QOTD: Are We Done With Retro?

Nothing like a nice evening drive on a warm summer’s night, streetlights whipping by as the western horizon glows with hues of peach and lavender. Yessir, there’s nothing like some leisurely motoring. And what’s that up ahead?

Oh, an FJ Cruiser, Toyota’s answer to the retro craze sweeping the industry back in the early to middle 2000s. Big ol’ thing, it was — and thirsty, too. Kept its resale value, though, but certainly not its initial sales prowess. That thing’s popularity dwindled faster than inhibitions at a kegger.

Will a time ever come when automakers again dive into retro with such ferocity, I wondered?

Recall that simple, long-ago time. I do it often after spending time on social media! It was a decade that brought us the blandest of mainstream sedans from all corners of the earth after a decade that saw the pinnacle of Japanese quality reached.

In the background, however, another crop of designers toiled furiously, dreaming of another era. From those pens came:

PT Cruiser (2001)

Yes, the Volkswagen New Beetle and Plymouth Prowler was just a warm-up act. These were not cars that boasted a clear design lineage with the generation of vehicle that came immediately before, and before that, and so on. They were departures; either aping a long-ago model or adopting distinctive styling cues of yesteryear.

And history has not been kind to these models, with the exception of the Mustang, which continues to wear its heritage on its sleeve, and possibly the HHR, which was an interesting way to package a cheap Cobalt. The panel van version remains an intriguing vehicle. The SS variant of said van is very intriguing.

Automakers continue to try to rekindle past successes and foist historical design elements on us, but there’s no critical mass of unabashedly retro design like we saw 15 years ago. There’ll be a new Nissan Z soon, but the previous 350Z and 370Z more or less kept the original design recipe intact, minus the distinctively retro flourishes expected of the upcoming model. There’ll be others, too, but it’ll be a scattershot affair.

In this writer’s view, the public’s current disinterest in the passenger car arena makes a wide-scale retro effort unlikely. Crossovers don’t lend themselves to mimicry. What could they mimic? And trucks are trucks, always existing in the present day.

What are your thoughts? Have we finished blasting from the past?

[Image: General Motors]