Epic fail: Mercedes Vaneo

Some cars achieve Epic Fail status thanks to their shoddy build quality, lacklustre performance, or the botched business plan that underpinned their creation. The Vaneo, however, flopped for none of these reasons. It achieved its fail status on account of oh God will you just look at it.

Top Gear takes no pride in being so very shallow in its judgement. Beauty, after all, is only skin deep. You should never judge a book by its cover. On the other hand, oh God will you just look at it.

Introduced in 2002 and based on the bones of the quietly revolutionary (but famously tippy) first gen A-Class, the Vaneo apparently sought to answer the eternal car buying question of, ‘What if large family, but also top hat enthusiasts?'

Borrowing its footprint-to-height ratio from a fridge freezer, the Vaneo offered seating for up to seven adults, so long as all those adults a) had very long necks and torsos, b) had very tiny legs, and c) had no sense of shame. So voluminous was the headroom that Merc could have installed a second deck of seats atop the ground floor accommodation.

Road tests of the day praised the Vaneo’s comfortable ride and flexible interior. What they failed to mention was its bile inducing, house of mirrors appearance, which gave the uncanny impression that the Merc design teams responsible for Vaneo’s lower and upper sections had, at best, never met, and at worst were actively working to undermine each other.

Somehow, 2,500 of these slaphead station wagons (OK it’s not technically a station wagon, but why let technicalities stand in the way of a snappy phrase?) found homes in Britain between 2002 and 2005, thus providing definitive proof that people can’t be trusted to make any good decisions about anything, ever.

According to the DVLA’s latest stats, some 350 Vaneos remain loose on British roads today. Be careful out there, people. Exercise extreme ocular vigilance. They trundle among us.