In what year/era did we reach "peak" car?

[white_goodman]

Inspired by the "what did you drive in the ..." threads and some of the fantastic cars that PHers have owned on there, in what era do you think we achieved "peak car" and why?

I appreciate that there's no right or wrong answer to this but I guess objectively the cars of today are as good as they have ever been but in general, I'm not a fan. Too many "driver aids" and over-complexity/reliance on touchscreens and the interesting/performance car template has become a little homogeneous and there seem to be too many driver setting options of which none are quite right rather than one decent passive setup.

I can see why someone might say the 60s, as there are some truly beautiful cars from that era and engineers/designers had less constraints to work with in terms of safety legislation, emissions and noise etc but at the same time, your average car was pretty crappy, rusted quickly and didn't last all that long.

For me, the 70s/early 80s didn't see much significant advancement but I'm very fond of cars from the late 80s/early 90s era. Fuel injection meant better reliability, features like ABS advanced safety slightly and yet the cars were still relatively simple, light and fun. I've loved all the cars that I owned from this era.

By the early 2000s, after going through a period where weight, performance and driving feel had been compromised by improvement in emissions/passive safety in the late 90s in my opinion, you had much better passive safety, refinement and luxury features such as air conditioning were more commonplace on ordinary cars but some of the performance/fun of the late 80s/early 90s had been brought back. I don't really see a lot of positive advancement since this era to be honest, as those cars can be as usable as modern ones without many compromises.

However, I think that I have narrowed "peak car" for me down to a 5 year window of 2009-2013. You could still get an NA V8 in a small saloon/estate or a V10 in a big saloon, hot hatches were available with your choice of 4, 5 or 6 cylinder engines, manual transmissions were still fairly commonplace in performance cars but the autos were also very good by this point if you preferred. Diesels were quite good and fuel economy very impressive but not yet overly-complex. You could still get NA cars and hydraulic steering and generally, I prefer the styling of vehicles from this era i.e. not to say that I don't like or dislike the styling of some modern cars but there are many from this era that were never really replaced or what replaced them didn't appeal to me as much.

To give a few examples of cars that I loved from this era:

AM V8 Vantage/DBS

Audi RS4 B8

Audi R8 V8 manual

BMW E9x M3

BMW M135i

Ferrari 458/F12

Lamborghini Gallardo/Murcielago

Ford Focus ST/RS mk2

mk5 Golf R32

Honda S2000

Mazda RX8

Nissan 350Z

LR Discovery 4

Porsche 911 (997)/Cayman (981)

Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG (W204)/E63 AMG (W211/W212)

Maserati QP V/GranTurismo

mk1 Jaguar XF

So, in your opinion, in what era/time period did we reach "peak car"?

[white_goodman]

General consensus seems to be early 2000s so far. Is this an age thing? Are we more drawn to cars that were current in our late teens/early 20s? Would someone that was born around that time think that cars from the early 2000s were crap and present day is where it's at?

I currently have a 2016 mk7 Golf, which is a great car. I've owned/driven most of the recent models in this class and in my opinion it is the best. However, there were a number of active safety features such as lane assist that I had to turn off when I got it, as they were driving me to distraction. It could be "rose-tinted glasses" but I had a number of mk5 Golfs as company cars back in the day when they were new and I'm sure they were more fun/handled better. I remember that you could really chuck them around but still had ESP/ABS as a safety net and yet this one is nice up until about 6/10 and then gets a little scrappy (and yes, mine does have the multi-link rear suspension). Doesn't make a lot of sense when I was under the impression that the mk7 MQB platform is lighter than the mk5/6 Golf platform?

[white_goodman]

Every day a journey said:

1990s

Because EVERYTHING was better then.

Cars were individual. Not same shape with different badges.

Music was better

Wasn't so much red tape and beaurocracy

Less 'Credit life' more 'work hard and enjoy' life.

People actually BOUGHT cars

The 90s was a bit of a "mixed bag" for me. You had the 80s designs at the beginning that didn't have much crash safety built-in but had been perfected over the 80s into cars that were fantastic to own/drive. Think Peugeot 205 GTi, mk2 Golf GTi, E30 3-Series etc and then the newer generation of cars such as the mk5 Escort/mk3 Astra/Corsa B etc, which are some of the worst cars that I have driven. Objectively better but subjectively significantly worse than their predecessors. In many cases, you had engines carried over from the previous generation of cars in bigger, "safer" but heavier cars, which kind of killed performance and handling, especially in conjunction with emissions regulations and cats strangling these older engines. By the late 90s, going into the early 2000s, they were starting to do things right again.

[white_goodman]

Om said:

What do you define as the 'era' though? The date the car was released or the period in which it was available?

From your list above, the 350z just scrapes into 2009 though it was released in 2002. It's successor the 370z was released in 2009 so slap bang in the sweet spot you highlight but is still in production now, so a modern car...

Apologies for picking holes in your thread, I just wondered if some clarification might help?

And to answer your question, I personally like cars that were released from the early 90s when modern technologies were in their early years up to those cars released in the early to mid 2010s prior to newer technologies (that have taken away from the driver experience and driver involvement) becoming mainstream. Unfortunately the sales figures for cars like the 370z suggest that I am in a minority and people want the tech. Competency beats character.

No, that's a fair point. You're right that the 350Z finished production in 2009, as did the S2000. 2009-2013 was kind of a compromise, as I was trying to narrow it down to a smaller window. For instance, the S2000 actually came out in 1999 but other cars that I like didn't come out until 2012 such as the B8 RS4, F12, 981 Cayman, GT86/BRZ etc. Broadly it's the 2000s for me then really but I think that some cars from the early 2010s did benefit from technological improvements/more modern styling trends without compromising driving pleasure. In the case of the 350Z, I was in my early 20s when that came out and seeing one for the first time in 2003 in that burnt orange colour made quite an impact on me, as it looked so different from anything else available at the time. The 370Z continued that design language and in many ways is probably a better car but in 2021 as a still current model, it looks very dated, whereas the 350Z gets a pass in the context of the time.