Henry David Floyd’s Favorite Cars

Road Cars

Production cars you can buy and drive home.
1934 Tatra 77 View photo A unique streamlined family cruiser far ahead of its time. A top speed of 90mph with a 60hp air-cooled engine was unheard-of, and the slick body looked 20 years ahead of its time.
1935 Mercedes-Benz 150H Sport Roadster View photo Way ahead of its time, an extremely unique little roadster with a unique boattail design and the engine behind the driver long before it was cool.
1954 Lancia Aurelia B24 View photo A simple, handsome Italian roadster full of Italian charms and quirks, a removable hardtop, and the world's first V6.
1967 Volkswagen Westfalia Camper View photo The last year of the beautiful first-generation Microbus camper, beautifully decked out for off-the-grid living.
1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RS 2.7 View photo The quintessential 911, distilled down to its most lightweight, simple and fundamental form.
1992 Porsche 911 Carrera RS Touring View photo No car has ever aged as gracefully as the eternal 911, with a slow and restrained evolution over the decades that resulted in beautifully simplicity even into the wild teal-and-pink 90s.
2002 Spyker C8 Double 12 View photo A quirky, Dutch-built, airplane-inspired spin on the traditional supercar, designed by the company that built the Dutch King's horse-drawn carriage. The Double 12 variant features an extended tail and exposed rivets on the body.
2019 Ferrari Monza SP2 View photo Blissfully free of wings, louvers, or gadgets, Ferrari's most beautiful car in years pays homage to the simpler front-engined racing cars of the 1950s with elegant simplicity.
2023 Pagani Huayra Codalunga View photo A huge departure from the rather busy-looking Huayra it’s based on, the Codalunga simplifies the design down to its most organic shapes and adds a feature that’s always been a favorite of mine—a sweeping “longtail” rear end.
2024 Aptera View photo The future of the automobile is alive in this alien-looking, ultra-quick, ultra-efficient, three-wheeled electric streamliner.
1962 Panhard PL 17 An obscure little lightweight French car with polished aluminum eyebrows, an extremely efficient two-cylinder engine, and a surprisingly spacious six-person cabin. Not fast, but lots of fun.
2006 Ferrari 612 Scaglietti At the risk of looking bland next to Ferrari's other offerings, the 612 was the rare subtle, demure Ferrari that could carry five people in comfort.
2003 Ferrari Enzo Every car nerd had their one true bedroom-wall poster car. This was mine.
1966 Porsche 906 The last-ever Le Mans racer to also be road-legal sported an odd, low-nosed function-over-form design that still ended up being quite a looker.
1973 Lamborghini Miura SV A swoopy bat from hell that ushered in modern supercar design.
1957 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Roadster Perhaps it's sacrilege to prefer the roadster over its famous "Gullwing" coupe variant, but its smooth flowing lines, elongated headlights, and famously off-kilter straight-six engine make this blazingly fast convertible the one for me.
1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Speciale One of the most beautiful cars ever made, a tiny little flying saucer with not much power but endless personality and charm.
1948 Tucker 48 In another universe, this could have been the blueprint for the sedan of the 50s. Looking for all the world like a traditional 1950s American sedan but hiding a rear-mounted boxer engine and countless technological advances, the design featured a unique tapered hood with its third headlight evoking the "boat-tail" look of classic speedsters.
1937 Cord 812 The Cord significantly modernized the automobile of the 1930s, marking the introduction of front-wheel-drive, independent front suspension, and a smoother, more modern body with no running boards and the distinctive "coffin hood".
2024 Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale Easily one of the best-looking cars in recent memory, Alfa’s new 33 absolutely nails the burgeoning trend of reimagining retro designs for the modern age. This perfect homage to the equally beautiful 1968 33 Stradale is accentuated by details like the 3D machined metal shield in the grille, the rear wheel well vents incorporated into the striking taillight design, and a rare choice between a roaring V8 or full electric power.
2022 Morgan Super 3 This retro-modern three-wheeled motorcycle-car might just be the most fun you can legally have on the road.
2023 Koenigsegg CC850 A celebration of the CC8 that came twenty years before it, this Swedish minimalist approach to supercar design is beautifully simple and crisp in its design language. But its real party piece is the gearbox, which is the world’s first to offer a seamless transition from genuine mechanical manual shifting to automatic with a simple flick of the shifter, with different gear ratios available in different driving modes.
2006 Yes Roadster 3.2
2000 TVR Tuscan
2022 Honda S660

Race cars

Track-only racing machines
1970 Porsche 917 LH View photo The legendary “hippie car” with its swoopy blue and green paint job secured second place overall in the harrowing 24 Hours of Le Mans 1970—beaten only by a different version of the 917. It featured a gorgeous “long tail” design, a monstrous flat-12 engine producing a then-unheard-of 630 hp, and fun artistic paint job you just can’t find amongst today’s sponsor-crammed racers.
1967 Ferrari 330 P4 View photo While it never secured an outright win due to the Ford GT40’s unexpected dominance, it was still one of the most successful and beautiful Le Mans cars of all time.
1961 Ferrari 156 “Sharknose” View photo The shift to rear-mounted engines was a quantum leap forward in Formula 1, and Ferrari’s first car to do so looked like a missile on wheels—and went like one too. The exposed engine headers, long, low-mounted exhaust pipes, and unusual “shark nose” make this first modern Ferrari F1 car particularly unique.
1968 Alfa Romeo Tipo 33/2 Coda Lunga View photo This wild-looking Le Mans racer helped a struggling Alfa Romeo finally achieve victory by competing in an unusual class, using a tiny but powerful 2-liter V8. The massive side air intakes are particularly unique, and would still be influential on cars decades later such as the Ferrari Enzo.
1936 Auto Union Type C View photo Audi’s outrageous 16-cylinder engine stuffed behind the driver into a no-frills, unpainted steel body could still beat many sports cars today.
1936 Bugatti Type 57G “Tank” View photo Based on the already-successful Type 57 road car, but dressed in a sleek pill-shaped body years ahead of its time in an era when the study of aerodynamics was at its most nascent, the 57G set several records that wouldn’t be broken for over 20 years. It also boasts the unique claim of winning both a Formula 1 race and the coveted 24 Hours of Le Mans.
1976 Tyrell P34 View photo Six-wheeled F1 car. That's all there is to say.
1956 Ferrari 860 Monza View photo The classically beautiful 860 was the climax of Ferrari's curious quest to dominate circuit racing with supersized four-cylinder engines.
1937 Peugeot 402 Darl’Mat Special View photo An already-success road car, the standard 302/402, raised to the next level of art deco beauty by coachbuilder Darl'Mat. Not only one of the most beautiful roadgoing cars of all time, but also made a respectable showing at that year's 24 Hours of Le Mans.
1964 Panhard LM64 View photo This impossibly low-slung, tiny-engined little pod of a race car is just one more example of the French doing cars a little differently.

Concept cars

(one-off show cars never sold to the public)
2001 BMW GINA Visionary Concept With a body made entirely out of a stretchy silicone fabric drawn tight over a metal frame with movable parts, this car's skin could literally shapeshift. It was also even better-looking than the Z4 it inspired.
1935 Auto Union Type 52 “Schnellsportwagen” Auto Union’s insane V16-powered grand prix car (see above) but with three-abreast seating and a gorgeous streamlined body for the road. It was designed, fully engineered, and being considered for production in 1935, until it was deemed too expensive and scrapped... until a team of heroes at Audi decided to finally build the thing in 2023 and race it at Goodwood.
1938 Phantom Corsair Built by the heir to the Heinz fortune, the Phantom is easily the most ahead-of-its-time design in automotive history. Looking like it could be a 1970s Batmobile, this 1938 oddity seated four across.
1947 Buick Norman Timbs Special A one-off car built by a Buick designer exclusively for himself, he flipped an existing chassis around backwards to create a rear-engined streamliner and gave it gorgeous, exaggerated curves.
2012 Peugeot Onyx Peugeot harnessed the natural beauty of solid, unvarnished copper by giving the Onyx supercar concept copper body panels that aged and oxidized naturally, and are still doing so to this day in the Peugeot museum. Together with a diesel hybrid drivetrain and a recycled newspaper interior, it truly upheld the French's reputation for quirkiness.
2000 Audi Rosemeyer Its development technically led to the Bugatti Veyron, but Audi's show car had a way cooler backstory: it was an homage to the Auto Union racers of the 1930s, its unadorned industrial aesthetic complete with unpainted sheetmetal and exposed rivets.
1993 Isdera Commendatore 112i A rather odd mashup of Porsche and Mercedes parts, as well as some original engineering, resulted in this long, streamlined, V12-powered curiosity. With only one completed prototype, the car journalists all got to enjoy it—but not the public.
1999 Honda Spocket concept Supercar plus truck bed. Enough said.
2013 Porsche 904 Living Legend This beautiful, flowing homage to the Porsche 904 of the 1960s actually hides under its skin a platform originally designed by Volkswagen for maximum fuel efficiency.
2008 Venturi Volage A slick, futuristic space pod of a car from a company that was way ahead of its time on EV technology.
2018 Peugeot Instinct concept An insanely cool-looking shooting-brake-short-wagon-thing with the slicey headlights, sick blue paint, and toasty taillights.
2006 Alfa Romeo Diva A compact little prototype which eventually evolved into the 4C, but in concept form had much cooler styling and more explicit references to Alfa's 1968 Stradale.
2023 Fisker Ronin If Fisker had lived on, they could have produced this great-looking electric roadster.
2009 VW BlueSport A Golf platform flipped around backwards to create a rear-engined roadster. It’s so simple it’s brilliant, and it’s a crime they didn’t make it.
2008 Mindset E-Motion This one’s a little weird.
2002 GM HyWire It’s not what you’d call pretty, but this modular body dropped on an ahead-of-its-time “skateboard”-style EV chassis was very clever... and it had a glass “grille” so you could see what’s in front of your feet. I mean come on.

Ugliest cars

Production and concept cars are all fair game.
1998 Buick Signia concept View photo
1994 Alfa Romeo Castagna Vittoria concept View photo
1970 Marcos Mantis View photo
1985 Consulier GTP View photo
1966 Lotus Europa View photo I will never understand the love for this car. The front half looks all right (although even that, with its sunken headlights and narrow mouth, looks strangely fishlike). But that front end transitions very abruptly into a rear half that resembles a pickup with its bed filled in with cement. It's not aerodynamic, it offers no rear visibility, and it's certainly not pretty—it's an ungainly cinderblock on wheels.
2009 Mercedes-Benz F-Cell Roadster concept View photo An idea that MAYBE looked good on paper, but looks absolutely fugly in real life. Spindly wire wheels o
2023 BMW 760i View photo Every single aspect of this car's front end is capital-F Fugly. This generation sees the unfathomably huge grills develop alien-like teeth and grow so massive they appear to have unrecognizably deformed the rest of the front end. They even offer it with a horrible two-tone color scheme that was maybe supposed to lessen the visual weight of the massive, ugly brick of a front end, but only serves to make it look even more deformed.
2023 BMW XM Label Red View photo Imagine designing the most obnoxious-looking brute of a vehicle ever, then deciding to make a version with the massive ugly flared nostril grilles outlined in red. The literal definition of lipstick on a pig.
2021 BMW iX View photo It's not just the big ugly beaver-tooth grille and squinty pig eyes that make this car look so wrong. It's also the overall proportions, with a tall, narrow, overly long front-end blending into a drab, characterless body with a rear end that doesn't seem to match it.
2024 Rolls-Royce Cullinan View photo It was already distasteful when it was introduced. Then halfway through production they smacked the front end with the ugly stick and gave it droopy headlights and a kill-me-now grimace.
2008 Scion Hako concept Bolt-upright windshields seemed to look all right on plenty of older cars, but on this ungainly brick it looks more like someone with a massive lump on their forehead where they've been hit by a sledgehammer. The squinty eyes and awkwardly-placed rectangle grille doesn't help.
2016 Toyota Prius With surprisingly good-looking Prii coming both before and after this one, this was a particularly unfortunate generation. Slashes and creases where they shouldn't be, a weirdly pinched grille that some described as looking like a pencil mustache, and a rear end apparently designed to look as tall and unwieldy as possible.
2000 Buick Rendezvous
2011 Wiesmann Spyder concept In stark contrast to the lovely MF5 and Thunderball, the Spyder concept chopped down the nose and tail to flat walls, with what can only be described as a gaping skeleton mouth.