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?
Some of you will hold this as blasphemy, but I could not stand Virgil Exner’s late 50’s/early 60’s reversed c-pillars. To me they just interrupted the car’s lines too much. By admission, I’ve always been a fan of the 1966 Chevelle and it’s very unnecessary flying buttress of a c-pillar.
Early ’60s Chrysler products were absolutely ugly vehicles for a bunch of reasons. Just misshapen and oddly proportioned.
Late ’50s, too. (see topshot)
However, I do have an inexplicable attraction to the ’61-2-3 Imperials.
57-58 were the best Exner designs. Relatively clean, and really captured the “forward look” “jet age” moment. After that they got weird and over laden with chrome appendages.
The Exner-designed first generation (’60-’62) Plymouth Valiant is the platypus of automobiles. Every 3 feet it’s a different vehicle and they’re all bad.
The ’62 Dodges were even worse! (look at a ’62 Dart or Polara) I’m not sure what was going on in the design studio that year, but the experiment didn’t work.
I daily’d a ‘62 Dodge Dart in the 1990s and second this. Great car, unfortunately styled like a nauseous catfish.
Phil Hill did use my hood to sign an autograph for someone else once, though.
https://itisgood.org/auto-biography/#62Dodge
(Note: these were the “big” Darts, before they became the Valiant’s platform mate.)
Kia Amanti
What seems to look decent over time: most VWs. The styling never seems to upset the applecart and it feels cohesive. They never seem to look “old” until they really are.
Hyundai, on the other hand, abandons styles as bad as the disposable society we’ve become. A 5-year old Hyundai always looks old.
That is the most accurate thing I’ve read all day. I’m stealing that.
Hyundai/Kia are the “fast fashion” of the auto industry, no question.
I would disagree on Kia; they’ve been reasonably consistent in their styling since Peter Schreyer.
They’ve been falling more into the Hyundai camp lately I fear. That said for most of the 2010s when they were following the German aesthetic they made some stylish cars. The Stinger and Optima still look really good in good shape.
Truth.
Hyundai/Kia are the first on the bad styling trend bandwagon and they all look like ass by the next generation.
They all look like ass, regardless of generation.
Fast fashion is indeed a great term for it.
I think the new Seltos, K4, Palisade, and especially Telluride look like ass *right now*. I can’t believe what they’re getting away with.
And journo’s gush over them. They take every corny current design trend, mash them all together and crank it up to 11. Techno zigzag lighting, blackout everything, weird c pillars, strange shapes everywhere. If anyone made a car as clean as the E39 today the press would be all over it for being boring, so it’s no wonder how we got here.
I do think the modern Genesis lineup will still look good in 10-15 years though.
these all remind me of refrigerators… one style, just different sizes
The K4 sedan is really revolting.
My ex had a 2005 Passat wagon, and people were still commenting on his “new car” when we split in 2017. People often assume my Sportwagen is a newer vehicle, even though it’s 12 years old.
Same, mine’s a few years older than yours and still looks pretty new. I still think the MK4 Jetta looks like a car you could release today
I had a Mk4 Jetta and it was *chef’s kiss*
The third and fourth gen US market Accords were pretty sweet too.
I would happily drive a 4th gen wagon, those still look great
I almost bought a used 4th gen Accord wagon, but they wanted more than I wanted to pay for a used one with 90K on the clock and bought a new 2001 Jetta TDI instead. That shows how much they wanted for the wagon.
It would probably still be running though
The Jetta, too, if the guy I sold it to hadn’t given it to his brother who tried to pull the sovereign citizen crap with cops in rural SE Texas, who broke all the windows out to extricate him from the car.
I wish I still had my 2001 MK4 Jetta, I loved that car. 185k trouble free miles until some idiot pulled out in front of me and destroyed it. Probably would still be driving it. I was so sad when VW took away the purple/red dash light scheme
Hands down the best light scheme I’ve ever owned or even seen. Gosh. I’d forgotten how much I loved that. My ’17 Accord is pretty drab in that respect. It’s perfectly legible but it reminds me of the instrument cluster in Mercedes E-Class taxi I took in France back in the mid-aughts.
I get the same comments on my 2001 Vehicross. One of the first if not the first CUC and a design so far ahead of its time it still looks modern 30 years after it was designed. More companies should use ceramic molds for interesting low production cars
I came here to say this. Now I don’t have to. The fascinating thing is that the Genesis vehicles tend to look better for longer. So they can do it they just choose not to.
2010’s Hyundais and early 90’s Pontiacs were the first things that came to mind reading this post. And yes, was going to add about even 25 year old VW’s looking great (see contemporaneous post about Phaeton).
Generally speaking, the least cluttered, bulgy, or foldy looking designs seem to age most gracefully, unless we’re talking pickup trucks because all old trucks look great.
DOs
Audi TT mk1
Landy Disco 3
DON’Ts
Ioniq 6
Model Y
Mach E
There’s really a lot in each category for me, so just a few examples above..
I would have labelled that second set something like “function over form.” They’re not pretty to most folks, but at least they’re shaped like that for functional reasons.
The Mach-E’s biggest problem is being called a Mustang, which then necessitated Mustang styling cues be used. It’s a handsome overall form, but trying (unsuccessfully) to Mustang-ify it is what does it in IMO. A cleaner “Ford Galaxie” would really age well.
Cars are funny in the sense that they’re at the centre of a tension between style and practical use durable good.
They reflect the ethos of the era they were designed in and can capture the spirit of those times.
Mid-to-late 1970s American cars are a particular low point on both metrics, where gaudiness and chintziness abounded from a style point of view and the cars themselves were poor machines from a practical use point-of-view.
Later 2000s to present vehicles struggle with the ever rising beltline and seating demands. That, combined with a struggle to make a styling statement in a crowded vehicle field, means that things like proportions and clean detailing often are lost in the name of making a splash.
Mazdas of the late ’90s and early 2000s hold up, as do their mid-2010s to present models.
Toyotas of the 2000s/2010s look disproportionate and blob-like (86 excepted) with weird styling cues.
Trucks have gone…somewhere…in terms of their style.
Another aspect of the question: Which car’s design holds up TODAY that you didn’t think would when they were new?
While I believe it to be buoyed by the currently-insane 355 Market, the Ferrari 348 deserves a nod here. Almost everyone derided this car as a mini-Testarossa, but the common hindsight consensus is that the 348 did the side strakes better than the big brother.
It didn’t help that it’s 1989 performance was ho-hum, and the car magazines ragged on it incessantly. “OMGGGG a Syclone is faster !!1!!!11!!” (never mind how diametrically opposite these two vehicles were…)
Looking at one today, and the proportions are pretty perfect, and while the more rounded 355 is getting the price-bump in the spotlight, the 348 remains a good value (relatively speaking). It retains a lot of old-school Ferrari rawness and sounds, and lacks a lot of what makes the 355 a PITA to own and maintain.
91-96 Park Ave/Le Sabre, and all of the previous gen FWD C/H-cars. They looked old even 40 years ago
So did the owners.
I think the last 10 years of Rav4 or other brand rav4 all kind of look the same shape with different, mostly bad, light designs. Not bad cars, not terrible designs, just all kind of indistinct.
I’m not huge on ’80s boxiness, especially vehicles without sporting intentions. It’s hard to tell a Toyota Tercel from a Nissan Stanza from a Hyundai Pony. Now, when flip-up headlights join the chat, things change a bit. No-one is going to say an ’80s Accord isn’t cool. Actually, Honda seemed to get the ’80s right overall, with designs that had a bit more personality than “square with square lights and huge black plastic grille.”
There is one car flip-ups couldn’t save, though: the early 4th-gen Firebird. It’s ’90s blobby in all the wrong ways, and despite scupted-in vents it seemed like the hood was weirdly flat. This trait of blob switched to the melty, cross-pollinated-with-a-Chrysler-Concorde Camaro after the facelift, while the Firebird got the sharp-edged, mean, clean looks the Camaro’d had. It’s the quad rectangular sealed beams. That’s peak GM.
Then there’s the cladding-era Grand Am, which feels so Aughts it’s not funny. Same with angry-eyed mid-’00s Chevrolet pickups (Silverado and Avalanche) which are now thankfully rusting to pieces and having their LS engines blown up in drift and drag cars. They had some of the worst oncoming headlight glare, too.
Ugh, the shovel face Chevy trucks are awful . . . they look like someone took a pre-facelift Silverado and smacked with with the inside of a spade.
I’ll beg to differ on the Firebirds though. Aside from the nostrils on the front bumper (admittedly a miss) I thought the pre-facelift cars were nicely done – swoopy and aerodynamic. The facelift looks roided-out, especially the double schnoz WS6 and compound schnoz Firehawk. Ugh.
I get that the ram air cars are overdone, (Camaro SS was too, to be fair, with that huge NACA duct scoop) but the standard Trans Am had something about it…I just really like it for some reason. Maybe it’s rose-tinted nostalgia…
Or maybe the ConCamaro looked too bad in comparison.
Never thought the 03-07 Silverado looked all that great. Not ugly, especially compared to what we have today, but not one of Chevy’s better truck designs. It is funny to see how many people talk about them like they’re the absolute pinnacle of truck design. Most of them I see nowadays have no muffler, terminal levels of rust, and illegal eBay headlights
GMC has always had the styling advantage over Chevrolet except with the GMT900s, which were so boring to look at that (absent badging) I couldn’t tell you which was which.
Interesting, I like how the GMT900s look pretty clean. I do agree, usually the GMCs look better than their Chevy counterparts. There are a few gens where the GMCs and Chevys both look good, but overall I think GMC takes it styling wise
Hyundai Ioniq series, all of them look cheap to me.
I think the 5 is great. 80’s retrofuturism in a practical hatchback form.
Also something new that won’t age well and I think already looks dumb is Mazda replacing the logo on the back with just chrome “Mazda” it looks cheap and tacky.
I’ve noticed this trend
Also see Tesla, Škoda, Peugeot etc
Yeah I don’t get it it is like they are trying to copy truck beds or really going back in time. I much prefer the cleaner look of just the logo.
That big spaced letter thing has been around for a minute. Mini had COUNTRYMAN sprawled across the trunk back in 2012, Ford with the PLATINUM badging, etc. It’s actually held up pretty fine, typefaces don’t really age. I do think it has less brand identity than a logo though.
It seems like automakers flip flop back and forth between just the logo with no lettering, or just the name with no logo.
10th gen Honda Civics, over the top origami samurai styling that only really worked on the Si Model, and was so painfully obvious that the vents/grills/grates were fake.
It’s like Honda tried to make it look like a Lamborghini and failed.
The Lamborghini Urus is what happens when Lamborghini wants to make a 10th-generation Civic.
My take: it was because Honda abandoned it that it stuck out.
If Honda doubled down for the 11th gen, it would have looked tame and wouldn’t have.
I also think the hatchback’s styling was far better than the sedans (si incl.)
The 11th gen, though, my bet is that it’ll fade into the background as a beige appliance.
I suspect it’ll be like the turn of millennium Malibu. A car that you occasionally see a decent example of and say – “Huh, that car still looks decent” – but that you don’t actually remember the name of until you walk around back. It’ll never look bad. It just might never look good either.
It’s funny, this would have been my bet back then too. But honestly cars have continued to be overstyled and these still look pretty normal. Maybe in another ten years.
The last Jan Wilsgaard Volvos (850, 940/960) hold up fine as late boxy-era designs, dated when they were new but ageless now. The first full Peter Horbury-era Volvos (S80, S60/V70) were very nice and still look good. The Horbury facelifts of the Wilsgaard cars (960/S/V90, S/V70) were dreadful, a sweaty attempt to bridge the old and new that just didn’t work. Transitional eras are tough, I guess.
I have to disagree with the S/V70, I think they look great (says the guy who had a 2000 S70 for nearly a decade)! But then I think Volvo is ahead of most other manufacturers when it comes to timeless design. The gap between the best and worst looking Volvos is pretty narrow compared to most car manufacturers’ lineups.
I’ll admit I find the S/V70 less offensive than what they did to the 960, though as a onetime 850 owner I still don’t like it. Both facelifts also came with interior redesigns that highlighted Volvo’s material quality shortcomings in ways that the older models downplayed—try to find a Volvo of that era with its door panel upholstery still glued in place, I dare you.
The first-gen C70, with the S70 nose tacked onto a Mustang rear end, was truly bizarre looking.
Haha, yeah, near the end of us owning the S70, the door cards had some funky stuff going on. I will say that the person we sold it to is still driving it 10 years on and it’s given her basically no issues, so they still had the reliability thing on lockdown at that point.
The American 70s. Any of them, all of them, with the exception of the tippy top of the muscle car pile.
To me, all the 70s-90s American cars with the long front overhangs are monstrosities. Adding empty nose length can occasionally be good for crash safety, and can often be good for handling if it comes with a wheelbase stretch, but in this case, it was a bit of crash structure and a lot of trying to increase the footprint to get around CAFE standards. The Lincoln Mk5 comes to mind, it almost looks imposing, until you see where the front wheels are located and realize it has the stance of a circus elephant balancing on a ball.
The SN95 carried this trend until way too late for me, it has the same dash-to-axle ratio as the FWD Probe with a longer hood and more visual mass at the nose, and could have been a far more handsome (and better-handling) car if the front wheels were just moved forward a few inches. It looked like an AT-AT that just face-planted after a snow speeder lassoed its legs. This was only made worse by comparison once the sleek S197 supplanted it.
Ford was by far, and for the longest time, the biggest “just add overhang” offender. Check out the late-’70s LTD II and Ranchero; compared to the preceding (and closely related) 1974-76 Torino, they gained more than 8″ of overall length on an identical wheelbase. They look ridiculous.
The Torino’s styling changes from 1971 to 1976 are an artistic rendering of the progression of gout in a medieval nobleman’s foot.
I have to disagree on the S197, I think the whole early ’00s trend of retro throwbacks (this, the New Beetle, the New Mini, the last-gen T-Bird, etc.) did not age well
The problem with retro cars is that you then have nowhere to go – you either have to tone it down, like the Beetle (and subsequent Mustangs), or kill it altogether, like the T-bird
The S197 was very much a thing of the moment, but it set the tone for every mustang going forward, and all Mustangs now are modernizations of the same 1964 face that the S197 mostly revived. But textures/graphics aside, the proportions were a huge upgrade over the SN95, especially at the front end.
I was thinking about this while looking at today’s SBSD. To me, the boxy Volvo has held up better than the 90’s bubble styled Galant. Similarly, I think the straight-edge designs from the late 70’s into the 80’s have held up pretty well.
As for what hasn’t? I don’t think cars designed during the round headlight era look good with a rectangular headlight facelift. Honestly, most (although not all) model facelifts in the last 50 years look like they were trying to cut costs, or were ideas left in the designers’ wastebaskets during initial development and salvaged for the “refresh”.
Lastly, I don’t think the overwrought, angrified cars of the past decade are going to age well, and I yearn for a return to cleaner designs.
The facelifts are usually left to the B-team designers, while the good ones make the next new generation. It also doesn’t help that it’s usually someone who wasn’t responsible for the original design, so it’s easier to end up disjointed.
SsangYong Stavic
Ford’s late 90s / early 2000s jelly bean phase. They sold well back then, but now . . . ugh.
Also Toyota / Lexus predator grills. Super aggressive styling on the most appliance like cars possible does not equal a win.
Yes! The jelly bean look was never good in my opinion, and it hasn’t aged well either.
The Truman Show Taurus is excellent car casting imo. Really plays into the weird superficial world he’s in.
I was only a kid in the early 2000s, but the jelly bean Tauruses already looked so sad and dated by about 2005 that I specifically remember thinking they were hideous.
Most cars from the late ’40s and early ’50s are pretty much indistinguishable to me. It’s pretty hard to even guess the manufacturer from say 50 feet away most of the time.
I get the same sensation from most of the current SUV crop. For a while there was a “generic GM” SUV style that while I couldn’t identify the model, at least I was able to guess it was part of the GM family.
Now even that is gone, and (outside of Kia/Hyundai) most SUVs all look pretty much the same. The Mazdas have a unique nose, but many of the rest all blend together into generic “meh”. Some of the K/H stuff is the outlier here, but I don’t think those are going to age well.
They had dumb names back in the ‘40s too. Ford Deluxe? Really?
The sixties hadn’t arrived yet. It’s been a helluva ride since.
Let’s not forget the Tudor and Fordor.
And then in the ’60s Ford really started horsing around.
(Sorry. My bad pun for the day.)
Where was Fordor when the Westfold fell?
It’s not Mazda’s fault for not being unique, but everybody copying their homework for the last 10 years… I read a great comment either here or the old site a long time ago saying something along the lines of:
“First every car started to look like a crossover, and now every crossover is starting to look like a Mazda.”
I think a lot of earlier Pruis’ and other early hybrids when they had to look different so people knew it was a hybrid.
Agree – Looking like a hybrid (or EV) because hybrid (or EV) is dumb. The car styling doesn’t need to be dictated by the propulsion system.
It does if you want to maximize aerodynamics and get the buying public to notice it.
Both things that I would expect car makers would want for all of their vehicles . . .
Turning the 2nd gen Prius into a kammback 5 door to boost mpg figures and make this new drivetrain form both noticeable and highly functional to gain acceptance before rolling it into conventionally styled vehicles doesn’t seem dumb to me. Looks more like a convergence of engineering, marketing, and good long term product planning.
I agree, but I don’t think the rest of the crowd is going to agree with us that all cars should be shaped approximately like 2nd-generation Priuses for functional reasons.
Styling aside….the 2nd gen Prius’ longevity is looking really impressive. They’re still all over, looking ratty AF, on owner 4 or 5 but still kicking.
The fact that “Shitbox Prius” is a thing is the clearest indication that we are indeed living in the future.
This is a good one. I felt like I was going crazy for ages as no company would put together a hybrid or EV that just looked like a goddamn car. It always had to be quirky and goofy looking. Ugh.
Escape hybrid, Tahoe hybrid, first Accord hybrid, Altima hybrid, Malibu hybrid, all 15+ years ago, all looked like the non-hybrid version. None were very successful despite most working quite well. Fusion hybrid looked normal too and sold better than those others.
There is a great scene in Silicon Valley where every car at a funeral is a Prius.
Hah I love that show just got done rewatching it a week or two ago.
and La La Land
A colleague described the 1st Gen Prius as looking like something you would buy if you’d given up on the idea of ever having sex again.
Not a specific car, but a trend: LED dot rows, especially the super early ones like on late 00s Audis.
They’ve improved in looks over time (and the unbroken bars that followed are fine) but the dot rows need to be done.
Cybertruck. Because it has no style beyond provocation. It’s a sloppy collection of straight lines with nonsensical proportions and piss-poor visual quality. With stainless body panels. No one emulating that after the DeLorean, and no one’s going to emulate the trashy-looking Tesla.
This is the answer I came to post.
A smiley face to you, good sir.
I think this is the only answer.
It’s what happens when someone calls you on your dumb joke, but you’re too stupid to back down
The Cybertruck owner venn diagram really captures the worst of the worst. Monster Energy bro-dozer lovers + silicon valley pretentious d*cks + Musk DOGE acolytes.
Yes, and the convergence zone of those three looks a lot like an anus, and tends to produce the same material.
Literally the entire Tesla lineup is horrifically ugly and looks more and more dated with each passing day.
Tesla’s gradual, iterative styling update process was an interesting experiment but, IMO, it hasn’t panned out at all.
Shame, it was an interesting idea.
I remember saying the original Model 3 looked like they made a bar of soap molded in the shape of a ’96 Dodge Stratus and gave it to Elon to shower with for a month.
Ironically the same process was common for Soviet cars
I’ve said it before, but the Model S is the only one that I don’t find hideous. You can get low Cd numbers without making the car look ugly, but Tesla doesn’t seem to understand that.
But it’s an investment, don’t you understand? fElon promised us it would appreciate in value! Your just jealous cause hes thr richest man in the world and the smartest and has done so many gerat things for the world and…
Shit. OK, let’s take it from so many great things and continue…
But look at the thousands of dollars that each Tesla owner makes by having their cars automatically function as ride-share platforms while they sleep! This capability has been built into these cars for almost a decade now, and Tesla cars more than pay for themselves!!! You can’t afford NOT to have one!
… what’s that? no actual level 5 FSD? What’s that about depreciation? Oh… uh… ouch.
4th Gen Honda Prelude. At the time I loved the future-ish styling as it was so different but I don’t think it holds up well at all.
Conversely, I hated the 5th Gen Prelude when it debuted because it was so boring but now I casually hunt for them to find one I’d like to own one day as the styling held up so well.
Hindsight is a hell of a thing.
The 4th gen does have a really cool dash tho
Any vehicles with black wheels.
Absolutely.
And add illuminated brand logo to the list.