Car Design Has Gone Downhill Since The Plymouth Prowler

There must be something in the water, because there hasn't been a new car design in nearly 30 years that can even remotely be considered cool or fun. Most barely even scratch the surface of interesting these days. The most recent example I can think of when it comes to production cars that actually do something different at play with the visual form was the Plymouth Prowler of 1997. There wasn't anything like this on the road when it debuted in the late 1990s, and there still isn't today. The Prowler was a completely different way of looking at cars. Blending an element of retrofuturism and old-school hot-rod aesthetics, the Prowler was as much a baby boomer's fantasy as it was the car millennials drove in their adolescent dreams. 

Then-Chrysler Corporation lead designer Tom Gale was responsible for so many great designs of the era, including a trio of the most unusual concept cars of all time: Chrysler's Thunderbolt, Atlantic, and Phaeton. I don't know if Gale just saw the world differently than other designers, or was just capable of more than they were — his work on the sublime Lamborghini Diablo indicates this may be true — but in either case the Prowler was immediately a stunning piece of automotive history. 

Earlier in the 1990s, the Chrysler Corporation had launched the Dodge Viper, a study in function over form. That car was built exclusively to deliver hot nasty speed to its passengers. The Prowler was perhaps its foil, bringing the most style possible to the fight, but without any substance to back it up. For the purposes of this conversation, the substance doesn't matter. Prowler has style icon status and nothing has matched it, let alone beaten it, since. There are definitely cooler cars, but cooler looking? Fat chance. 

I'm going to fess up right here and say that the Prowler was the first car I was obsessed with. When it hit dealerships in 1997, exclusively in purple metallic, I was 10 years old, and extremely impressionable. I fell head over heels in love with it. I had dozens of scale models, T-shirts, dealer posters, magazine article clippings, and advertisements for the strange car scattered around my room for its entire production run. You've all met those kids who are fixated on a single subject — well, for me it was the Prowler. I wished it was faster, I wished it drove better, and I wished it wasn't powered by a minivan-like V6. Most of all, I wished I owned one. I'm an adult now and I still think this was among the wildest swings a car designer could have made. Nobody's this brave anymore.

I can admit that there's more to making a good car than making it look cool, but why aren't designers trying? The Prowler couldn't exist today for myriad reasons, but its spirit can soldier on to bring a bit more levity and flair to car design. Apparently everything has to be egg-shaped, with thin slitty LED headlights, thick A-pillars, and sharp, angular minimalism. And you can forget about a convertible at all, really, because allegedly nobody buys them. 

Even car interior design has become little more than a minimalist dashboard with a large touchscreen in the middle. I wouldn't say the Prowler's interior looks nice by any stretch of the imagination, but at least it has a little fun with the genre. The color-matched binnacle and center-high-mounted gauges are absolutely ace. You can't beat a column-mounted tach, I mean, come on.

The Prowler was an attempt to do something completely different. Plymouth was on the ropes at the time anyway, so, to use a mixed sports metaphor, why not swing for the fences? What good is it to keep producing boring rebadged models until you fade away? 

Maybe this was the beginning of the end for car design, as it brought about a wave of retro-inspired ripoff designs that brought nothing new to the table and suddenly became de rigueur. Or maybe it was so good a first shot that it never should have been tried again.

We've since seen 30 years of Mustang/Mini/Challenger/ID.Buzz-style returns to the same well for diminishing result. Plymouth isn't absolved of this, as it quickly pushed out the PT Cruiser in an effort to stave off death. The brand died anyway and its replica-retro-for-the-everyman car was stolen for Chrysler. Result? Nothing feels stylistically special anymore. When even Ferrari is farming its own history for retro-modern designs, it's time to hang up and try again. The trend has been taken too far, and we need to look for the next thing. Please. I'm begging you. 

I'm no design history scholar, but it seems that aesthetics tend toward bland aggression when there's a pessimistic societal weight. In the face of technofascism, uneasy economics, and a troubling climate outlook, it's difficult to be optimistic about anything, and design is seemingly suffering as a result. Practice radical optimism: In the face of everything, be joyful for a future better than the present. Even if it never comes, the infective nature of optimism can always make someone's day better. If there are any designers reading this, stop trying to emulate the Prowler's retro-coded look to the past. Please aim for its future-inspired optimism.