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

Globalization happened around the late 80s. That gave us a homogenization of products, and more importantly, it crushed the marketing strategy which had been followed by the “big 3” from the 50s to the late 70s, which focused on stylistic change instead of technical innovation. That had given us the large change in styles over that period, but the cars were easily out-competed by the foreign manufacturers to which globalization exposed north american consumers. So the big 3 culled their lines, dropping things like pontiac and oldsmobile which were essentially just separate style lines, as styles converged on more functional and aerodynamic designs.