What Automaker's Era of Car Design Was the Best of All Time?

We’ve asked plenty of car design-themed questions for Jalopnik’s Question of the Day over the years. But I’ve searched and searched, and I don’t think we’ve ever asked one quite like this: What particular brand, over a particular time period, produced the best-looking group of cars the industry’s ever seen?

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To clarify, we’re not just asking about broad decades here. The aim is to get specific. Car manufacturers go through phases of design. BMW had Chris Bangle’s controversial flame surfacing theme through the aughts. Maybe a decade earlier, Ford tried to go postmodern with its New Edge philosophy. That’s what we’re talking about today: a specific company and a specific design language.

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This is admittedly a really hard one for me to answer. The enthusiast go-to tends to be BMW through the ‘90s, right? The era that gave us the E46 3 series and E39 5 Series. I will not object to anyone who responds similarly; those were fantastic days. Part of me wants to say Honda from the mid-’90s through about half of the 2000s — ending whenever the bloated eighth-gen Accord came out. Certainly not as dramatic as answering with, say, a Ferrari or Aston Martin era, but Honda just mastered the art of refreshing, utilitarian design over that span.

But don’t let me ramble all wistful and rose-tinted. There a number of automakers killing it in the design department today, too. Conversely, you could wind the clock back even further, to the golden years of Americana. So who you got? What company’s era of design is the greatest of all time, and why? Respond if you’re so inclined in the comments below, and we’ll compile the answers that catch our eye in an article later this week.

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