In the 1990s, the family car grew taller and smarter. SUVs and car-based crossovers filled American driveways, Japanese carmakers built dazzling sports cars and the first hybrids, and General Motors put an electric car on the road. New rules brought dual airbags, on-board diagnostics and published crash-test ratings, while record-breakers reached 240 mph and passed the speed of sound. These stories follow the makes and models, the innovations, the people and the moments of the 1990s.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1990s game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makes and Models
nine stories
1The supercar with a gold-lined engine bay
On the tile: McLaren F11992-1998
Designer Gordon Murray's McLaren F1 put the driver in the middle of the car, with room for a passenger on each side and luggage in compartments on either flank. Its BMW V12 made so much heat that the engine bay and hood were lined with gold foil, which reflected heat away from the fuel tank and protected the body. It was also very fast. On March 31, 1998, Andy Wallace drove an F1 to 240.1 mph at Ehra-Lessien in Germany, the average of runs in both directions.
The Dodge Viper began with Chrysler executive Bob Lutz's idea for a revived Shelby Cobra. Its V-10 engine came from a design Chrysler was developing for Dodge Ram pickups, and Lamborghini, then owned by Chrysler, helped turn the heavy cast-iron truck engine into a lighter aluminum one. Months before production began in early 1992, a Viper paced the 1991 Indianapolis 500 with Carroll Shelby driving. It was a last-minute substitute, chosen after the United Auto Workers and others objected to the imported Dodge Stealth.
3A movie star was Hummer's first civilian customer
On the tile: Hummer1992
AM General built the Humvee for the military in Mishawaka, Indiana. Publicity for the Humvee during the Persian Gulf War, and a drop in military orders afterward, helped lead the company to a civilian version, sold to the public as the Hummer starting in 1992. Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was AM General's first civilian customer, buying a custom-made conversion of the military model as well as regular production Hummers. In 1999, General Motors bought the marketing rights to the name, and the truck became the foundation of GM's Hummer brand.
Volkswagen was in a sales slump in the 1990s, so it asked its newly opened design studio in Simi Valley, California, for help. Two American designers, J Mays and Freeman Thomas, answered by reimagining the old Beetle. Their Concept One was the star of the 1994 Detroit auto show, and Volkswagen fast-tracked it into production. The New Beetle arrived as a 1998 model, built on the Golf, with one big change from the original: its engine was in the front, not the back.
In the mid-1990s, sport utility vehicles were pushing station wagons out of American driveways. Subaru answered without building an SUV. The Outback began as a 1995 trim package on its Legacy wagon, and by 1996 it added a mild suspension lift, rugged body cladding and a raised roof to Subaru's all-wheel drive. Paul Hogan starred in the ads. Subaru billed it as the world's first sport utility wagon, though earlier all-weather wagons from AMC, Honda, Toyota and Mitsubishi had tried the idea. This time buyers were ready, and the Outback likely saved the company.
Small four-wheel-drive vehicles of the early 1990s, like the Suzuki Escudo and Daihatsu Rocky, were built like trucks, with a body mounted on a separate frame. Toyota's RAV4, launched in May 1994, took a passenger-car approach instead: a frameless monocoque body and full-time four-wheel drive based on a front-drive layout. Its name stands for Recreational Active Vehicle with 4-wheel drive. The first version was just 3.69 meters (about 12 feet) long, and in 1997 Toyota even sold a battery-electric RAV4 in selected markets.
Tata was known for trucks and utility vehicles when it unveiled the Indica, a name blending India and car, at the Auto Expo in New Delhi on January 15, 1998. It was India's first indigenously engineered car. Ratan Tata set the goal: "We decided to design a car with the internal volume of an Ambassador, the size of a Maruti Zen." Designs were finalized with Italy's I.DE.A, but 98 percent of its 3,885 components were made in India, and within eight days of its launch it drew 115,000 fully paid bookings.
On September 15, 1991, the 110th anniversary of Ettore Bugatti's birth, Romano Artioli's revived Bugatti unveiled the EB110 to some 2,000 invited guests in Paris. Built at a new factory in Campogalliano, Italy, it combined a V12 engine with four turbochargers, a lightweight carbon-fiber chassis and all-wheel drive. Bugatti says the car set four world records, including one for the fastest sports car running on natural gas. But the supercar market collapsed, and the factory closed after about 134 cars, prototypes included, had been built.
Chrysler design director Tom Gale's Plymouth Prowler looked like a hot rod from the 1940s or '50s, and its bonded aluminum panels let the company explore lighter, more efficient construction. Under the hood, though, was a V6 borrowed from the Dodge Intrepid sedan, not the rumbling V8 its looks suggested. For the first year, buyers were offered a single body color, purple, and only 457 Prowlers were sold in 1997. The trunk was tiny, so Chrysler offered an optional matching trailer.
Starting with the 1996 model year, federal rules required on-board diagnostics on every new passenger car and truck sold in any state, and in practice virtually all were built to California's standard, OBD II. The system checks almost every part that affects emissions. When something fails, it lights a warning such as Check Engine and stores details so a mechanic can find the problem. California's first version, required from 1988, watched only a few parts. To confirm a car has it, look for the words OBD II on the emissions label under the hood.
In 1991, Congress passed a big transportation law, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, with a safety rule tucked inside. Every new passenger car built after September 1, 1997, had to have airbags for both the driver and the front-seat passenger, and light trucks got one more year. Federal rules had let carmakers meet requirements for automatic crash protection with either airbags or automatic seat belts. By the time the law passed, airbags were already fairly common, and the delay gave factories time to retool.
General Motors showed an electric concept car called the Impact in 1990, then spent years turning it into the EV1, built at a special facility in Lansing, Michigan. GM calls it the first modern mass-produced electric car designed from the ground up by a major automaker. Its accelerator, brake pedal and gear selector were fully electronic, its frame was aluminum, and GM says it was the first vehicle to use a heat pump for climate control. GM leased around 1,000 EV1s, never sold one, and later recalled the cars.
In 1990, Mazda's Eunos Cosmo coupe became the first car in the world with built-in GPS navigation. Mitsubishi Electric developed the system after studying satellite navigation used on Antarctic expeditions, and map publisher Zenrin supplied digitized maps. The touchscreen was a picture tube that showed a flat, bird's-eye map, and it placed the car to within about 50 meters. The system could also run a car phone and show television. The Cosmo itself was just as unusual: it was Mazda's first production car offered with a three-rotor rotary engine.
Airbags in the steering wheel and dashboard protect people in a head-on crash, but Volvo went a step further. In 1994, the Volvo 850 became the first mass-produced car fitted with side-impact airbags. Volvo called it the SIPS bag, because it added to the car's structural Side Impact Protection System. The bag was built into the backrest of the front seat and inflated in a side-on collision to help protect the chest. By then, the 850 had earned more than 40 international awards since its 1991 launch.
GM's OnStar grew out of Project Beacon, a 1995 effort to bring satellite and cellular technology into the car. It debuted in 1996, first as a dealer-installed device on several 1997 Cadillac models. OnStar calls it the industry's first embedded telematics system with automatic crash notification. Using the car's cellular phone, it linked drivers to an advisory center staffed around the clock. If an airbag deployed, the center was notified automatically, and advisors could also give directions, unlock the car remotely and help track it if it was stolen.
In 1995, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety began rating cars in a frontal offset crash test. The test represents two vehicles meeting at a little under 40 mph each with only part of their fronts overlapping. A car drives at 40 mph into a deformable barrier with 40 percent of its front overlapping, with a dummy in the driver's seat. High-speed film and greasepaint showed how the dummy moved. Later research found that drivers of cars rated poor faced a significantly greater risk of dying in real frontal crashes.
In 1991, Chrysler announced a clever option for its 1992 minivans: child safety seats built into the bench seat, the first such device for vehicles sold in the United States. Pulling down what looked like a center armrest revealed a child seat with its own belt system, made for children from 20 to 40 pounds. For bigger kids, one of the two seats could become a booster used with the van's standard three-point belt. When not needed, the seats folded back so adults could sit there. The price was expected to be $150 to $200.
9Chrysler's family sedans had a Lamborghini ancestor
On the tile: Cab-Forward1993
For 1993, Chrysler launched new family sedans, including the Chrysler Concorde and Dodge Intrepid, with what it called cab-forward design. The firewall and the base of the windshield were pushed forward, giving the cars a modern look and more room inside. Automotive historians note that some of the styling was heavily influenced by the Lamborghini Portofino, a four-door show car designed by Chrysler's Kevin Verduyn and shown at the 1987 Frankfurt auto show. The new sedans largely replaced models based on Chrysler's dated K-car platform, and they proved very popular.
In February 1989, Honda engineers developing a new mid-engine sports car asked Formula One star Ayrton Senna, visiting Japan to test a McLaren, to drive their prototype. Honda recalls his verdict: "I'm not sure I can really give you appropriate advice on a mass-production car, but I feel it's a little fragile." The car was designed to be as rigid as a Porsche or Ferrari, but the team raised its targets and tested at Germany's Nürburgring. The result, the NSX, launched in September 1990 with the first all-aluminum monocoque body on a mass-production car.
In 1993, Toyota launched the G21 project, a car for the 21st century, with Takeshi Uchiyamada at its center. The first target was 1.5 times the fuel efficiency of conventional engines, but executive vice president Akihiro Wada ordered a doubling. A hybrid offered that prospect, so the concept car for the 1995 Tokyo Motor Show became a hybrid, and the production car followed. Toyota took the unproven technology to mass production in about two years, and the Prius, the first mass-produced hybrid passenger car, was ready for sale at the end of 1997.
Kazunori Yamauchi wanted to make a realistic driving simulator for the PlayStation, but it was a hard sell to Sony executives. So he made a racing game they could understand, the cartoonish Motor Toon Grand Prix, released in Japan in December 1994, while quietly starting on his real project. Gran Turismo took five years. The team began with five people and was still under 20 at the end, and some slept under their desks. When the game came out in Japan in December 1997, it had 140 cars, and each one handled differently.
Argentine-born Horacio Pagani made composite parts for other firms near Modena, Italy, by day and his own supercar by night, calling it the Fangio F1 after his friend and mentor Juan Manuel Fangio. In 1993 he showed the prototype to Mercedes-Benz engineer Dieter Zetsche, who praised it as a timeless car. Pagani answered that this was lucky, since he had no money and would need a lot of time. Mercedes agreed to supply a V12. Fangio died in 1995, and in March 1999 the car debuted at Geneva with a new name: Zonda.
Christian von Koenigsegg was 5 years old when he saw Pinchcliffe Grand Prix, a Norwegian stop-motion film about a bicycle repairman who builds his own racing car and wins against the odds. About 17 years later, on August 12, 1994, he founded Koenigsegg Automotive in Sweden at age 22, with no track record in carmaking and little funding. In 1996, racing driver Rickard Rydell gave the company's CC prototype its first public drive at the Anderstorp race track, and in 1997 the car was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
Lyn St. James had a successful sports car career, but when she qualified for the 1992 Indianapolis 500, it was only her second open-wheel race and her first on an oval. On May 24, 1992, she drove the No. 90 car for Dick Simon's team to an 11th-place finish, beating six other rookies, including Paul Tracy and Jimmy Vasser, for Rookie of the Year. She was the first woman to win the award, only the second woman to race in the 500 and, at 45, the oldest Rookie of the Year up to that time.
Early in his world rally career, Colin McRae was so erratic that people nicknamed him McCrash. By 1995 the Scotsman was one of the most exciting drivers in the sport, and in his Subaru Impreza he feuded with his own teammate, Carlos Sainz. He clinched the title at his home event, Rally Great Britain, becoming the first British world rally champion and, at 27, the youngest champion yet. When he drove onto the finish ramp in Chester on November 22, 1995, a bagpiper led the way.
Nicolas Hayek, the businessman behind the colorful Swatch watch, also conceived the Swatchmobile: a cheap little car with interchangeable plastic body panels, designed from the start for battery or hybrid power. After first exploring a deal with Volkswagen, he teamed up with Mercedes-Benz, and the Smart City Coupe was set to go into production at Hambach, France, in the summer of 1998. But engineers found the hybrid system would be very hard to fit, and it was dropped. In late 1998, the Swatch Group sold its 19 percent stake to Daimler-Benz.
By 1998, Dale Earnhardt had 70 NASCAR Cup wins, but the Daytona 500 had always escaped him. On February 15, 1998, in his 20th try, he finally won it. What happened next became one of the sport's most enduring moments: members of practically every team in the race lined pit road to congratulate him, crowding it so much that he had to put his right-side tires on the infield grass. His son, Dale Earnhardt Jr., later said no competitor had ever received that kind of salute from nearly the whole industry.
At 4 p.m. on June 23, 1991, the No. 55 Mazda 787B won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the first overall win for a Japanese car. New rules would soon require piston engines, so this was Mazda's last chance with its rotary, and the 787B is still the only rotary-powered winner. Driver Johnny Herbert collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration and missed the podium. The car had needed only an oil top-up, a headlight bulb and a scheduled brake change, and engineers later judged its engine could have run another 24 hours.
On October 15, 1997, Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green drove ThrustSSC across Nevada's Black Rock Desert at 763.035 mph, or Mach 1.02, setting the first supersonic land speed record. The car was pushed by Rolls-Royce Spey jet engines of the type used in the Phantom fighter. Its sonic boom was so powerful that in Gerlach, 10 miles off the end of the track, people thought they were feeling earthquakes. The record came 50 years and one day after Chuck Yeager first flew faster than sound in the Bell X-1.
Mercedes-Benz launched its new compact A-Class in mid-October 1997. A few days later, Swedish journalists ran it through their moose test, a quick swerve left and back to the right, as if dodging a moose on the road, and the car tipped over. Mercedes interrupted deliveries for twelve weeks, optimized the suspension and made its ESP stability control standard. Finnish rally driver Rauno Aaltonen then drove the revised car through the moose test and a slalom 38 times, and former Formula One champion Niki Lauda was among those who later tried the course.
In June 1994, Saturn, General Motors' young small-car company, invited its owners to come home. Tens of thousands of people headed to Spring Hill, Tennessee, where their cars were built, for plant tours, country music concerts and craft booths. They came from coast to coast and from Alaska and Hawaii, and about 30 owners and dealers traveled from Taiwan. Asked about their cars, owners talked about friendly dealers and prices they had not had to haggle over. None of the cars was old: Saturns had gone on sale only in the fall of 1990.
When Congress repealed the national speed limit in 1995, Montana fell back on its old basic rule: in the daytime, drivers only had to keep to a speed that was reasonable and proper for the conditions. There were still limits at night, but Montana was the only state without a numeric daytime speed limit for cars. In December 1998, the Montana Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the rule was so vague it was unconstitutional. The short-lived Montanabahn ended in May 1999, and numbers went back on the signs.
For decades, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, opened in 1909, had been the domain of open-wheel Indy cars. That changed on August 6, 1994, when NASCAR's stock cars ran the first Brickyard 400 before a capacity crowd. The winner was Jeff Gordon, in his second Cup season, driving the rainbow-colored No. 24 Chevrolet. Born in California, he had moved to nearby Pittsboro, Indiana, to race open-wheel cars. It was only his second Cup win, and it helped spread NASCAR's popularity far beyond its Southern roots.
In October 1997, Vickers put Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, maker of both Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars, up for sale. BMW already supplied engines for the company's new models, but in 1998 Volkswagen bought it, taking the Crewe factory and the Bentley brand. There was a catch. The Rolls-Royce name and RR logo belonged to Rolls-Royce plc, the aircraft engine maker, and were not part of the sale. BMW licensed them for 40 million pounds. Volkswagen could use the name only through 2002; after that, Rolls-Royce cars were BMW's and Bentley stayed with Volkswagen.
Lead had been blended into American gasoline since the early 1920s, mainly to boost octane. In 1973, gasoline carried about 200,000 tons of lead a year. The EPA phased it down, and starting in 1975, new cars came with catalytic converters that needed lead-free fuel. By 1995, leaded gas was just 0.6 percent of sales, and on January 1, 1996, the Clean Air Act banned it for on-road vehicles. Carmakers could drop the "unleaded fuel only" labels from dashboards, though racing cars, aircraft, farm equipment and boats could still use it.
Early in 1997, Ford could still advertise its Taurus as America's best-selling car, but the Baltimore Sun pointed out a catch. Counting only cars registered to individual buyers in the 1996 model year, the research firm R. L. Polk ranked the Honda Accord first and the Taurus seventh. Slightly more than half of the redesigned Taurus's sales had gone to commercial fleets and rental agencies, and one analyst said Ford was paying a big price to be No. 1. Later in 1997, the Toyota Camry beat both to become America's best-selling sedan.