Welcome to the place where logic breaks down, not with a bang but with $500 bottles of brake fluid (Rolls SZ) and the vague smell of an overheated AMEX Centurion. The below cars are not “bad cars” in the normal sense; they’re proof that the right combination of hubris, panic, and corporate disarray can move mountains, or at least a few tons of Connolly leather and steel. This is the Absurdity Index, where deeply strange automotive decisions in the luxury segment finally get their due.
[Control] 0/10: Lexus LS400. Anhedonia as the benchmark for perfection.
A four-wheeled experiment in sensory deprivation, engineered by a nation that built a supercomputer to play Go while the rest of the world was watching Kasparov. Toyota’s magnum opus of restraint: no noise, no vibration, no sharp edges, and, for many, no discernible pulse. This is the car that proved you could smother joy and call it engineering. Here, perfection becomes its own form of punishment: Plato’s cave by way of ISO-9001, where the only sin is smiling at the wheel.
Project F1 (Flagship 1, not Formula): $1 billion, 4,000 engineers, and not a single one with a sense of humor. Critics likened its precision to a Rolex, but this was the Oysterquartz: you may appreciate it, but you’ll never really love it. Liquid-filled engine mounts meant that at 145 mph on the dyno, the stacked crystal champagne glasses stayed put. Enough NVH isolation to make a sensory deprivation tank feel busy. Pilots seethed; the electro-luminescent gauges made a Learjet cockpit look outdated.
When 8,000 cars needed a recall, Lexus dispatched a phalanx of white-gloved techs to collect and return each one, setting the customer service bar so high that Munich and Stuttgart are still playing catch up.
2/10: Mazda 929 (second generation). Luxury witness protection.
When is the last time you saw one of these? Odds are Bill Clinton was still in office. The last 929 was dignified but so understated that it’s only memorable in hindsight, its super-wide C-pillar and gentle curves almost daring you to care. The perfect car for someone whose answer to “what do you drive” is “a car.” Why is it on this list? Mazda brought this actually weird-in-a-good-way large sedan to the U.S. with no substance to back it up, and priced it within a stone’s throw of Lexus—a mystery only the early ’90s could produce.
In Japan, your 929 (over there, the Sentia) could have four-wheel steering and a solar-powered vented roof—features that could have impressed would-be Acura Legend (MSRP $28,550) or even BMW 525i ($39,000) buyers. But Americans got none of that—just a sedan that looked larger than it was, dressed up in space-age cues, with no real party tricks under the skin and a loaded price in the mid-$30s, close enough to a Lexus LS400 ($39,500) to make you wonder if you were missing something.
Mazda built a spaceship for the Japanese market and brought it here as a movie prop: all the set dressing, none of the special effects. The 929 was outclassed by the Legend, overshadowed by Lexus, and too expensive. It was left to fade away holding up only anonymity as its final subversive luxury.