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

Late 80s still looks pretty dated, the styling shift you’re talking mostly happened in the mid 90s.

What happened is three things converged: fuel economy, unibody construction, and company consolidation.

Post the fuel crisis of the 70s (and the rise of the must more economical Japanese models in the 80s), a number of jurisdictions put in fuel economy requirements and consumer sentiment shifted much more towards fuel economy. Among other things, that drives you to going to lower drag bodies, and since everyone is working with the same physics that tends to drive body styles together.

Up through the 70s, a lot of cars were build like trucks…ladder frame with a non-structural body riding on top. Among other things, that means your body styling could really be done independently of what the car had to to structurally. Unibody is when the car is basically a shell, the body is part of the structures. This means, especially as you have to meet more and more stringent crashworthiness standards, shapes start to converge too.

And, more into the 2000s, auto makers started to consolidate. This is when you got the giant groups (VW Group, Fiat/Chrysler, the rebooted GM), who mostly went to “platform designs”…the same underlying architecture is usually behind a *really* wide range of cars across brands. That tends to drive a lot of their major look together.