Bizarre Cars, by Keith Ray – review

My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many tokens, and with the casuistry of both Calvinist and Jesuit, it has been possible for the author of this pretty little Christmas-stocking book to include as bizarre any vehicle he chooses, including motorcycles and the micro-cars that made motoring possible after the defeat of Germany in 1945.

Without these categories, a bus-cum-truck-cum-tractor,variations on the Hummer and the stretched limousine, and too many excursions into the bizarrerie of car names that in other languages have meanings genital and scatalogical, this book would be very thin. Yet even the vehicles that are indisputably cars are padded with examples that hardly count as odd, let alone half-barbaric.The Morris Marina and Austin Allegro were bad and boring rather than bizarre, the Talbot Tagor was too unremarkable to usurp the equivalent Peugeot (the beautifully bizarre Peugeot 601 of 1935 is nowhere mentioned), and the 3-litre version of Austin’s land-crab 1800 was a surprisingly serene, quiet and comfortable competitor for the early Ford Granada and Mrs Thatcher’s favoured Rover.