Mitsuoka Orochi

Yamata no Orochi is the finest serpent in world mythology and it is not close.

The Kojiki describes it plainly: eight heads and eight tails, eyes like winter cherries, a body spanning eight valleys and eight hills, with cedars and moss growing on its back and its belly perpetually raw and bleeding. It demanded a daughter every year. Susanoo, exiled from heaven, defeated it not by strength but by leaving out eight vats of very strong sake, waiting for each head to drink, and then cutting the sleeping animal apart. In its tail he found a sword, which became one of the three imperial regalia of Japan.

That is the name Mitsuoka chose. Not for a hypercar with a thousand horsepower. For a hand-built, glass-fibre-bodied coupé with a 3.3-litre Toyota V6 in the middle and an automatic gearbox, capable of a perfectly respectable and entirely unremarkable turn of speed.

And this is the argument the Ophidiary wishes to make on its behalf: the Orochi is the most correctly named car in this entire book.

Every other serpent car names itself for the snake’s violence. The Cobra means danger. The Viper means danger. The Orochi means something else — it means the sublime and repulsive at once, an animal that is beautiful and wrong, that people cannot look away from, that has moss growing on it. Mitsuoka did not build a fast car. Mitsuoka built a car that is genuinely difficult to look at, that appears in every list of the world’s ugliest vehicles, that has a front end resembling a wet mouth, and that people photograph obsessively for exactly that reason.

It is unsettling. It is unforgettable. It is a snake with too many heads and moss on its back, and it never once claimed to be pretty. The car does precisely what the myth does: it makes you uncomfortable and then makes you keep looking.

Mitsuoka called the final run the Orochi Final Edition and stopped in 2014. Eight was always the number. It was never going to run forever.