I doubt that you have ever seen any of these cars in real life.
The Honda CRV is a Honda Civic with bigger wheels. It 's a compact car with 2 rows of seats, and is not even available with items such as HID headlights that the Ford come standard with. The only drivetrain is the 180 hp 4 cylinder engine from the Civic mated to a 5 speed auto.
The Ford Flex has 3 rows and seats 7 passengers. The $42k Ford Flex would have been the AWD 355hp twin turbo V6. It runs mid 14s at the drag strip. The drivetrain is a state of the art direct injected engine mated to a modern 6 speed transmission. It gets better fuel economy than the comparable Honda Pilot while being about 100hp more powerful.
The Ford is a far superior vehicle to the Honda in every possible metric and given Honda’s history of making junk automatic transmissions, will also be more reliable too. The equivalent Honda Pilot would need to be about $10k cheaper to be even worth anyone’s consideration.
To echo RealityChuck, I never had a problem picking my '92 Saturn out in a parking lot. Not so with my '98, which looked a lot like a bunch of other cars. When I brought my '92 car home the teenage boy next door told me it was a cool looking car, which had never happened to me before. The '98 was a lot more comfortable, but nowhere as nice looking.
I have some DVDs with a bunch of old commercials., including a bunch of car commercials from the era in question, and there is less diversity in design than you would have thought. I remember cars then probably being more alike than they are today - at least big family sedans. I think we have uglier cars on the road today than back then, but the average is higher.
One reason I think cars look a lot alike now is that cars are no longer as fashion driven. Back then a lot of people traded in cars every two years - they’d fall apart in 3. Average time between purchases is a lot higher now, so if you make your customers go elsewhere by producing a risky car that no one wants, you’ll lose them for longer. You can try out interesting niche designs, but mass market cars have to be safe and relatively boring. Plus I’d suspect styling isn’t nearly as important as it used to be. I did not buy my new Prius for its appearance.
It’s a shame that the Aztek was just so ugly - I think the Audi A3 had the same similar shape at the time. In fact, that basic shape has been so successful on other later platforms - the CR-V and RAV4, Traverse, Murano, a few Lexus and Acura models, Caliber, and on and on.
All they had to do was dial back the ugly- they had the shape down.
I just recently interviewed one of the exterior designers for the Audi R8…
He said that one of the factors in the “blandness” of modern cars is that the bodies have way way fewer pieces than they used to, where earlier cars may have been assembled in 200 or 300 hand moulded parts, today’s cars are just a few pieces - which makes it much harder.
Secondly is the reliability factor - where even small issues can translate into massive profitability problems, while people may say they want “personality” if that has any impact at all on cost or useability it goes by the wayside at the cash register, spelling doom for the auto maker.
I get that this plays a part in the way cars are designed – as aerodynamic understanding increases, we continue to update the way we design cars. If the public demanded older-looking cars, we’d make them, and we’d make nips and tucks to make them more aerodynamic than in past years.
In fact, this is exactly what happens: the new Camaro strongly recalls the designs of older muscle cars, but its clearly a modern design. Its about marketing, unless the OP really is asking why we don’t design cars on drafting boards and use T-squares anymore.
