For all the focus groups, design concepts and millions of dollars that makers pour into their new models, sometimes they still get it plain wrong. When I was a kid there were few things I could think of more exciting than designing my own car. In fact, until Weird Science introduced the concept of designing my own real-life lady friend, having a car made just for me was my life's aim. That and discovering the secret formula for Coke, obviously.

But getting a car right is much harder than it looks - just ask Homer Simpson. Let's face it, most of us, if tasked with penning the ultimate car, would unleash exactly the type of adolescent embarrassment that The Homer was, with its huge grille and massive cup holders... hang on, don't most cars have both those things now? Anyway, it's nice to know that carmakers can be human too, capable of conjuring up metal so inept and/or ugly and/or badly timed that only the mentalist minority would buy one.

Most of the cars on this list are mere blips from otherwise successful companies, though in one case, so catastrophic was the entire debacle surrounding the car that a stint at her majesty's pleasure beckoned for those involved. Read on to find out which that is.

The Avantime gleaned its name from an amalgam of the French word for 'ahead' and the English word 'time'. And the coupé/MPV crossover may well have been ahead of its time, but we're evidently still waiting for that time to arrive. Unveiled in 1999 at Geneva, the Avantime took two years to reach production - reputedly because it took Renault that long to make it safe enough for public use.

It needn't have bothered, because selling 435 in the U.K. didn't even qualify it as having reached the public. The Avantime was supposed to combine the style of a coupé with the space of a people-carrier and the luxury of an executive car (a field Renault was dabbling in at the time with another car, the equally catastrophic Vel Satis). Unfortunately, the clumsy coupé offered the worst of all worlds: it was too big and horribly offensive to be a coupé, useless as an MPV because it only had three doors and really expensive, yet constructed using production techniques that even the Russian automobile industry had long since left behind.

It was dropped after two years, without even an attempt to save it with a facelift. True to form, however, everybody loves it now.

Detroit 2001 saw the debut of the concept Mercedes R-Class, but the production version didn't hit the shelves until 2005. What Merc was doing in those four years is unclear, but we imagine it must have spent three and a half of them looking for the biggest ugly stick it could find, then the next six months mercilessly beating the R-Class with it.

The luxury people carrier, which is still on sale now - tucked away behind the smoking sheds of selected quiet Merc dealerships - is marketed as a family touring cruiser (or something like that) and comes in short and long wheelbase versions as well as, unbelievably, full AMG state of tune: the R 63 hits 60mph in five seconds flat. Imagine that face hurtling towards you that quickly.

But that's not the most surprising thing about the R-Class. Nope, the most surprising thing is that Mercedes honestly thought 50,000 people per year would buy one. It struggled to get a fifth of that number. Next year's facelift will have to me more a full body transplant if the R-Class is to get back on track.

Volkswagen conceived and built the Phaeton under the premise that it could actually make the very best car in the world. And most would agree it's a magnificent piece of engineering, but the world's best car? Probably not. That's not the issue here, though; the issue is that even if VW had made a car so fantastically superlative that nobody could dispute it was the world's best, it still has a whopping great VW badge on the front.

And people with enough money to buy the world's best car generally don't want their neighbours to think they've bought a Passat, which is why VW has only flogged a couple of thousand worldwide - and also why the Phaeton is possibly the used car bargain of the century. Underneath VW's flagship limo sits a Bentley Continental, basically, except because of the whole VW badge and unpopularity thing, you can get a used Phaeton - the pinnacle of VW engineering excellence - for about the price of a Kia Picanto. That's like Megan Fox agreeing to marry you on the condition that she can wear a Primark shell suit at all times.

The Jaguar X-Type isn't a terrible car; it's just that nobody was fooled about what it actually was when it hit showrooms in 2001. Plenty of cars share their underpinnings with something far more humble - the Audi TT is a SEAT Altea, and the Saab 9-3 is a Vauxhall Vectra to give but two examples - but something about a Jag actually being a Mondeo, that consummate rep-mobile, struck an uncomfortable nerve with the car buying public.

Jaguar was merely trundling along in the late 1990s, with Ford seemingly not clear about what it should do with the luxury brand it had acquired in 1989. Being a huge multinational carmaker, though, it did have the nous to realise it had a half decent brand image on its books. And it also realised that people liked to buy cars called 'compact executives'...

'Aha,' Ford thought, 'we shall build a small Jaguar'. Unfortunately, the car it unveiled in 2001 was a retro pastiche too far. It was four-wheel or front-wheel drive in a rear-drive segment, old-fashioned and cramped. It took two years to get a diesel out and three for an estate, and by the time they did come the X-Type was already dead on its feet because few people wanted the tarted-up Mondeo when the casual one was just as good, but much cheaper. Poor sales were a given, and the X-Type clambers on, facelifted to the hilt and surreptitiously concealed behind rows of XFs in Jaguar showrooms.

 

Despite its immortality as Doc Brown's time machine, in reality the DeLorean was a disgrace to gull-wing doored cars everywhere and was mired in controversy until the day its Northern Irish factory was ordered to close its doors by the British Government in 1982.

John DeLorean was something of an executive maverick during his time working through the ranks at General Motors in the '60s and '70s, but he still earned a reputation for turning out profitable cars. So when he set up the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) and took tax money from the British Government to build a car factory, most thought the resulting DMC-12 would be something to behold. All the ingredients were there: gull-wing doors, a Giugiaro designed body and a chassis developed by DeLorean's mate Colin Chapman, Lotus's eminent founder.

However, just 9,000 cars and a videotape showing DeLorean accepting drug trafficking money later, and it was game over. DeLorean successfully defended the charges against him and avoided prison, arguing he was stung by an entrapment operation, but the $20M of Government money that was channelled into a Swiss bank account led to the imprisonment of Lotus accountant Fred Bushell. The judge's assertion that Chapman would have gone down for at least ten years too, had he not died of a heart attack earlier, tends not to get talked about much around Hethel these days either. The car sucked, by the way, despite its flux capacitor.