Scary Rides

The mother of all showroom pickups
In the middle of the last decade, commercial truck manufacturer Navistar International — formerly International Harvester — decided to go after the consumer end of the pickup market. The monster that resulted was the CXT pickup — short for Commercial Extreme Truck — a 14,500-pound, 21-foot-long diesel he-beast that boasted a 9-foot-tall cab. Although targeted at ordinary consumers, the CXT could tow up to 20 tons, and its frame was identical to that used on International's massive dump trucks and cement mixers. Base price was a whopping $93,000. They must've been charging by the foot.

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Yes, it actually looks like that
When the Japanese-built Mitsuoka Orochi was first unveiled, most people assumed it was a mistake. "Surely," they thought, "no one would design a car to look like that on purpose." When the production version was revealed in 2006, jaws hit the floor. This, believe it or not, is a real car. It costs just over 10 million Japanese yen, or roughly $123,000, and is powered by a 3.3-liter 230-horsepower version of the Toyota V6 engine used in the last-generation Camry. And it looks like some sort of mutated shark-fish and cat-vomit nightmare. If an Orochi shows up in your driveway, run. Fast.

Bing Images: Mitsuoka Orochi

The world's fastest production car
The phrase has a serious, almost haunting ring to it: world's fastest car. Think about what that means. This is the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport, a 1,200-horsepower version of the 1,000-horsepower Bugatti Veyron 16.4. Like its lesser sibling, the Super Sport is best explained through numbers: 1,200 horses at 6400 rpm; 1,106 lb-ft of torque; zero to 62 mph in 2.5 seconds. Oh, did we mention it has a 268-mph top speed, making it faster than any other production car on the planet? All for the low, low price of $2.8 million. Worth every penny.

Video: Bugatti Veyron Super Sport

Whatever you do, don't make it mad
The KTM X-Bow, built by Austrian motorcycle manufacturer KTM, is a road-legal track rat that can sprint from zero to 62 mph in 3.6 seconds. It weighs 1,816 pounds and sports a 237-horsepower turbocharged 4-cylinder engine under its rear deck, but that's not why it's here. The KTM looks like a ticked-off space bug from hell, the kind of thing you don't want crawling around in your sheets (or garage) at night. It is available only in Europe and costs the equivalent of $78,000, which is interesting, because that's exactly how much we would pay to not have bad dreams involving that face.

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Doing more with less
Handling, as most engineers will tell you, is a subjective term, one that represents a car's cornering composure. It's about balance, not speed, which is how we can name the 1962-1975 Lotus Elan the best-handling car in history. The Elan weighed 1,500 pounds — 500 pounds less than today's Lotus Elise — and produced a modest 108 horsepower from its twin-cam 4-cylinder engine. But thanks to Lotus' engineering, it sucked up turns like it was on rails. Your grandmother could drift an Elan around a racetrack while fast asleep. No other car is as forgiving at speed. In a word, it is magic.

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No one has paid more for a car — ever
Just three Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantics were made, and only two of those survive in original condition. One is owned by fashion designer Ralph Lauren, and the other, the blue car shown here, sold this year for between $30 million and $40 million. Because the sale was private, exact figures weren't released, but the deal was brokered by the auction house Gooding & Co. The record was previously held by a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testarossa auctioned in 2009. It brought $12.2 million, which, in retrospect, seems like chump change.

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Feel like blowing up?
The Ford Pinto's tale of woe is legendary: Car company creates cheap compact car; compact car goes out into world; compact car erupts in flames in rear-end collisions. People die, lawsuits are filed. While every Pinto on the road was subject to a government-mandated recall that fixed the problem, the stigma remains: Step into a Pinto, and you can't stop thinking about burning to death. If that's not frightening, we don't know what is.

Bing: Exploding-Pinto Jokes

Drinks like a fish, sounds like a tank
Attempting to name the car with the worst — or scariest — fuel economy in history is a fool's errand. Over the past century, people have stuffed all manner of large, thirsty engines into strange and unheralded cars, and standardized fuel-economy testing didn't exist until a few decades ago. For that reason, we're going to say the worst guzzler is Jay Leno's 810-horsepower Continental AV-1790-engined Tank Car, aka the Blastolene Special. When Leno bought it, it achieved a pathetic 2 mpg. There may be cars out there that suck down more fuel, but few are freakier.

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If you could afford one when it was new, you made too much money
Look up "inappropriate" in the dictionary, and you'll find a picture of a Bugatti Royale taken during the Great Depression. The French marque's most infamously luxurious car, the 21-foot-long Royale weighed 7,000 pounds and sported a 12.7-liter straight-eight engine. At $25,000 for the chassis alone — roughly $300,000 when adjusted for inflation — the Royale was intended to be a car for royalty. The onset of the Depression meant that just six were sold, none of them to kings or queens. You know what's scary? Driving around in this while most of the country can't afford to eat.

Bing Images: Bugatti Royale

Like a donkey in a prom dress
An automotive tease is like bad fast food: You start off wondering how bad it could possibly be, and later, you realize it couldn't possibly have been any worse. The Chevrolet SSR sported a hot rod's body and the vibe of a classic American pickup. Under the skin, however, it was little more than a warmed-over SUV. The SSR shared a platform with GM's tepid TrailBlazer and Oldsmobile Bravada, which meant that it was slow and heavy and possessed the reflexes of a drugged elephant. This is fear you don't see coming.

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Sam Smith, a multiple International Automotive Media award-winner, has covered cars for Automobile Magazine, Car and Driver, and Esquire, among other publications. He once drove 4,000 miles in a weekend for a hamburger and has only been threatened by the German police twice.

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