If We Get 100 Autopian Members In June We’ll Buy The ‘Ugliest Car Ever Built’ And Make Our Posh Car Designer Drive It To Goodwood

Last year, we challenged 200 of you to get a new Autopian membership with the promise of buying an Aztek and living in it. You held up your end of the bargain, so we bought an Aztek, and David spent a week sleeping in it. This year, we want to do something bigger, both physically and emotionally. If 100 of you become new members (or upgrade) between now and the end of June, we will not only buy a car Top Gear once said looked like “an outbreak of cold sores,” we’ll make our fancy car designer use it as a daily driver and force him to take it to the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

That’s right, we’re talking about the Ssangyong Rodius, a giant Korean crossover-SUV thing that AutoCar called “The Ugliest Car” on sale. There are still a few of them that haven’t been crushed for the benefit of mankind, and who better than to make drive it around than our cranky goth prince car designer/design professor Adrian Clarke?

He’ll hate it, I’m sure. In fact, when we told Adrian about this idea, he just screamed, “Are you mad?” and then spent the rest of the week trying to convince us to buy literally any other vehicle.

Why? I guess Top Gear did once call it one of the biggest “fails of the century,” noting that it looked like “that fetid juice that pools at the bottom of your food waste bin” and “Barney the big purple dinosaur, looming outside your bedroom window with a chainsaw, eyes unblinking, giant dino-mouth fixed in a horrific, rictus grin.”

How Do I Help Make This Happen?

Great question. If you haven’t yet become a member of this website, you can sign up for any plan at any level. For that, you get fewer ads, no autoplay video, special Discord access, and some other perks, as well as the warm feeling of supporting a website that you love to read. Any plan will count, but if you sign up for an annual one, we’ll give you a 10% discount with the code “ssangwrong” (or click this link).

That means for less than $5 a month (Cloth Annual), you can make one special British car designer just a little miserable. And what if you’re already a member? First, and most importantly, thank you! If you’ve been contemplating making the jump from Cloth to Vinyl, perhaps, then you can get a sweet shirt and sticker to go with your membership. Plus, I’m extending the 10% discount to upgrades as well!

I really, really, really want to make this happen. That’s why we’re starting this drive a day early, since June only has 30 days. If you sign up today (or tomorrow), it’ll still count.

I’m Not Convinced, How Can You Sweeten The Pot?

Perhaps the above is not quite enough to get you to pull the trigger. Perhaps you want more. If we buy this car, we will also make Adrian drive it (and us) to the very fancy Goodwood Festival of Speed. In particular, we’ll make him drive us up to the Duke’s house for the ball in front of all the paparazzi and, like, Lewis Hamilton or whoever in the Rodius. It seats seven, so there’s plenty of room.

Is This Thing Really That Bad?

I’m genuinely curious! I’m not saying that this car was so ugly the company completely disowned it, but the car was entirely redesigned, and SsangYong changed the name of the whole brand shortly thereafter.

AutoExpress gave it 1-star rating in its review, stating “the SsangYong looks ungainly from almost every angle.” Yeah, it looks bad, but it’s huge! And the drivetrain is actually interesting. The most common motor is the famously reliable 2.7-liter OM612 inline-five diesel borrowed from Mercedes, mated either to an unloved manual transmission or the universally praised 5GTronic automatic. The pairing of the diesel and the auto is one of the most robust drivetrains imaginable.

Technically, we could buy the post-facelift version, which sort of fixed the puckered face while doing nothing about the strange, Yacht-inspired rear deck. We will do our best to purchase the early, extremely terrible version.

Why Is Membership So Important?

Quite simply, we couldn’t exist without members. Many car sites you may read are forced to overwhelm their pages with advertisements, rely on egregiously underpaid freelancers creating endless slideshows, or both. We don’t want to do any of that. You’d have to read approximately 9,000 articles a year to provide the same benefit to us as signing up for the cheapest annual plan with the discount. Because we are conservative with our ads, we generally make less than our competition.

That’s ok! We want to make this place readable for everyone, the way websites used to be. We also don’t want to be beholden to the whims of marketers. We want to be an independent website that brings you the best (and strangest) automotive content on the web.

And if you can’t become a member, that’s ok, too. We understand! If you’re curious, this page has the details on all you get. Together we can make this world a truly better place by making Adrian’s life a little worse.