We like to keep things pro-car at The Autopian, so I’m not looking to slag any cars as ugly or badly designed here, or unworthy of anyone’s respect or admiration or, dare I say, love. I should also point out that a car plainly appearing of its time does not mean its styling “doesn’t hold up.” Indeed, if you were to name what you think is the best-looking car of any decade, I’m confident it would employ the popular motifs of its era to some degree and be instantly recognizable as a product of the 50s or 60s or 70s, etc.
For me, the cars that hold up least well are the machines of the 50s and 60s that went hardest for chrome adornments and pointless jet-age detailing. I’m sure they were exciting and futuristic at the time, but today the unrestrained application of gewgaws and nonsensical stylistic appropriations (the taillights are jet engines?), often at the expense of what may well be otherwise clean lines, reduces these machines to mere kitsch.
Would I enjoy cruising in something like the ’59 Dodge Coronet in the topshot and soaking in the vibe? Absolutely. But do such things hold up as good design? Not for me.
Your turn: what cars of the past, near or distant, still hold up for you? Which most emphatically don’t?
The original Telluride knocked it out of the park. Suddenly it looks a little bland, even boring, with the bold and exciting new one.
Still holds up: 2011-2018 Volvo S60. Yes, I might be biased since I drive one. But some styling cues have trickled into Teslas much more recently.
Doesn’t hold up: 2014-2018 BMW X5 (F15). When it was new, I thought it looked okay, like an evolution of the E70. Some of the details have not aged well, though. The front fog light placement looks instantly dated now since the G01 X3 and everything after went to a much different placement. The rear hatch has an “Ozempic face” sunken effect that becomes apparent when you compare it to the X5 before and after. The midsection looks blobby and bloated compared to the athletic G05 that succeeded it. The interior is forgettable like all F-chassis BMW interiors in my opinion. And of course, your powertrain choices are N55 mediocrity or N63 horrors.
Post-recession era Lincolns. Not a fan of the proportions, confusing names, and the whale grille didn’t look good then and still doesn’t look good now. They really cleaned up their design languange and naming convention with the reintroduction of the Continental onwards.
I will get a lot of hate for this, but for me the Renault Fuego is one of the worst designs ever.
Banana-shaped as if it was originally a phone receiver design, too narrow a track (looks like an IFA W50 in that regard), charmless black plastic everywhere. Incredibly apologetic and unsporty looks overall, with a sad Default Car Face as identified by Torch. Just droopy and meh all around.
I was just looking at the early 70s mustangs for some reason, and realized just how small the engine bay was relative to the frontal area of the actual car. I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, they just widened the Sheetmetal, but kept the same unibody structure from the earlier cars, so you’ve got lots of dead air space around the unibody. So even though the cars looked wider, at their core they were still a Falcon from ten years prior.
This is what I see as faux design, making something look wide and capable, without actually making those changes internally.
That weird hole in American car design where automakers realized they needed to shrink the cars, but couldn’t/wouldn’t give up on the old shape. The Bustleback Cadillac, the Chrysler Fifth Avenue, etc. Not grand like the cars of the ’70s, not interesting like the cars of the ’90s, or even the European and Japanese cars from the same era. Just a weird dip in style.
Your point about cars from the 50’s applies to today’s cars as well. As all cars,and all designs really,are products of their time this question is hard to answer.
Most of the squarish, robotic circa 2010s Nissans with a few exceptions.
The Altima, Sentra, Quest, etc where super weird cars that aged terribly (and were also terrible cars).
The R51 Pathfinder was alright though and still looks somewhat fresh.
The absolute piece of shit I took my drivers test in: Ford Gran Torino Elite III. God I hated that car and it’s still ugly as hell.
I had to look it up. Wow, that was fugly
#1 of all time: the Tesla Cybertruck.
and the debate is now over. We have found the winner.
Still hold up: Geiger’s Mercedes designs, mid-1980s 5, 6 and 7 series BMWs.
Don’t hold up (and looked like butt when new): most post-2000 Mercedes, the ones that look like used soap bars with two googly eyes on each side of the grille. There’s a bunch of them, like the W210. Early Escalade, before the angular redesign. It looks like a ham.
Most modern Kias and Hyundais are going to look extremely dated in a few short years. That’s what you get for being trendy.
Contrast their modern designs, with something like the Stinger which had classic proportions when it came out and still looks sharp today even though it is a nearly 10 year old design.
I don’t know – I hate everything and I think the recent batch looks eyecatching and I think they will age well. Would I own one? Hells no. But the Ioniq 5, for instance, still looks like it ran away from a show car stand.
I think that mid-engine Corvettes are horribly over styled. I don’t think that they’ll get better with age.
I agree. I understand they needed to go mid-engine to keep up with the Joneses, but the supercar styling is too much and likely won’t hold up. I think they got it right with the c4 (particularly early ones) and the c7. I was at a corvette night (which is a whole other set of weird) to give a guy a spare front license plate filler I had for my c4 and I saw a c7 and c8 parked together. The c8 had sort of a silly spaceship vibe that I personally didn’t care for. Too many creases and angles.
And as a ragtop guy, I thought the convertible would be more, well, convertibley. It may as well be a targa.
I completely agree with all of this. GM designers seem to lack the ability to put down their pens and stop adding stuff. C5’s haven’t aged well for me and I never like C6’s.
On a side note – I always thought that the intro of the mid-engine C8 was a missed opportunity to launch the Corvette as a brand, to keep the C7 going in updated form while also launching the mid-engine “supercar” version.
Cyber truck doesn’t just “not aged well” it looked STUPID from the first moment Elon stepped out of his precious prototype.
Agree completely on the C5. Just looks…bulbous? The C6 looks good to me but late period C4’s are the ones I really like. They seem nicer everytime I see one.
They are a (dated) product if their design era. At the same time the C8 was developed, every Honda Civic, Ford Fiesta ST, etc. had every possible angle, wing, not-a-vent vent, deflector, diffuser, etc. It was just a busy era.
See also Robyn Graves post below about post 2010 supercars also having this busy look.
It was just a busy era.
Thankfully, things have recently started to tone down a bit.
I think a lot of the post-2010 supercars are going to look incredibly bad and dated in a few years. The last time I was all gassed up about a six-figure unobtanium supercar was probably around the time of the Porsche Carrera GT. I remember the arguments about it stacking up against the Enzo. Maybe the Aventador when it first came out, though it’s kind of to blame for where the styling eventually went, and it’s clearly more of an evolution of the Murcielago than its own thing.
But after that era? Everything is just covered in folds and creases and aero vents, or it’s gone the other way and it’s weird, liquid forms around gaping air holes like some awful deep-sea creature not meant to witness the light of day.
Ferrari hasn’t made a good-looking car since the 575M. Lambo keeps remaking the Aventador with more origami folds. Porsche is doing… something, I don’t know what, but their design language seems like it’s fighting with itself. Aston has been remaking the V12 Vantage over and over again and it’s starting to go sour and look odd in the edges. McLaren went from building the most unique road car on the planet to cranking out uncountable variations of more or less the same catfish-shape.
You can point to the late ‘80s wedge cars or the swoopy ‘90s curves, and that’s valid, but I don’t think any of that design language holds a candle to what rich assholes are buying now. This stuff is going to look like utter ass in 30 years when no one can get the parts to fix the busted-ass computer networks in these things, you mark my words.
Totally. The McLaren Senna is one of the most awful looking things ever made.
Bangle Era BMWs. I do agree that they started the modern design language for cars, but it wasn’t a good one and most Bangle Era BMWs years in blend in with everything else available.
The 90’s.
There are some good ones. But for the most part, the 90’s was full of weird looking blobs and jelly beans. I know there’s an industrial transformation on exhibit here, but there’s an element of “look what we can do now!” that maybe went too far.
The original Hyundai Tiberon is an example that comes to mind. As does the era’s Taurus. And everything Pontiac transitioned from neat angular designs to blobby over-designed crap. I don’t really blame GM as much as I blame the 90’s and it’s penchant for neon coloured stick on graphics and weird mouse fur interiors.
The OG Tiburon was its own kind of … Thing.
By contrast, the Vehicross did that vibe really well.
Back in 2012, Hyundai introduced the stylish Sonata at the same time that VW brought out the Americanized Passat. The Passat was dismissed as boring at the time. Look at them side by side today and the Passat looks elegant, the Sonata, frumpy.
Timeless, simple styling is what endures.
There are lots of designs from the 1970s that I think hold up well, from reserved to garish. I still like my dad’s 1977 Thunderbird – no, I don’t suppose it “holds up,” but you could do worse as automotive disco time capsules go. It was this car, including the “Polycast” wheels, but with red velour interior.
https://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTA2NlgxNjAw/z/xy8AAOSwR~lg9Z7a/$_57.JPG?set_id=8800005007
Our neighbor’s 1976 Buick Riviera two-door in the same color combo was also a handsome car, mostly straight edges and angles, and very little of the baroque frippery of the era:
https://bringatrailer.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/1976_buick_riviera_DSC_0005-37606-scaled.jpg?w=940
But whoever thought stacked rectangular headlights ever looked worth half a damn on literally any car needed his head examined. Look what they did to the Monte Carlo between 1975…
https://en.wheelz.me/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/190832.avif.webp
…and 1976.
https://cdn.dealeraccelerate.com/bullet/1/1039/12024/1920×1440/1976-chevrolet-monte-carlo
> There are lots of designs from the 1970s that I think hold up well
Definitely. I’d include the El Camino in that group too.
I never understood that stacked rectangular look. It’s ugly.
I HAVE A CORRECT ANSWER!
The 1960 Plymouths, Dodges and Chryslers!
Virgil Exner, the architect of the “forward look” vehicles with low bodys, dramatic proportions and towering tailfins, kept that look going into the 1960s when Ford and GM moved on from tailfins. They looked out of date and dated on arrival… In 1960. They were so poorly received that 1961 was Exner’s final year and he was replaced by Elwood Engel…the guy from Ford who penned the crisp, slab-sided 1961 Lincoln Continental.
Honorable mentions:
Putting the “aero ‘Bird” on this list is pure blasphemy.
Good catch! I actually meant the 1982 Thunderbird because I thought it went through ’83. The next one was much better looking. I could have nominated its Mercury Cougar running mate, though!
Oh. Then we agree. LOL
I feel like the ’63 Avanti and the Subarus are well-regarded as art, at least weird insider art, even if most elements of their designs didn’t show up on other models.
The ‘box Bird’ and Fifth Avenue were half-assed and behind the times, though, and the ’96 Taurus was indeed stylistically notable for the wrong reasons. (That radio…)
…Outsider art, that is, relative to more mainstream manufacturers. Proofreading!
Loads of cars from model years ~1975 to ~1985. Too many to count.
Not just styling being bad, but quality was also so fucking bad, even Hondas of that era weren’t built extremely well (head gaskets, for one)…just better than the lowest bar that had been set by everyone else.
Little egg shaped economy family cars. They sucked then and suck now. Now overly chromed? I’m not a fan but don’t go to a low rider car show and start spouting that Gringo sheet. LOL
The SLR McLaren, while neat in some aspects, has aged like absolute milk up front and inside. That steering wheel in particular, as well as the weird F1-style nose.
These always looked phallic and penile to me.
I can’t look at an SLR McLaren without thinking “ribbed for her pleasure.”
This was the first car I thought of when I saw the headline. I thought it looked at best like a phallic SLK when it came out and has only gotten worse with age. I worked at an MB dealership when these came out and we had to send a tech to Germany for a month of training just to have the allocation to sell one. When we took delivery of one I was still not impressed, they don’t look any better in person unfortunately. The Ford GT was available at the same time these were on the market, you could have bought 3 or 4 of the GTs for the price of one of these!
“For me, the cars that hold up least well are the machines of the 50s and 60s that went hardest for chrome adornments and pointless jet-age detailing.”
Me too, especially the ones with engine bays big enough to fit a second, maybe a third engine and/or trunks big enough to fit the entire La Cosa Nostra.