Fail of the century #106: the Ssangyong Rodius

No one buys an MPV for its lissom good looks. They buy it for unpretentious space, and the Rodius certainly offered a lot of unpretentious space. It seated as many as 11 humans, provided all had (a) small legs and (b) no sense of shame. So is it really fair to brand the Rodius a failure on aesthetic grounds alone?

Probably not, but we’re going to do it anyhow. Because the Rodius wasn’t just ugly. It was an unprecedented assault on the world’s rods and cones: automotive design as GBH.

Ssangyong claimed the Rodius had been inspired by luxury yachts, suggesting they’d somehow confused the phrase ‘luxury yacht’ with the very similar phrase ‘used aeroplane sick bag’.

Or perhaps the phrase ‘that fetid juice that pools at the bottom of your food waste bin’. Or ‘an outbreak of cold sores’. Or ‘a clump of moist, sweaty gym towels, left abandoned in a locker only to be discovered a year later’. Or ‘a bolus of OAP earwax’. Or ‘Barney the big purple dinosaur, looming outside your bedroom window with a chainsaw, eyes unblinking, giant dino-mouth fixed in a horrific, rictus grin’. Or ‘a giant fatberg’. Or ‘a skip filled with tens of thousands of month-old Wee Willy Winkie’s Mini Skinless Sausages’. Or [thank you, that’s quite enough. Ed]