to one side on a level surface. By the time it hit 30,000, it was uglier still. The shift linkage got so badly worn, you had to pound it into gear with your fist. I replaced the linkage, but the improvement was slight and it was soon back to where it was.
> Then it got uglier again. The air conditioner quit, the door handles fell off, the clutch started to chatter. By the time it had 109.000 miles, it had lost all compression on one cyliner and the other five were weak, so I sold it. I told the guy it was shot, but he bought it anyway. "It looks good," he said.
> That's when I bought a 1978 Subaru. It was ugly, but it was a great car.
> Howard
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