Some cars are weird, some a wonderful, while others are just outright pointless. Today were looking at the five most pointless cars in The Thursday Five.
Jeep Grand Cherokee Hellcat
It hasn’t officially been confirmed yet - and if it is, we think it will be utterly awesome - but it will be thoroughly pointless. Stuffing the magnificent 707hp Hellcat V8 into as massive SUV? Mental and utterly pointless.
That doesn’t mean we don’t think it will be possibly the most brilliant thing ever, just the most pointless as well, after literally no-one NEEDS a 707hp SUV that will potentially be able to belt to 100km/h in 3 seconds... but we still want one...
BMW X6
“Here’s a good idea!” said a designer at BMW one day, “Let’s make a car based on the X5, but with less room and pretend it is a coupe!”
Sadly no-one said “You are an idiot, that will look ridiculous” and the BMW X6 was born. And sales were better than a cake shop next to a fat camp.
The thing is though, is that the X6 so desperately lacks a point that the sillier and more pointless it gets, the better it actually gets - case in point; the mental X6M is utterly awesome.
The best part about the X6 - it is utterly brilliant to drive. The worst part - its success justified BMW’s urge to invent new and even sillier niches...
Hummer H1
Damn you Arnold Schwarzenegger, why did you start this thing on a path to civilian production? Why did you wake up one day and think “I need a thoroughly massive vehicle that has bugger-all interior space because... well, screw you, that’s why”
And why did enough people agree to make AM General (and later GM) actually not only build it, but also build smaller, almost as pointless versions. At least there is one thing that we can thank the GFC for - the final extinction of the Hummer.
Renault Avantime
This one is so gloriously pointless that we actually completely love it - the Renault Avantime was an MPV coupe, literally the only vehicle in that segment ever.
Oddly enough, no-one really saw the need for a coupe version of a vehicle solely designed for moving large amounts of people, much like no-one has ever lamented that there isn’t such a thing as a “sports bus” or a “roadster van”.
Renault sold 8,557 of them, which may make for a worryingly large number of deranged people, but an unfeasibly small number of cars to sustain production. Still, it is now a wonderfully pointless collectors item!
Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet
Why? I mean, really - why?! What on earth possessed Nissan to think that cutting the roof off a floppy, but remarkably comfortable SUV was a good idea?
The Murano was very much a car for the American market, meaning it had loads of chrome and wallowed around corners like a bucket of sick on a skateboard, so making it less structurally rigid and even more awful looking can only have seemed like a good idea to a genuine sociopath who enjoyed inflicting pain. Or whoever was in charge of Nissan at the time...
The CrossCabriolet sold in truly dismal numbers and limped along for three and a half years before Nissan put a bullet in its head. The only question we have is “what took them so long?”