The Most Eccentric Car Collection, Uncut

Myron Vernis’s car collection isn’t built around icons — it’s built around the cars everyone else passed on: a French sports car with a very specific seating arrangement, a proto-SUV wearing a plywood roof, and a convertible repeatedly nominated as the ugliest ever built. This uncut follow-up digs into the cars too strange for the first cut. Watch to see what didn’t make it the first time around.

Some car collections are built to impress at a concours lawn — polished, matched, predictable. This one was built to do the opposite. Myron Vernis has spent years assembling a garage full of cars that don’t fit any obvious category: a French sports car designed with just enough room for a driver and, depending on who’s telling the story, someone other than his wife. A proto-SUV wearing a plywood roof. A convertible widely nominated as the ugliest one ever built. None of these cars would win a beauty contest, and that’s precisely the point. What kind of collector chases the odd, the homely, and the forgotten on purpose — and why does it work?

The Deep Cuts Jalopnik Left Out the First Time

The Jalopnik on /DRIVE crew had already profiled Vernis once before this video, but this cut goes further, moving past the cars that made the first edit and into the ones that were arguably too strange to include. That’s the appeal of an “uncut” follow-up: it’s not the highlight reel, it’s the deep cuts, the cars a producer might normally leave on the floor because they’re harder to explain in thirty seconds. Vernis clearly doesn’t need that thirty-second pitch to justify why a car belongs in his garage.

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A Sports Car Built for a Very Specific Passenger

Take the French sports car built with just enough seats for a driver and a passenger who, per the video’s own framing, wasn’t necessarily the driver’s spouse. That’s not a spec sheet detail you’ll find on a typical import’s window sticker — it’s a design brief that says something about mid-century French engineering priorities, and about a certain kind of buyer the manufacturer had clearly identified and built for. Cars like this rarely survive in numbers, in part because they were built for a narrow purpose and a narrow buyer, which is exactly why a serious oddball collector goes looking for them.

The SUV That Predates the SUV Category

Then there’s the proto-SUV with a plywood roof — a vehicle that predates the modern SUV category by decades, built at a time when “off-road capable people mover” wasn’t yet a segment with its own marketing department. A wood roof on a factory vehicle sounds like a joke until you remember that steel stamping technology and production budgets in earlier eras didn’t always make an all-metal body the obvious choice. It’s a reminder that today’s SUV boom didn’t spring out of nowhere — oddball engineering experiments like this one were laying the groundwork long before anyone called the category by name.

Chasing the Title of Ugliest Convertible Ever Built

And then, unavoidably, the convertible that has been nominated more than once as the ugliest ever built. Beauty is subjective, but automotive design history keeps a running list of cars that missed the mark so specifically that they’ve become famous for it — proportions that don’t resolve, details that clash, a roofline that looks like an afterthought. Vernis owning one isn’t an accident. Collectors who chase conventional beauty compete against thousands of other buyers for the same handful of cars; collectors who chase infamous ugliness get a much shorter waiting list and a much better story to tell.

Why an Oddball Collection Beats a Conventional One

This is where an oddball collection actually beats a conventional one on value, at least in terms of story density. A pristine muscle car or an exotic in factory colors is impressive, but it’s also a story that’s been told a thousand times by a thousand other owners. A plywood-roofed proto-SUV or a car built for a driver’s mistress is a story nobody else at the show can tell, and that scarcity of narrative is worth more to a certain kind of enthusiast than scarcity of production numbers.

The Case for a Second, Uncut Episode

It also explains why Vernis needed a second video to cover his garage properly. A single segment built around only the cars a general audience would immediately recognize misses the entire thesis of a collection like this — that the strange, the flawed, and the purpose-built-for-one-weird-reason cars are just as worth preserving as the icons. The “uncut” framing signals that Jalopnik and /DRIVE understood that the first cut wasn’t the whole story, and that the deleted material was arguably the more interesting half.

Preserving the Cars Nobody Else Wants

What ties a Cadillac collector, a muscle car restorer, and someone like Vernis together isn’t the specific metal in the garage — it’s the refusal to let a car disappear just because it isn’t famous. The plywood-roofed SUV and the widely mocked convertible are exactly the kind of vehicles that get scrapped first when nobody’s watching, because they don’t carry the resale value or reputation that protects a more celebrated classic. Collections like this one function as a kind of automotive preservation project as much as a personal hobby, and that’s a mission every corner of car culture, muscle cars included, ultimately depends on.

A Familiar Instinct, Applied to Stranger Cars

For muscle car enthusiasts specifically, there’s a familiar lesson buried in Vernis’s approach. The same instinct that makes someone track down a numbers-matching 440 Six Pack or an original-paint Hemi car — the refusal to let a piece of automotive history vanish just because it isn’t glamorous by modern standards — is exactly what drives a collector toward a plywood-roofed oddball or a car infamous for its looks. Muscle car culture already understands the value of preserving cars other people wrote off decades ago; Vernis is applying that same philosophy to a completely different, much stranger corner of the hobby.

Worth Preserving Isn’t the Same as Worth Admiring

It’s also a reminder that “worth preserving” and “worth admiring” aren’t the same category. A car doesn’t need to be fast, pretty, or even particularly good to deserve a place in a serious collection — it just needs to represent something that would otherwise be lost. That standard is a lot more demanding than simply buying whatever’s expensive, and it’s why collections like this one tend to age better in reputation than collections built purely around blue-chip metal.

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