Relevant Jeremy Clarkson segment: Why 1970s American Cars are Awful | Jeremy Clarkson's Motorworld | Top Gear - YouTube
I saw a 944 on the way to work this morning. I tried to find its styling terribly outdated. I just couldn’t. It’s still a good-looking car.
Boxy was the fashion of the time. Car style and couture have gone hand in hand for decades; at least that’s the way I see it.
I’d imagine that the then-current state of computer graphics had some influence. All they could handle were boxes, sharp lines and simple polygons, but were in the minds of people as “cutting edge”.
Interesting point. Early versions of AutoCAD, for example, did indeed favor designing with straight lines and pre-defined (often right) angles.
Part of the magic of '80s designs is that they appeared boxy, but they were actually full of curves. If you take a straight edge to a lot of cars that you think are boxy you’ll find they there’s hardly any flat panels on them. It really was all about the style rather than manufacturing limitations or aerodynamics.
Umm… all I can say is good combination of user name and post. What on earth makes you think the primitive 3D imaging of the era had anything to do with car design? (Did Saoutchik and Loewy have copies of Pixar software that fell through a wormhole from 2010?) Or that the polygon renderings of CAD then, or Battlezone, drove public perception?
Umm… what makes you think that AutoCAD was any major part of designing cars in the 1980s, or that its ease of drawing straight lines was peculiar to the era? In the T-square and ink era straight lines were easier to draw. (I was there.) In the monochrome era of CAD it was easier to draw straight lines. (I was there - I bought an expensive 8087 for my PC-XT to speed up rendering.) Using the most sophisticated software on today’s market, it’s easier to draw straight lines. I assure you that I was drawing complex, curved shapes in ACAD ca. 1987 and if a young, self-taught designer could do it, I am pretty sure anyone Ford or GM was paying could do so.
Bingo. The look of 1980s cars was the style. No more, no less, no technical explanation needed. They could have been as round as jellybeans if that was what was perceived to be customer preference.
Technical forming techniques don’t have much to do with it. About the only real change in recent years is the “deep draw” forming process that allows very deep, sculptured sheet metal to be formed at production speeds - GM showed it off with the fenders for the SSR retro-truck. But round, square, curved… the limits of body forming were pushed past simple forms in the 1930s.
Amateur Barbarian: Chevrolet Corvette 1984 commercial (us) - YouTube
Advertising using vaguely video-gamish imagery (helllooooo, Night Driver!) in 1984 is not especially noteworthy and doesn’t say anything about the design of the car - process or public perception. Ads come years and years after car design - moreso in that era.
Remember that the [del]'82[/del] [del]'83[/del] '84 Vette was so long in the pipeline that GM ended up continuing the prior line an extra year and then skipped the '83 model year. It was almost certainly designed on paper and its curves come from clay modeling bucks, not AutoCAD. I doubt anything in that ad came from a computer, either - even two years later, “computer graphics” had to be simulated in animation for* Max Headroom*.
(Oh, and the “computer controlled transmission” probably had one of the first simple electronic modules in it, up from plain switches. I guess that’s close enough to a “computer” for the ad guys. 
)
Easy to forget that computers haven’t always been around, and how late real (= meaningful, not trivialities or demos) computer-based design and graphics came along.
People forget that cars of the 1930s had curving lines. And the 1930s saw the Chrysler Airstream, which was aerodynamically styles. These cars were body on frame construction, which made it easy to change body styles. Now, cars are all monocoque construction, which makes it more expensive to alter body styles easily.
The ultimate aerodynamic car was the 1952 Citroen DS-21…I think it had a very low Cd. Curiously, that style has never really been used again.
Maybe because it’s… how does one say it in French? Butt-ugly.
The second-generation Dodge Intrepid and kin have a very similar banana shape with a wasp waist, just a prettier rendering of it. While the Citroen had very low drag for its era, I think a number of modern cars exceed it. By having a lower coefficient, I mean, which doesn’t really fit with “exceed.” You know what I mean. Many of them don’t look particularly aerodynamic, at least not so obviously so.