Variety is the spice of life. If every carmaker sang from the same song sheet, the world would be a duller place.
Therefore, we should salute those who choose to zig where others zag. Those who swim against the current, who color outside the lines. Companies like Mitsuoka, the small-volume Japanese manufacturer that, for the past three decades, has been taking sensible JDM offerings and rebodying them to resemble old-timey cars in a proudly off-kilter way.
But there’s swimming against the current, and then there’s the distressing monstrosity that is the Galue. It’s good to be unique, but maybe not...this unique?
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A luxury car (or possibly ‘luxury’ car, or possibly ‘luxury’ ‘car’) based on a humble Nissan Altima, the Galue is half melted Rolls-Royce, half first-gen AI image creation nightmare, and all very, very wrong. There may be no universal standard of beauty, but surely there’s nowhere in the world this car looks...good?
To comprehend the thinking behind the Galue, ‘Epic Fail’ braved the Mitsuoka website, where Epic Fail discovered each Mitsuoka is handmade by “45 skilled craftsmen who [...] expertly blend traditional timeless beauty with state of the art technology.” In the case of the Galue, it is tempting to wonder whether these 45 skilled craftsmen have ever actually met each other.
“Galue is a beautiful way to live,” Mitsuoka proclaims, presumably having mistaken the word ‘beautiful’ for the similar word ‘ghastly,’ and ‘way to live’ for the similar phrase ‘crime against aesthetics.’ “Live naturally,” it continues. “We have received the truth of the World. No extra power is required, and the mind lives gently.” Not while beholding the Galue it doesn’t.
Since 1996, Mitsuoka has produced no fewer than four generations of Galue, somehow succeeding in making it uglier with each fresh iteration. How terrifying will the next one be? Can the world’s eyes possibly survive?
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
