In the 90s, cars from the 70s and 60s were seen as classic, but in 2022 cars from the 90s or 2000s can still be seen in daily use, and in terms of body design, many don’t even look that far off modern cars. What happened around the late 80s?

Question

Edit: great responses, Reddit. People have largely addressed the form factor aspect of my question. But am I wrong in sensing that cars from the late 90s seem to be more reliable and functionally acceptable in 2022, than most cars from the 70s were in the 90s? Was there some engineering breakthrough that made them more long lived?

In: 91

Answer 1

This isn’t from an expert, by any means, but I started driving in 1990, if that helps. I’m going to say “Japanese Cars.”

When people think about classic cars from the 50’s-70’s, at least in North America, they’re all American-made cars. In 1980, my mom got a Mazda RX-7, and the sporty, affordable cars tended to be Japanese. American cars were boxy and clunky (do a Google Images search on 80s K Car). As the 80’s went on, foreign cars had new and interesting designs, and it took awhile for the US automakers to catch up. In fact one of my early cars was a Saturn SL1. If you see what early 90’s Saturns looked like, they were 4-door versions of previous 2-door Japanese cars (very much like Mazda RX-7’s but with 4 doors).

tl;dr – sporty design and lower prices from foreign cars.