A lot of people think this is the ugliest car Volvo has ever built – the 262 C. This was the fancy schmancy special edition exclusive extra expensive coupe version of the boxy 240 series. So what do you do when you want to make a coupe and you can’t afford to design a new body? Get the angle grinders out and chop the roof. This car was not pretty to begin with, but with a shrunken head? A bright red example was Volvo CEO at the time Pehr G. Gyllenhammar’s personal car for a time. We suppose all Volvo directors got one, how could they get rid of them otherwise?

We’re grateful to Carl Johan Rehbinder for collecting the information and pictures of some of the above butt ugly cars. His own site has lots more. We just thought these were the pick of the litter.

When Volvo first tried to expand into Europe, they wanted to get their hands on some production capacity inside the then fledgling European Common Market. The answer was to buy a Dutch car manufacturer called DAF (van Doorns Automobil Fabrieken). Among the piles of trash Volvo had to clean up in the factory was DAF’s plans for their next offering to the car hungry public. It became the Volvo 343. It got a Gremlin-like exterior and inherited DAF’s Variomatic transmission, some sort of rubber band thingy that allowed the car to go as fast backwards as it went forwards. The shift was really simple with only three positions – forward, neutral, and reverse – which made it rather popular with people who couldn’t afford an electrically powered wheel chair.