Vector W8
Why 3.0: DougScore 57 — a Weekend score of 41 against a Daily score of 16, and that gap says everything before you even look at the transmission. 625 turbocharged horsepower, claimed, routed through a 3-speed automatic borrowed from a front-wheel-drive Oldsmobile.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €414k (1990) → €239k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
The long version
Only around nineteen W8s were built before Vector's chaotic ownership fights ended the run in 1993, which makes surviving cars closer to museum artifacts than used exotics — most live in private and institutional collections, wheeled out for the occasional show rather than driven with any regularity. The twin-turbo V8's claimed 625 horsepower was genuinely radical for 1990, faster on paper than most contemporary Italian exotics, but the automatic transmission underneath it was a heavily modified GM three-speed sourced from a front-wheel-drive Toronado, and period reviewers found the whole car nose-heavy and unnerving at speed. Values collapsed after the company's collapse and stayed low for a decade before collectors rediscovered it as the most American answer to the 1980s wedge-supercar era anyone actually built. It wears Garage Queen honestly — there is functionally no daily-use population left to argue otherwise.