What It's Like To Drive The Worst Car Ever Built?

“Worst car ever built,” is a phrase that gets flung around with the careless impunity of a toddler with a bag of superballs. Whatever you’ve once called the “worst car” is wrong. A Yugo may as well be a Maybach compared to the Hoffmann, the actual worst car ever built. I know because I drove it.

I was able to drive the astounding Hoffmann thanks to our friends at the Lane Motor Museum, whom I asked specifically to find me their worst cars. When they polled everyone and came up with a list, only one car received a unanimous vote: the 1951 Hoffmann.

Of course, I was wildly interested. It helps that the car looks like something that’s very appealing to me at first glance — strange, streamlined, sort of like a zeppelin and a colossal robotic tortoise made angry love. But the more I looked, the stranger things got: odd, asymmetrical curves and details, oddly and seemingly willfully mis-aligned parts and trim, a general shape seemingly designed with either a gleeful disregard or outright contempt for both the human form and the laws of physics.

The Hoffmann was made in Germany right after the war by one M. Hoffmann, a man no one seems to know much about. I’m not entirely sold on the idea he was a human at all, actually. Whatever he was, he had real skill — the car is actually beautifully built, with lots of difficult metalwork and fabrication evident throughout.

Read more: http://jalopnik.com/what-its-like-to-drive-the-worst-car-ever-built-1735448480