20 Years Ago Today CAR attempted to find a car to sum up the Nineties. Guess what?
As a century neared its end, CAR attempted to find the car that defined the Nineties. Its conclusion surprises us even today
Attempting to sum up a ‘car of the decade’ is fraught with difficulty. Predominant themes in car design/engineering are not neatly confined into convenient ten-year segments. Most cars with that kind of status achieve it in lengthy retrospect – like the Jaguar E-type for the Sixties and Audi Quattro for the Eighties. But with a sense of pre-millennium finality for CAR’S December 1999 issue Jason Barlow looked back on the decade, ditched the rose-tinted Oakleys, and drew some remarkable conclusions.
Looking back, it’s a remarkably paranoid time and misguided predictions are made. There’s an assumption that the government was just about to speed-limit everyone’s car, and that VW was about to make a huge mistake pouring a vast amount of money into building a mystery Bugatti that looked like it might never be finished.
Barlow’s 11-car shortlist was dominated by sports cars. ‘Very little can touch it for visceral thrills or sheer exhilaration,’ he said, almost talking himself into nominating Honda’s NSX. But the TVR Griffith was more exciting, the Audi TT better looking, and the Lotus Elise brought Nsx-style aluminium technology to a larger audience.
Affordability was a virtue in the Nineties. ‘It’s too expensive to be the true Nineties car,’ says Barlow, dropping the Mclaren F1 out of contention. Similarly, although the Porsche 993 makes the shortlist, he can’t find much to recommend it alongside a groundswell of clever affordable car design. The Ford Ka is considered the natural successor to the original Mini, and the E46 BMW 3 Series, ‘A much-imitated template for aspirational but affordable motoring; a heartland car, as well as engineering and marketing shorthand.’
The Renault Scenic is considered in similar length to the Ferrari 360 Modena, which in today’s classic market exists in the shadow of its F355 predecessor, which is now often labelled the ‘car of the Nineties’. But with cleverness and mass appeal more important than exclusivity, what takes CAR’S car-of-the-decade crown?
It was the Subaru Impreza Turbo. ‘Years after the pioneering Jensen FF and original Audi Quattro, four-wheel drive had finally reached its zenith in an affordable, high-performance road car,’ Barlow concludes. ‘Younger, fitter rivals duly arrived to depose the new hero. Happily, though, they were all wearing Impreza badges too. Its huge success came by accident rather than design. In an era strangled by spin, the Impreza Turbo was an underground hit that gradually went overground, unhindered by hype.’