The scariest cars for Halloween

Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. No, not a quote from the workshop manual of a TVR, but a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It’s also a reminder that the spooky season is upon us, as we prepare our pumpkins and remove the skeletons from our cupboards. 

With our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks, we’ve blown away the cobwebs to look at some of the scariest cars for Halloween. No tricks, just treats.

‘Electric vehicles are the vehicles of the future,’ read the promotional blurb for the Sinclair C5 in 1985. Accurate, if a little premature, but the C5 wasn’t the ‘intimate, personal transport’ we were craving for. The late, great Sir Clive Sinclair had high hopes for the 20-mile range electric vehicle, but dicing with lorries with your head at the height of a car’s bumper was a frightening prospect. And for some unfathomable reason, he launched it in the depths of winter to boot.

Andrew Frankel isn’t a fan of the Renault Clio V6. In a recent retrospective review, he described it as ‘probably the trickiest new road car I’ve come across’, before describing its approach to corners as ‘grip, grip, grip, grip, gone’. In fairness to Renault, it attempted to fix many of the car’s weaknesses, but the mid-engined Clio V6 isn’t a car to take lightly. Be afraid of its erratic behaviour at the limit.

What could be more menacing than something called the Plymouth Prowler? It sounds like the name of a ne’er-do-well who makes the front page of a regional newspaper for criminal night-time activities. But the biggest crime was Chrysler’s decision to fit a 3.5-litre V6 engine rather than the V8 lump it deserved. Less hot rod and more simmering on a low heat.

In 2009, the Alfa Romeo 166 was named as Britain’s worst depreciating used car, holding on to just 14.4 per cent of its original value after three years. By then, the 166 had been out of production for around two years following a sharp dip in demand. That’s a scary amount of depreciation; sticking your life savings on the 166-1 outsider at Kempton Park would have been more sensible than buying a new 166. Still, it’s a formidable used buy.

Earlier this year, our sister title What Car? named the Audi A8 55 TFSI quattro Vorsprung as the fastest-depreciating car of 2021. Spend £106,305 on a new example and you can expect to lose £77,330 in three years. That’s a retained value of just 27.3 per cent, which means it loses a higher proportion of its value than any other car on sale. A scary thought for new car drivers, but a treat for anyone who fancies a loaded A8 on the cheap.

Catastrophic depreciation isn’t the preserve of Italian exotics and German luxobarges. The Vauxhall Combo Life, which shares a lot in common with the Peugeot Rifter and Citroën Berlingo, is far from a depreciation dream for new car buyers. What Car? figures suggest that the 1.2 Turbo 130 Elite will lose a nightmarish £20,100 after three years. Still, if you squint hard enough, it looks a little like the Mystery Machine.

Dearly departed P4, P5 and P6 owners would have been turning in their graves when MG Rover launched the CityRover in 2003. It was crude, too expensive and already dated by the time it hit MG Rover showrooms. The business case made sense; making a decent profit on a Metro for a new generation would have helped to boost the company’s bottom line. Instead, it came to symbolise the slow and agonising death of this famous old brand. What a nightmare.

In the case of the Mercedes-Benz 600, the overriding sense of foreboding comes not from the car but from the evil dictator likely to be lording it up in the back. A big, powerful and slightly sinister car for big, powerful and very sinister people. If this thing rolled up outside your house, it would have been a good idea to run or hide. The list of former owners includes notable murderers such as Chairman Mao, Idi Amin, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Pablo Escobar and Saddam Hussein.

The Lincoln Futura of 1954 could have been just another concept car from the 1950s. Designed by Lincoln-Mercury’s chief stylist, Bill Schmidt, the Futura was built by Ghia in Turin and featured a Lincoln 6.0-litre V8 under the hood. So far, so standard concept car. Eleven years later, George Barris was given a few weeks to create a car for a new TV show called Batman. The rest is history. Bats are synonymous with Halloween, which is why the Batmobile makes our list.

It’s a decade since the Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet first reared its ugly head at the 2010 Los Angeles International Auto Show. The crossover convertible has been scaring American kids ever since. In fairness to Nissan, it predates the Range Rover Evoque Convertible and VW T-Roc Cabriolet, but Land Rover might have to accept that sales of its droptop SUV were frighteningly low.

‘She was born bad. Plain and simple. Somewhere deep on a darkened assembly line. Christine. A ’58 Plymouth Fury possessed by Hell.’ As we discovered in the 1983 movie directed by Stephen King, hell hath no fury like a Plymouth Fury scorned, or something. King chose a Fury because it was, in his words, a ‘forgotten car’. We haven’t forgotten the first time we watched Christine.

The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, powered by a supercharged 6.2-litre Hemi V8, was the world’s first production car to lift the front wheels at launch. It also set the world record for the longest wheelie from a standing start by a production car at 2.92ft. Banned from the drag strip for being too fast, the Demon is scarily quick. Demon by name, Demon by nature…

Clever, Hennessey, very clever. How does one exorcise one’s demons? By using an exorcist. Demon vs. Exorcist is a movie we’d pay to watch. The 1000bhp Hennessey Exorcist 30th Anniversary was marked out from the ‘standard’ Exorcist by bespoke badging, a unique red and black paint job, plus an individual build number. The 217mph top speed and 2.1sec sprint time to 60mph remained. Scream if you want to go faster.

We would apologise for the blurry photo from our 2007 review, but you’d probably thank us for sparing you the sight of the Mitsuoka Orochi in glorious HD. Built by a company more commonly associated with converting Micras into Mk2 Jag lookalikes, the Orochi boasted its own spaceframe mid-engined chassis. Power was sourced from a 3.3-litre Toyota V6, but we can’t get beyond the ‘challenging’ styling.

If Ray Parker Jr. was in the market for a Rolls-Royce, he’d almost certainly choose this one. Because he ain’t afraid o’ no ghost, etc. In our review of the new Ghost, we said: “Rolls-Royce also deserves credit in its attempt – successful, in our opinion – to tone down the car’s flamboyance while retaining its sense of stature and just the right amount of whimsy. All in all, superb.”

Did you know that the TVR Cerbera is named after Cerburus, the watchdog of the underworld? The entry on the Britannica website makes for grim reading: ‘He was usually said to have three heads; heads of snakes grew from his back, and he had a serpent’s tail. He devoured anyone who tried to escape the kingdom of Hades.’ With a CV like this, the TVR’s reputation for craziness and occasional unreliability seems rather tame.

Designed by the wealthy ketchup heir Henry ‘Rust’ Heinz, the Phantom Corsair of 1938 has a fearsome reputation. Plans to put the Cord 810-based prototype into production were shelved when Heinz was killed in a car accident shortly after it was built. In 1951, it was bought by the game show host Herb Shriner, who also died in a car crash. Some people believe the Corsair is cursed; many think it’s one of the most sinister-looking cars of all time.

At one point, the Reva G-Wiz was the best-selling electric ‘car’ in the world. This is about the only positive thing we can say about the Indian-built G-Wiz, which arrived in the UK with little regard for occupant safety. In 2007, there were calls for the quadricycle to be banned following a disastrous 40mph crash test, while the tragic death of a scientist in 2010 cemented the public’s concern.

Wheels of Terror isn’t the best horror movie of all time; it scores a middling 4.3 on the IMDb website. For proper suspense and genuine terror, you should look no further than Steven Spielberg’s Duel. That said, the Dodge Charger in the 1990 film is properly terrifying, perhaps more so than the aforementioned Christine.

It was known as the ‘widowmaker’ for a reason. A formidable sports car in the right hands, the Porsche 911 Turbo would catch out the unwary and those with more cash than talent. Lifting the throttle mid-corner would result in a catastrophic spin, while the turbo lag meant the full force of its 3.0-litre flat-six could arrive when you didn’t want it. A genuine ‘trick and treat’ car.