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16 Poor Jeremy
No, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you – that really is Jeremy Clarkson riding one of the weirdest little cars ever created by man. According to TopGear Wiki, this thing is known as the P45, and it was actually built by Jeremy Clarkson who was on a mission to build a car that was smaller than the Peel P50. Clarkson even drove the P45 from Top Gear studios to Longer where a stop to the Dragon’s Den resulted in unanimous agreement that the P45 was indeed crap. Well, it wasn’t only crap, it was downright ugly too. Apparently, it offers up a very uncomfortable ride and may cause head injuries because of a lack of proper head restraints. On the plus side, it was classified as a hybrid vehicle, so it had that going for it.
15 The Parasite
We’re not being mean when we call this ugly little plane “the Parasite.” According to Boeing, it’s actually called an XF-85 Goblin and was built as a short-range parasite that would ride inside the belly of bomber planes. Its whole purpose was to launch if the host ship came under fire to defend it.
Records at Boeing claim that it was actually easy to fly and could even recover from spins well, but the redocking procedure proved troublesome and the two prototypes that were made never led to any production models.
While it may be one of the ugliest planes known to man and was only built in two examples, its purpose would have been well served had the docking procedure not been a problem. The whole program was canceled prior to 1950, which doesn’t really matter because new technology emerged that would have rendered the Goblin obsolete anyway.
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