Cars that can never be 'cool' again??

Disliking a cars styling is not being closed minded...it's called taste and everyones is different. Take the first facelift Hyundai coupe. I personally think it's one of the most disgusting looking cars made and in twenty years time I will still hold that opinion. That wouldn't stop me from remarking about it's rareity should there still be any then.

Twenty years ago, the worst styling got was dull, now the worst it gets is downright ugly. I cannot think of a great deal of cars built prior to 1990 that would actually consider to be really ugly but there have been plenty since. Mechanical innovation is quite thin on the ground these days too as virtually everything follows the same pattern of design and construction. This is another aspect that makes an old car interesting and often renders a new car dull. These factor plus the ridiculous degree of platform sharing between marques these days makes modern machinery more akin to a domestic appliance that ever before.

Sadly, what keeps old cars alive is nostalgia by people for the cars they knew and worked on as they grew up. These days there are very few people who are DIY-ing it in the way they did during the 70's and 80's and new rules means these cars will dissapear from the roads faster than ever before. The changes I've seen in my 20 years of driving leads me to the conclusion that the "classic car" as we know it is a dying breed and that nostalgia (if there is any) for the current crop of cars will be more media based than metal based in twenty years time.

These days, to find anything mechanically unusual is very much a rareity whereas in the 70's there were plenty of cars that were rear engined, air cooled or even two stroke. Cars such as the Smart are the only small cars to stray from the transverse engine FWD formula and how many small cars are front engined and RWD now? BMW.



Granted, but not on anywhere near the scale to which it is done now. Nissans are Renaults, Saabs are Vauxhalls and Subarus, Jags are Fords...the list is endless. Giant corporations now share as few platforms as possible between as many different brands as they can to save cash and the result is the same car with a different look and a different badge. These days the majority of cars utilise a platform shared by others whereas 30 years ago it was the minority.



True, but ugly is still ugly ...it's just old and ugly. I'm not saying they don't have period charm, I'm just saying they don't magically become beautiful and cool once they are 30 years old. A Datsun 120Y is still as ugly now as it was when it was new and I still don't want one now as much as I didn't want one ten years ago ;D

Agree and disagree again!

Back in the 70s There were a lot of "different" cars, true but a lot of them were clones of each other, and a hell of a lot of them were Cortinas! Slewed survival rates and selective memory mnight make those days seem more diverse than they were... Today we have elecrtric and hybrid cars, TDI, rotary, multii valve 3 cyls, V8s, V10s, SUVs, civilised pickups, mini 4x4s and a whole range of vehicles we never had back then. The fact we see them every day makes them seem less diverse.

The Mk2 Cavalier, Daewoo Espero and Oldsmobile Firenza were just three of the 20 or so different cars built on the same platform, and they all look and feel different. I can tell a Mk2 Cav by the way it smells inside. Weird, sit in one, breath in and its 1984 all over again... I can't really comment on the differences between a 2007 Vectra and Saab, Cadillac BLS, etc because I've not been in any of them let alone driven one.

And yeah, the '61 DeSoto is as screamingly ugly now as it was in 1961. Its one of the few cars which makes me actually laugh when I see one. Probably the reason they sold so dismally. Very rare now, I ache to own one.

WTF is going on here?

Desoto is certainly unusual at the front but I`m not sure slanted headlights are enough to make it ugly, I think thats an attractive car, myself.

I suppose in years to come even Nissan Notes will have some appeal to someone, when they're all gone and the smug lifestyle air about them has been replaced by an amusing naffness, its just that with something like a 1999 Mondeo you can see the future Cortina beginning to take shape, but the Nissan Note has no historic equivalent which makes it hard to see what it`ll seem like in 20 years, leading me to perhaps wrongly believe it`ll never be appreciated.