7 Car Monstrosities These Italian Design Houses Want You To Forget

Romantic names that roll off the tongue are all part of the appeal of cars designed by the major Italian houses, but even the best in the business make mistakes sometimes.

How else could you explain some of the vehicles below? They may all have come from the studio of famous designers, but their aesthetic appeal leaves plenty to be desired...

Pininfarina

Most famous for their work with Ferrari, the design house Pininfarina has also worked with dozens of other carmakers over the years, adding beauty to the most humble of vehicles - remember the Peugeot 406 Coupe, for example?

Unfortunately, their work with Peugeot hasn't always been successful. We're not sure whose idea the 1007 was, but Pininfarina's name is attached to it, and it's not one of their better efforts. The sliding side door is undoubtedly a clever idea for a city-bound vehicle, but its immense weight, poor integration and slow operation make less sense.

Pininfarina didn't stop there either - remember the Hyundai Matrix? A weird front and rear step to the side window line seems to be the designers' only real contribution to an otherwise resolutely bland high-rise hatchback.

Bertone

Bertone has also been responsible for some amazing designs - step forward, Lancia Stratos - but we're not sure what the designer was thinking when he penned the Daewoo Espero.

In fairness, whoever was holding the stylus probably didn't have a lot of room to manoeuvre, given the Espero's roots. It was, largely, a 1980s Vauxhall Cavalier. Beyond tweaking front and rear lights there's only so much you can do with a bland three-box design, but it seems a shame that Bertone's name will forever be linked with the Espero. Adding further insult to injury, the Bertone Badge has also been stuck to the side of several Vauxhall Astra convertibles.

Zagato

Zagato vehicles have often been an acquired taste, even in their finer moments. The Alfa Romeo SZ doesn't wear the nickname "Il Mostro" for no reason - it's a real assault on the eyes. But at the same time, it's likeable.

That's more than can be said for the Toyota Harrier Zagato. If the Harrier name isn't familiar to you, then you'll know it as the Lexus RX, specifically the first-generation version sold in the late 1990s. Over in Japan it wore Toyota badges, and when breathed on by Zagato it also wore a hideous wide-arch body kit and unusually featureless front-end panelling. If you thought horrific SUVs were the preserve of Mansory and other taste vacuums, remember that even the greats cock up occasionally.

Italdesign Giugiaro

It's hard to know where to start with Italdesign Giugiaro. Despite turning out such brilliant works as the original VW Golf and Scirocco, the first Fiat Panda, the DeLorean DMC-12, Alfa 159, BMW M1 and Maserati Quattroporte, their back-catalogue of shitters is second to none.

You can't start on Italdesign without mentioning the Morris Ital, one of Britain's truly atrocious vehicles from a period with genuinely tough competition - the UK was littered with poorly-made, depressing, rusty failures, but the Morris Ital was one of the worst. We're at a loss to discover exactly what Italdesign did with the Morris Ital, other than perhaps try to forget all about it for the next thirty or forty years.

Hyundai Excel (Image: favcars.com)

There have been beasts from the east, too. Remember the Hyundai Excel? Of course you don't - you might as well have had your hippocampus removed in a botched lobotomy for all the memory you have of the drizzle-bland Excel. You'd get more entertainment staring at a blank spreadsheet of the same name.

We've saved the best till last, however. We'll give Italdesign the benefit of the doubt and assume that someone from Suzuki held a designer at gunpoint until the styling house committed its name to the X-90. That's the only explanation we can come up with for a small, targa four-wheel drive based on the Vitara that not even Barbie is blonde enough to own...