The Aztek Was The Centerpiece Of The 1999 Pontiac Website

The Internet in the 1990s was kind of a bare bones, Wild West sort of place full of tiny pictures force-fed into your computer through slow, beeping phone-based modems. It's a ton of fun to go back and see what they looked like in those days, especially for automaker websites.

That's exactly what Graham Kozak of Autoweek did recently. Using the Wayback Machine, he dug up a bunch of carmaker websites from the mid-t0-late 90s, and the results are kind of awesome today.

First and foremost, he found out that the now-notorious Aztek was the centerpiece of Pontiac's 1999 website. I mean, it makes sense — while that design is kind of reviled today, it was a groundbreaking and revolutionary vehicle when it came out, one of the earliest examples of the crossover genre.

The other one I really like that Graham dug up was this Dodge site from waaaaay back in 1996. It's extremely spartan, and you can tell they weren't really sure what they could do with this whole "Internet" thing quite yet. And as he notes, it wasn't even Dodge.com back then; that was owned by an unrelated company, so they had to use 4adodge.com. Obviously, that no longer works.

Oh yeah. Is it bad that sometimes I forget Plymouth even existed?

Be sure to check out the Autoweek story, it's a fun read. What's the craziest 90s automaker site you can find? Start waybacking!