Why Do Most Cars in the 70s Look So Ugly?

Well now. Ugly is in the eye of the beholder, but let's acknowledge that vehicular aesthetics underwent a radical change between the 1950s and the 1980s. And beyond kind of leaves it wide-open, but while we’re at it, let’s acknowledge that body styles radically changed once again in the 21st century.

Why?

For a bunch of reasons, but I want to focus mainly on aesthetic trends here.

Car Buyers and Aesthetic Trends

What the buying public considers beautiful and desirable in a car depends a lot on what they see around them that’s also considered beautiful and desirable. Fast and powerful being components of desirable when it comes to cars, midcentury auto designers turned to aviation for design inspiration. The first tail fins appeared on the 1948 Cadillac.

Aviation Design Influence

The inspiration for that feature came directly from this twin-tailed puppy here, the Lockheed P-38 fighter plane.

The Golden Age of American Auto Design

I often see the 1950s cited as a golden age of American auto design, and I'm inclined to agree. Not every design was a winner, but it was certainly a creative and inventive period as the industry boomed and designers negotiated the transition to more unitary forms from the prewar norm of treating fenders as separate structures. Early-50s cars were all rounded and curvaceous like the airliners of the day. Note that this Lockheed Constellation uses the same rounded tailplanes and indeed the same wing upscaled as the P-38.

The Jet Age and Beyond

But toward the end of the decade came the jet age. Aircraft began sporting swept-back airfoils with the sharp corners and angles that were more efficient at very high speeds. Automotive design followed suit, and those tail fins got pointier. Some definite jet-exhaust energy informing that '59 Caddy's backup-light surrounds as well.

The Space Age

This was also the beginning of the space age. Rocket ships, until then largely the stuff of science fiction, had always been depicted with big fins—usually curvilinear ones in early depictions and later more straight-edged and clipped. Had to keep ahead of current realities, right?

Embrace of Minimalism

Then in the early 1960s we started launching actual astronauts into space on board rockets that looked like this. Hey, what happened to the fins? Accordingly, cars grew plainer and boxier, and the tailfin gradually disappeared. The industry embraced this new minimalism, I’m sure for the same reason modernist minimalism became all the rage in architecture—because it's cheaper, hence more profitable, to build.

Public Attitudes

But we mustn’t discount public attitudes here. The fact is ‘60s consumers wholeheartedly embraced this change. It cannot be overstated how thirsty we were for the new, for the very latest, and for the FUTURE. To hell with the past, and everything that even looks like it comes from there. Give us sharp-cornered cars and Space Food Sticks!

The 1970s

Nostalgia was dead and wouldn't arise again as a selling point until the mid-1970s. The seventies also brought soaring fuel prices and the mass incursion of smaller, more fuel-efficient Japanese cars, resulting in some seriously regrettable design choices by American automakers trying to compete in that space. Sigh...

The 1980s and Beyond

About the 80s to the 00s, perhaps the less said the better, so let’s skip over them to the more or less present day (when everything looks like this damned thing). The automobile industry standard looks this way because that's what the American consumer demands these days. Unless they’re into pickup trucks, they demand SUVs.

Rationalization of Shapes

A conventional sedan is good luck finding one these days unless you’ve got a pantload of money to spend on a high end import or a Tesla. Is the best choice for your lifestyle a conventional station wagon? Forget it; they're history. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated into the sport-utility collective. Note especially the rounded tail section with the upswept beltline and squinty rear windows on this example. This is pretty much universal these days and comes out of efforts to increase aerodynamic efficiency to save fuel, which is especially important given these tall vehicles’ unhelpful wind profile. And, of course, they have to do this while maintaining an effective safety cage for the passengers, further limiting design leeway.

Lessons from Aviation

If we can go back to the aviation connection, once upon a time, airliners came in all kinds of interesting shapes and sizes—one of the nicer ones being that Connie posted above. This was because:

The technology had not matured and they were still figuring stuff out. Airlines and airplane manufacturers were still run by aviation people, not bean counters or vulture capitalists, and they supported experimentation and new ideas. Engineers were still making calculations with slide rules and didn’t have computers telling them “don’t do that it’ll cost too much.” An example would be the Connie’s curvy spine—a costly if beautiful choice.

Now, nearly every airliner is a version of this—a ramrod-straight aluminum cylinder with sharp little wings. Because that's what the technology has matured into, and short-term-profit-driven management is not about to greenlight any new idea that would cost them an additional dime.

Conclusion

It's much the same with cars. The engineering has matured, and they know what works now in terms of aerodynamics and safety. The assignment to get the maximum safety AND fuel economy while still delivering the imposing size and excess capacity the American consumer demands has caused our current design standard to reach this sad level where aesthetics not only take a back seat—they get left on the side of the road.