“I ALWAYS wanted to own a dream car,” said Andy Saunders, 44, who has a flair for customizing cars. “But others had already bought all the dream cars.”

So Mr. Saunders settled, instead, for a nightmare.

“I remember one day going through a book about dream cars, and I saw a tiny drawing, a sketch really, or artist’s impression of a car called the Aurora,” Mr. Saunders said in a telephone interview. “My dad commented, ‘Have you ever seen anything so ugly?’ He was right; it was so ugly it was unreal. I said straightaway, ‘I’ve got to own that.’”

Mr. Saunders, who operates an auto importing and customizing business near his home in England, said he enjoyed a challenge. He has worked on cars that include a Lancia and a Cord (www.andysaunderskustoms.com).

He saw the image of the Aurora in 1993, and it took him several years of detective work to find what happened to the car.