This is a weird one, so bear with me. It probably deals with sociocultural concepts of “in style” and “current.” Anyway -
When I see a '96 car, like a Jetta or Grand Am, I’m horrified at how outdated, uncool, unlikeable, and crappy it looks. It’s not so much “that doesn’t look current” as it’s “i can’t imagine anyone ever looking at that brand new on a lot in '96 and thinking ‘this looks cool.’”
Why/what is this phenomenon? Does this mean that current '04 models of cars will look woefully shitty, uncool, horribly designed, and aesthetically offensive in six or seven years?
Is this the same effect as when I see pictures of women from the 1980s and think “how did anyone ever look in the mirror, see big, frosted hair and shoulder pads, and think it looked good?”
Sorry, this came out at least 14x less coherent than it sounded in my head.
I know exactly what you mean, but I can’t really offer any explanations. It doesn’t work for all cars though - until very recently my parents were still driving a 1990 Ford Sierra, and to my eye the shape didn’t look especially out-of-date.
To be honest, 1996 is quite recent for this phenomenon, IMO. Certainly, a lot of cars from the late 80s and early 90s look incredibly slab-like. I think that’s part of it - the general change of styling from slabby sides to curves, which I guess is partly attributable to better manufacturing techniques as well as changing fashion.
FWIW, I just bought a brand new car last month ( a Mazda RX-8, certainly gets the r_k seal of approval ) and can’t imagine it looking crappy and out of date in a few years’ time. But young whipper snappers in 10 years time might be looking at it and laughing. Who knows.
Truthfully, I find most of the “outdated” cars to be much better looking than the new cars out there now. I look at cars on the road with me and wonder how anyone could stand driving such ugly cars. The Aztek is the worst, but there are quite a few coming up behind. Of course the RX-8 is an exception… I love how it looks.
I know PRECISELY what you mean here, and I’m inclined to agree with r_k.
Perhaps it’s also due to all the technological advancements in cars in the nineties and early noughts that cars seem to have changed more in the past eight years than they have between most other similar spans of time.
When the rounded style in cars first came out, I remember thinking look really bad, now my opinion is completely opposite. In fact, one of my friends in my freshman year was in Industrial Design and was telling me his professor was one of the forces behind the design shift. I told him something along the lines that his professor was a fool. :o
I notice the same thing, but I’m older, so I think '96 cars still look pretty current. Cars from the early 80s, when I was getting out of college, now give me that same impression - how could anyone ever have thought that looked good?
Yesterday I saw a Ford Pinto driving down the road, and I thought “my god, what an ugly piece of crap. Were they that ugly when I was in high school and they were new?”
I am presently contemplating the company’s mid-90’s, thoroughly worn-out Pontiac Grand Prix sedan, which is beginning to looka bit like one of the car from the Road Warrior. Based on this, things that may make a contribution to the effect mentioned by the OP include:
Design – as previously mentioned, there has been a gradual movement away from angular body shapes with a lot of fussy detailing (Pontiac’s absurdly overdone cladding comes to mind) to more rounded, fluid shapes with cleaner detailing, Likewise, there apparently has been a relaxation of bumper impact standards from the 70s-era “5 MPH with no damage” criteria, which severely limited front and rear design options.
As a side note, recent Cadillac designs (and some of Chris Bangle’s designs for BMW) seem to be going for a deliberately awkward arrangement of design elements in an effort to make the shapes ‘memorable’, whether or not anyone finds them attractive. I suspect they are going to look dated rather quickly.
Materials – from sometime in the '70s forward, cars have been made with greater and greater amounts of plastics, some of which were less durable and showed effects of aging much more than materials previously used. Worst seem to be GM models from the '80s, which featured numerous exterior plastic bits that perished mercilessly, and miserably shoddy paint jobs that started peeling off in creat chunks after a few years. This trend seems to have been reversed somewhat in recent years.
I’ll give my opinions, since I can’t answer with facts.
Car companies need to sell cars. They can appeal to the consumers’ sense of style (or lack thereof), or they can make the car more efficient, or they can offer more room, etc. There were big cars when I was a kid. Emphasis was on space. (I remember seeing a commercial that featured the capaciousness of the trunk.) In the late-'70s, cars had to be smaller. Styling took a back seat (heh) to economy. Eventually, styling began to catch up.
It seems that in the U.S. today things are “faster” than they used to be. Mainstream movies seem to rely on “MTV-style quick edits”. We tend to like the “latest and greatest”. Phrases like “That’s so five minutes ago!” emphasise how style-conscious we are. So styles change more rapidly than they used to, and “older” styles seem ugly to our short attention spans.
But this isn’t a new thing. BMC (and later, British Leyland) made the MGB for 18 years with virtually no changes to the body. Porsche’s 911 series is recognizable after 40 years of production. Still, British Leyland (which comes immediately to mind) came out with the TR-7 in the late-1970s. “The Wedge”. “The Shape of Things to Come”. It was quite a departure from the TR-6. Someone at the time predicted the TR-7 would be out of style within six months. Now the TR-7 is often called “The Car that Sunk British Leyland”.
In any case, the MGB and the 911 retained their styling because they started out as good designs. They were “right” from the start. They’re classics. New cars are designed to be attractive now! Today! Who cares if their styling becomes dated tomorrow, as long as they get sold today?
The concept of frequent style changes was invented in the early 1950’s by the auto industry as a way of sparking new sales. It was a master stroke. They trained us to want the latest model, and so we trade in a perfectly good car for a new one. We ache for the newest thing, and we disdain the out-of-date used old thing, because we are trained to do so.
As a retired auto worker, I say Og Bless Advertising.
I always thought 1970s-era American cars acqured a dated look in the shortest amount of time after they were manufactured. For some reason, to me cars from the late 1960s seemed more modern, and maybe a bit more timeless, in their appeal.
Some brands seem to age well. Most models from Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, and Honda (after 1984 or 1985) seem to have a timeless appeal about them. Sure, a 1992 Passat looks like it came from a previous generation of design, but it doesn’t seem dated in an embarassing way. I see late '70s-era BMWs on the road occasionally, and they don’t seem as laughably dated as an … oh, a Plymouth Volare or “box Chevy, yo” from the same era.
Thinking about it some more, what El_Kabong said about bumpers rings true. One of the distinguishing features of “old and crappy” cars is the non-matching bumpers - usually in black plastic that fades horribly in the sun - that appear “bolted on”, rather than actually being part of the body.
Nowadays, we are used to body-coloured bumpers, which look great… until you ding them parking, of course, :eek: when they are a PITA to get fixed up, unlike the plastic ones that wouldn’t show any damage.
I think it’s fair to say that the Taurus changed everything. It’s current incarnation is about to be replaced with a Volvo design and a Mazda design (yeah, two cars to replace one – it’s about time, Ford). Such us progress.
Some cars are timeless. Some, looking at thier original showroom photos, look horrible.
My car looked old at one year old when I bought it. But it’s a sleeper.
Chalaboy, welcome to the Straight Dope. We ask that old threads in General Questions only be revived to provide new factual information. Since this does not, and this thread is more than 11 years old, I am closing it.
) and can’t imagine it looking crappy and out of date in a few years’ time. But young whipper snappers in 10 years time might be looking at it and laughing. Who knows.
