10 Of The Weirdest Cars Made In The 2010s

Some decades produce a wider range of weird and wonderful cars than others. The '90s and '00s saw manufacturers experiment with retro-modern styling, resulting in weird-but-popular models like the Chrysler PT Cruiser and the strangely ahead of its time Pontiac Aztek. Likewise, the 2020s has so far been a great time for weird cars, with EV makers trying to stand out from the crowd with unusual designs and eyebrow-raising performance numbers. Want a family-sized electric sedan with over 1,200 horsepower on tap? Look no further than the Lucid Air Sapphire. Fancy an electric pickup that looks like a rendering glitch in a video game? Try a Tesla Cybertruck.

Sandwiched in between those two eras was the 2010s, which produced a lot less weird cars than its surrounding decades. Manufacturers were still recovering from the effects of the Great Recession, and didn't have money to waste on niche oddities. Tightening emissions rules also loomed large, with necessary powertrain improvements gobbling up development budgets that could otherwise have been spent on developing new, unusual models.

Still, the 2010s still produced a few strange cars, from drop-top crossovers to road legal single seater race cars. These 10 are among our favorites from the decade, and deserve to be celebrated even if most of them never sold well.

Pitching a fresh take on an automotive icon can sometimes work out well. Other times, you get the Mini Coupe. Offered for a few years at the start of the 2010s, the Mini Coupe took the brand's signature design — which itself was a largely successful reinvention of the classic model — and chopped the roof off. Then, Mini's designers stuck a new roof back on again, except this new roof was lower, more ungainly, and less practical than the original.

The idea, supposedly, was to create a sports car that took the bones of the regular Mini but made it sharper to drive and more eye-catching. It certainly delivered on the latter, although not quite in the way its designers were hoping. The roof of the car looks like it's been squashed, with its two-tone paint highlighting its unusual proportions. What makes it worse is that the lower half of the car was largely unchanged from the standard Mini hatch.

Unsurprisingly, the uglier, less practical version of the Mini didn't sell too well, and the brand axed it after just a few years on sale. Examples remain readily available on the used market for reasonable prices, so anyone who wants to pick up one of these divisive coupes for cheap has plenty of options.

The Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet makes frequent appearances on weirdest cars lists like this one, but that's for good reason. Nissan's chief creative officer Carlos Ghosn was reportedly responsible for the decision to develop the car, but evidently he was in the minority in thinking it was a good idea. The car drew puzzled reactions from buyers and journalists as soon as it was unveiled, including from SlashGear's own review team, who drove the car at launch.

It was more luxurious inside than most other Nissans at the time, but its price reflected that. Its ride was exactly what you'd expect from a tall, bulbous convertible — not particularly refined, but smooth enough to iron out any bumps in the road on the way to the grocery store. Likewise, its performance was adequate but unremarkable, with its 3.5L V6 churning out 265 horsepower.

Perhaps if the Murano CrossCabriolet had looked a bit less awkward then it might have sold in better numbers, although its price point towards the top of Nissan's lineup meant that it was always destined to be a niche offering. After debuting in 2011, the Murano CrossCabriolet was quietly axed by Nissan after the 2014 model year.

Plenty of the cars here were never designed with the intention of looking strange, even if they turned out that way. The Morgan 3 Wheeler, in contrast, was always intended to be an oddball, with one less wheel than normal and an engine mounted outside of the body in the front of the car. The 3 Wheeler's design was based on the English brand's cars of the 1920s and 1930s — back then having three wheels meant lower road taxes in Britain, which made Morgan's so-called cyclecars a popular option. That tax advantage is long gone, but the design of the revived 3 Wheeler, which debuted in 2011, remains impressively faithful to the original.

Morgan eventually ended production of the 3 Wheeler in 2021, having sold a reported 2,500 examples over the course of its decade on sale. That's enough to make it one of the most popular Morgan models to date. Its spirit lives on in the form of the current Morgan Super 3, which moves the engine back inside the bodywork but keeps much of the rest of the recipe the same as it always was.

The original Toyota Mirai was a boundary-pushing car in several ways. The most obvious way was its powertrain technology — this was one of the first publicly offered hydrogen car on the market, offering an alternative to BEVs for buyers who lived within driving distance of the very limited hydrogen refueling infrastructure available at the time. As such, it was only sold in a handful of markets, and couldn't be used for any cross-country jaunts.

Just in that regard, it was already a bit strange, but Toyota's baffling choice of design made it even stranger. Here was a car with impressive technical specifications and family-friendly interior space, yet it looked like a Photoshop experiment gone wrong. It managed to look strange from virtually every angle, and the more you look at it, the more weird lines you can pick out.

Toyota understandably wanted its most futuristic car to look like it had arrived from the future, but the first generation Mirai was a prime example of how not to go about that. Thankfully, the second generation Mirai, which debuted for 2021, did a much better job of conveying the car's cutting-edge appeal without veering into look-at-me ugliness.

Undoubtedly one of the strangest cars ever built by a luxury brand, the Aston Martin Cygnet was intended to be the automaker's silver bullet to solve the problem of tightening emissions regulations. Borrowing the 1.3L engine and platform of the Toyota/Scion iQ, the Cygnet would drastically lower Aston Martin's average emissions and would thus help it avoid impending regulatory fines — or so the thinking went.

There was just one sticking point, as the Cygnet retailed for more than twice the price of the Toyota on which it was based, and didn't offer superior performance nor a vastly different appearance. Sure, the interior was all-Aston and therefore much more luxurious than any Toyota, but there was still no hiding the fact that this was a budget city car with an unreasonably large price tag.

Despite its strangeness at first glance, there is some logic to the idea of a luxurious city car. Congested European and Asian capital cities are not a natural environment for a large, powerful GT car, and so having a smaller Aston Martin in your garage for a quick grocery run might make sense for a few well-heeled city dwellers. Unfortunately, there weren't enough of them to make the Cygnet a success, and some of the potential pool of buyers were likely put off by the car's clear visual and mechanical similarity to the cheaper Toyota. As a result, the Cygnet was a short-lived oddity, being launched in 2011 and axed by 2013.

The regular Nissan Juke is already one of the stranger looking crossovers on the market, but it's nowhere near as weird as the Nissan Juke-R 2.0. First unveiled in 2015, the Juke-R 2.0 combined the internals of a GT-R with the body of a Juke. The GT-R's V6 produces around 600 horsepower in the Juke-R 2.0, and its all-wheel drive system and dash are also present and correct.

The GT-R's oily bits aren't just thrown in for show — Nissan reportedly made sure that the Juke-R 2.0 made full use of them, and was a formidable track toy in its own right. The super-Juke was originally intended to be a one-off, but after demand from well-heeled (and presumably very eccentric) buyers, Nissan eventually greenlit a limited production run of five examples.

Two of those remained under the ownership of Nissan, while three were sold to private customers. Two of the three privately owned examples were reportedly crashed, but one is known to survive and appeared for sale for around $720,000 in 2020. That might seem like an eye-watering sum for what's still at the end of the day a compact crossover, but then again, the buyer of the Juke-R 2.0 gets the admittedly niche bragging rights of owning what's arguably the strangest Nissan ever built.

Ask most enthusiasts to picture an ultra-efficient diesel car and they might think of the kind of gray, boring fleet vehicles that made up the majority of diesel car sales for years. In fact, the most efficient diesel of them all looks like a futuristic sports car and was made by Volkswagen specifically for the purposes of setting records. It boasted a two-cylinder diesel engine and an electric motor and took the crown for the most efficient diesel production car ever built, clocking a remarkable 261 mpg.

Of course, to win the title of the most efficient production car, Volkswagen actually had to put the car into production. The automaker partnered with an Austrian supplier to develop a lightweight monocoque chassis made from carbon fiber reinforced polymer, then assembled the car at its plant in Osnabrück, Germany. A reported 250 examples were built with a price tag of over $100,000 each. Today, low-mileage examples remain sought after among collectors, with one example selling for €97,750 (roughly $103,000) at a Bonhams auction in 2022.

It's a common complaint to hear from critics of EVs — "if it's electric, it's boring to drive." The Renault Twizy is certainly not boring to drive, although as SlashGear found out in 2016, it's also not practical nor is it particularly pleasant to drive in the cold either. The Twizy is essentially a plastic box on wheels, and Renault made no attempt to disguise that fact. Near-universal car features like windows and doors were reduced to options on the Twizy, although with the car's starting price of around $10,000, those add-ons didn't sting too much.

SlashGear drove one in the U.K. shortly after the car was launched there, and found it to be a uniquely attention grabbing car, drawing crowds away from vehicles that cost vastly more. It's not quite as slow as it might look either. Unlike the modern Citroën Ami, which sports a measly top speed of 28 mph, the Twizy could hit over 50 mph, which is more than fast enough to zip around busy European cities. Still, its limited range and weird looks kept it a niche vehicle, although it was enough of a success for Renault to announce a follow-up called the Mobilize Duo in 2024.

It might not look as strange as most of the other cars here at first glance, but the Infiniti FX Vettel is every bit as strange on closer inspection. It takes its name from former F1 champion Sebastian Vettel, who worked with Infiniti to develop the car. Thanks to Infiniti's sponsorship of the Red Bull F1 team at the time, Vettel already drove an FX and wanted a faster version. The standard FX50's top speed limiter of 155 mph was increased for extra autobahn performance, and the 5.0L V8 engine's power output was boosted by 30 horsepower.

The Vettel edition also gave this upscale family SUV a pricey carbon fiber front lip, designed in the style of the F1 driver's competition car. Only a very limited number of examples were produced, although given the car's price tag, Infiniti was unlikely to shift many of them anyway. When it launched in 2013, the car cost £100,800 in the UK — the equivalent of over $150,000 at the time.

That's a staggering price considering that the regular FX was available for roughly half as much. Exactly why Infiniti decided to launch an F1-inspired SUV with minor performance improvements for double the price of the regular version remains a mystery. Perhaps this strange decision can be explained by Infiniti's desire to raise the profile of its brand among well-heeled buyers — although clearly it didn't work, as Infiniti had pulled out of the U.K. and Europe altogether by 2020.

Despite its appearance, the BAC Mono is in fact street legal, and a small number of examples have been imported to America. It certainly doesn't look like it should be able to wear a license plate — it is in essence a single-seater race car that just about meets the requirements to be on the road. It joins a rarefied class of British road-legal race cars including the Ariel Atom and Radical RXC, but the BAC Mono arguably looks the strangest of all of them.

It's strange, but it's also undeniably cool. The Mono looks like it's recently escaped the confinements of a closed circuit when it really shouldn't have, and with its 2.7 second 0-60 mph time and 170 mph top speed, it packs the punch to back up those looks. BAC reportedly even offers a custom race suit that matches the car to really complete the look. It's safe to say that buyers willing to shell out $150,000 or so on such a car are few and far between, but those that did — and continue to do, as the Mono remains in production — will find themselves with one of the most eye-catching, albeit strange, road cars on the market.