In my opinion, spare a few, the 80s was a pretty poor decade for the design of cars ( and a lot of things in general ). The previous decades produced cars that are still influencing design today.
What made the 80s, and really much of the 90s such a drab period in car design?
I hope i’m not missing something obvious.
I’d call cars of the 70s boxy more than those of the 80s.
Car design goes thru trends, just like clothing design and other industries, usually following hot designers of the period. It can be driven by some outside influence like safety regs, aerodynamics, and such but mostly the designers feed off each other. A lot of 80s cars were influenced by Italian designers, with sharp clean lines defining Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and especially Maseratis of the 70s and 80s. Just about every boxy or wedgy car can be traced back to an Italian design house.
Porsche held the line on curves with the 928 and 911 (which the family wouldn’t let change much anyway) but succumbed a bit with the transition of the 924 to 944.
Great response. Thanks for the input.
I suppose it depends what type of cars you’re talking about, but those eras were awesome, especially the 90s. Though it’s a bit simplistic, I more look towards luxury and performance cars when talking about design, since those signatures and characteristics typically trickle down and influence a given generation. I think there was lots of good design coming out of the late 80s into the 90s, but again, this is based on where you choose to look.
At the luxury end, I think the most easy reference would be Toyota and how they established Lexus with the 1st generation LS. It serves as a prime example of what was happening at the time; if you wanted to be in the market and appeal to buyers, you wanted to look European and so the design borrowed from them. Other commuter cars adopted (or already had), similar shapes over time.
For sports cars, the 90s saw vehicles like the C5 Vette and Dodge Viper, which were gorgeous, IMO. The same could be said for many Japanese cars, like the early 90s NSX, RX-7, Miata, Z, etc. (all of these weren’t as boxy, even in applicable 80s generations). If anything, I’d say many of the cars in the 80s had very sharp angles, with major examples existing in the form of cars like the F50 and Countach. By late 90s, you had very progressive designs emerging, such as the Audi TT…which looked “futuristic” and primed for the 2000s. After that, we started to see undeniably progressive designs like the Murcielago and 350Z.
Fun times.
I think it all comes down to aerodynamics. Car makers never cared about aerodynamics in the 1950s, look at all the unnecessary fins and chrome and hood ornaments, etc. They started caring about this stuff in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until wind tunnel testing and then simulators using computational fluid dynamics that cars started to really improve aerodynamically.
This “How Stuff Works” article says:
Practical considerations (aerodynamics and drag) are one thing, but OTOH rounded shapes can be harder to maximize interior space within. (The last generation of Thunderbird could not get a V8 until Ford completely redesigned the front assembly, putting all the driven junk very low relative to the engine and using a fearsomely complicated serpentine belt to drive them… IIRC, the belt was something like 22 feet long.)
But really? Style. Manufacturers have been increasingly bent to the limits of safety and efficiency, but they will give buyers whatever style they will buy within the limits of those limits. If fins and dagmars became stylish, back they’d come. Ditto for squares and boxes.
In addition to the responses noted above, it’s also easier to manufacture angles than curves. Every part of your car has to be stamped, cut, or fabricated in some way. Most of the car’s body is stamped - sheet steel or aluminum is fed through a die, then moved on to assembly and painting.
Dies to make curved parts are cheaper than dies to make angular parts. Flat surfaces and simple angles are much easier to engineer, make, and QC. The advent of more computerization in such things, and other manufacturing processes, has made the price difference a lot easier to incorporate into an economical product.
Look at some of the cars of the mid to late 1970’s (especially the American ones) and you will have your answer. Things had progressed to what has sometimes been referred to as the “whorehouse on wheels” stage of automotive design and the simple, boxy designs that started coming out of Europe and Asia around the turn of the decade were a very refreshing change.
My pet theory is that you get cycles where cars get gradually fancier and fancier until they reach the point of ridiculousness, and then you get push back and more simplistic designs. Tailfins and chrome crept up during the 50’s to the point that most post-'57 cars were just plain goofy. That gave way to much simpler designs in the early 60’s, but those designs got more and more flamboyant over time, eventually leading to the aforementioned WWoW stage in the mid 70’s. The simple designs of the 80’s started getting more and more complex into the 90’s, culminating in the plastic clad eyesores of of the late 90’s, of which the Aztek is the prime example. Things got simpler again in the 2000’s, but my impression is that a lot of the higher end cars are starting to sneak back towards the “overthinking it” school of design.
Is that what you meant to say? I would have expected the opposite.
Interesting you would say that, I remember my mother’s 1979 Ford Mustang had a Pinanfarina badge on it and wondered why. The car looked a lot like this: http://static.cargurus.com/images/site/2008/06/12/15/58/1979_ford_mustang_base-pic-54169.jpeg
And after the 1979 Mustang I started noticing more and more cars adopting that general shape, like the Honda Accord.
I don’t think Pininfarina had anything to do with the design of the “Mustang III” - I also had a '79. There were “Ghia” editions at the time that did have a variant of a PF badge, but it was the usual color-coordinated interior, seatbelts, vinyl top and floormat deal.
I’m waiting for fins to make a comeback.
Boxy style bodies have more interior room (than rounded bodies). I like boxy styled cars-you actually have headroom in the back.
I think these severely curved body styles will become passé soon-at speeds under 50 MPH, aerodynamics don’t mean much.
Huh - I don’t recall PF doing anything with Mustang - I thought their sole Italian design influence was the Mustang Ghia, from the design house with the same name that Ford bought back then (then well-known for the Karmann Ghia). Learn something new everyday.
The Italians ruled the roost back then - most everything was influenced by them one way or another. Throughout the 70s-80s, everyone wanted an Italian design house badge or brand, so there were Mustangs Ghias, Bertone Volvos, Chryslers from Maserati, and hand-waves at European flair like the Cadillac Allante, Buick Reatta, and such. And since those guys loved their rulers, we got boxy cars.
A lot of the jelly bean styling that’s common in most modern cars was pioneered by the first Ford Taurus (1985), which was influenced by the previous Audi 5000. It popularized many of the styling and aerodynamic features that are pretty much universal on cars today.
Because,
We needed boxy cars to fit our huge shoulder pad wardrobe in!!
Eh, there’s nothing wrong with boxy, per se.
Yes, there is.
One of my favorite cars is the sedan Ford made (Crown Victoria?) the year before the Taurus. Hideous. I always imagined a room full of downcast designers…“I got nuthin. Nuthin. What about you? Yeah, thought so. Well, we’re on a deadline, grab that last sketch out of the trash…”
