LizzieMaine
Bartender
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Fifty years ago few would have mistaken a Jaguar sedan for a Ford, or vice-versa. Not anymore.
Few Americans fifty years ago would have ever *seen* a Jaguar unless they went to the zoo. I wouldn't be able to identify one of any vintage unless I walked right up to it and read the nameplate.
Luxury cars have always been a breed apart. The cars ordinary people drive have always looked pretty much the same as every other car on the street in their era -- perhaps not to devoted carspotters, but to the average person in the street. Small details of design don't change the fact that most cars you saw in 1940 looked like an endless procession of hard-shelled beetles rolling down the highway, most of them black or dark blue, with a few greens, maroons, tans, and greys livening things up. You didn't see too many Duesenbergs in the Free Parking lot at the First National.
I think also the ability to spot cars depends on how interested one is in the cars of a particular period. I can recognize most mainstream 1930s American cars, but other than the ones we owned while I was growing up, cars of The Fifties and sixties all look pretty much alike to me -- most fifties cars remind me of something Godzilla might fight in a Japanese horror movie, and sixties cars of middle-aged men sitting around outside Dunkies trying to convince twenty-something women that they're sporty.
As for the jellybean styling, well, we don't live in a world of thirty-cent-a-gallon gasoline anymore, and never will again, but that doesn't mean the Boys have given up. Look at the ridiculous "aggressive" facial expressions on cars of the last decade, with the scowly headlights and sneering lower grilles, like the sort of thing a frustrated fourth-grader might doodle in the margin of a math worksheet. It's the same idea as the monster-face Buicks of The Fifties. Automobile design as an outlet for repressed aggression knows no era.