The Most Controversial Cars of the 2000s

Most controversial cars share one thing: they make you feel something. Love, hate, confusion. Anything but indifference. Car and Driver just rounded up the worst offenders from the 2000s, and the list is a wild ride through automotive history. Some of these cars deserved the scorn. Others got a raw deal. Let us cut through the noise and look at what actually happened.

When Ferrari Goes Electric

Ferrari's Luce dropped and the internet lost its collective mind. The brand's first EV was always going to ruffle feathers. But the reaction went beyond anything Maranello expected.

Here is the deal. The problem is not really the electric powertrain. It is the shape. A five-seat hatchback wearing a Ferrari badge feels wrong to people. Deeply wrong.

A Five-Seat Hatchback With a Prancing Horse

Former Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo did not hold back. His take on the Luce was brutal.

"[It] risk[s] the destruction of a legend."

That stings. And it explains the backlash better than any auto critic could. Ferrari's faithful wanted a two-seat supercar as the first EV. They got a family hauler. The brand's enormous fan base, far larger than its actual customer pool, felt betrayed.

But here is the catch. The people actually complaining were never going to buy one anyway. Ferrari knows this. The question is whether the real buyers show up.

The German Design Problem

Six days before the Luce reveal, Mercedes-AMG dropped the GT 4-Door. The timing was almost merciful. Ferrari's controversy sucked up all the oxygen.

The AMG GT 4-Door is not a bad shape overall. The profile borrows heavily from the Porsche Taycan and Audi e-tron GT. Proportions are decent. No awkward thick-waisted EV look.

So what went wrong? The face. Those three-pointed-star headlights connected by a pedestrian light bar drew immediate fire.

The Bangle Butt Era

BMW walked into this same buzzsaw back in 2001. The E65 7-series arrived and shocked everyone. Design chief Chris Bangle took the heat. The rear end earned the nickname "Bangle butt," though Adrian von Hooydonk actually penned the early sketches.

Previous BMWs looked lean and athletic. The E65 looked heavy. An eyebrow over the round headlights confused people. Inside, a dainty column shifter and the first iDrive controller frustrated drivers. iDrive was a good idea executed poorly.

The car sold well anyway. BMW then doubled down with the similarly styled 6-series and the flame-surfaced Z4. More consternation followed. More sales followed too.

Electric Dreams Turn Sour

Dodge built its modern brand on V-8 thunder. Old-school. Loud. Unapologetic. Then someone decided the Charger should go electric.

It's a flop. You could see the disaster coming from a mile away because the 2024 Charger Daytona EV was a flop straight out of the gate, but its styling actually nailed the 1968-70 Charger look, up to 670 horsepower routes to the rear wheels, and a synthesized soundtrack tries to recreate the glory days.

None of it mattered. Dodge fans rejected the battery-electric drivetrain completely. Real talk: thinking they would embrace clean, green power was next-level self-delusion.

It's a different controversy. Unveiled in 2020 with promises to disrupt the full-size pickup market, it suffered repeated delays. But the high-school shop-class looks are one thing; the truck became an avatar for Elon Musk himself, and his role with DOGE and federal government turned it into a political statement on wheels.

Performance is genuinely impressive. Sales to actual customers remain slow. The Cybertruck attracts public derision in a way no other Tesla model does.

The Jaguar Type 00 is only a concept, but the vitriol still earned it a spot among these most controversial cars. Brutalist styling leans entirely on extreme proportions. The bluff front end stares blankly. No rear glass feels like a gimmick. Metallic bright blue and pink colors did not help. Jaguar's plan to go all-EV and move dramatically upmarket drew genuine criticism.

Sometimes the Crowd Gets It Wrong

2002 Porsche Cayenne. Heavy. High-riding. A Volkswagen-derived VR6 base engine. A diesel option. This was the antithesis of everything Porsche stood for. Purists howled.

But it's missing something. The Cayenne had strong straight-line performance and surprisingly capable handling, the buying public's SUV mania did the rest, it's been Porsche's bestseller for decades, its success emboldened other sports car brands to take the SUV plunge.

The Crossover Before Its Time

Pontiac Aztek. The year is 2000. The Detroit auto show press conference was thoroughly cringe. The car itself looked like a punchline.

SUVs were hot, but automakers realized most buyers never went off-road. Body-on-frame construction brought weight and fuel-economy penalties. GM's solution was brilliant on paper: a high-riding SUV on a passenger-car platform. The modern crossover formula. Look at any parking lot today. The idea was right.

But GM refused to modify the minivan platform's hard points. The result was dorky proportions. Slab sides. Disjointed side-window treatment. Copious plastic cladding. A face only a mother could love. The related Buick Rendezvous, just slightly less ugly, looked almost normal by comparison.

The Aztek nailed the vehicle type but whiffed completely on execution. Decades later, it remains a punchline that still lands.

What This Means for You

Here is the real takeaway. The most controversial cars of the 2000s fall into clear patterns.

• Wrong vehicle type for the badge. The Luce should have been a supercar. The Cayenne should not have been a Porsche. Yet one is currently hated and the other became a legend.
• Styling that breaks too hard from tradition. The E65 7-series and the AMG GT 4-Door prove that faces matter enormously.
• Electric powertrains in the wrong garage. Dodge and Tesla both learned that some buyers will never plug in, no matter how good the numbers look.
• Good ideas buried under bad design. The Aztek pioneered crossovers but nobody could see past the plastic cladding.

If you are wondering whether any of these cars deserve redemption, history offers a clue. The Cayenne proved everyone wrong. The Bangle-era BMWs found their audience.

Quick question: which of these most controversial cars do you think will age well? The Luce might surprise us. Or it might not. The market decides. It always does.