MotorTrend

“The historian,” wrote Frederich Von Schlegel, “is a prophet looking backwards.” We certainly made more than our share of predictions in the ’90s; we were right about some, wrong about others, and downright embarrassed by a few. Here are a half-dozen

The ’90s can conjure thoughts of an automotive dark age full of unsatisfying niche vehicles and evolutionary dead ends. It’s the decade that gave us the Suzuki X-90, after all. But it was also studded with gems, some of which have become bona fide co

General Motors takes way more flak and gets nowhere near enough credit for the GM EV1, the most technologically advanced production vehicle of its time. It pioneered and/or demonstrated myriad features we either take for granted on today’s (electric

Thank you, MotorTrend; your April issue could not have come at a better time. I was just about to plunk down $490,810 on a new McLaren 765LT Spider until I read your article comparing it to the Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica and the Corvette Z06/Z07. Fo

As the 20th century’s final decade began, Tom Cruise felt the need for speed in a Chevy Lumina, the coolest new music came from Seattle, and NikeTown was the next big thing in retail therapy. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and with it the Soviet Union b

If you lived through the 1990s, you know it was a fascinating era. From cars to pop culture to politics and more, we can’t come close to reminding you of everything significant that occurred—but we can highlight some of the key cars, moments, and tal

These two Ford F-150 Lightning pickups are nothing alike. Their worldviews appear to be diametrically opposed. The original seems antisocial—a flagrant corruption of the noble F-150’s puritanical work ethic, a hedonistic implement for transforming pe

Perhaps nothing is more important to the Mustang story than the fans. This might sound like platitudinal BS, but it’s also true. At every turn when Ford could’ve either killed the famous pony car or made it worse, the Mustang’s wildly vocal and passi

Some objects require a generation or more to pass before they achieve Citizen Kane Rosebud status in a population’s collective consciousness. Most material items never get there at all. Porsche’s 993-series 911 needed only a few years to achieve pred

For our Flat Out Classic, we headed to California’s new-ish Ontario Speedway to find 1973’s fastest American car. Winner: the Pontiac Firebird Trans Am 455 SD at 124.3 mph. We previewed GM’s soon-to-be-stillborn Wankel rotary-powered Vega, showed the

It’s been three decades since we first met the Jeep Grand Cherokee, and back then we had a strong suspicion we were looking at the future: a sport-ute with the off-road ability of a truck (for trucks is what most SUVs were) and the driving characteri

Kudos to Saturn: Those plastic body panels really do work. The pristine S-Series you see here—a time machine of a car if there ever was one—resides not in rust-free Arizona or California but in the heart of Chicago. Twenty-seven years ago, Barbara Sc

As we went about putting together this issue, I couldn’t help but to think about a subsect of cars from the ’90s—cars that are more than deserving of their reputations. The past 10 years might very well go down as the peak hypercar era—the Bugatti Ve

“Maybe we were led to expect too much.” Even on the first page of the first test of GM’s all-new Saturn in our November 1990 issue, the sense of disappointment was palpable. For years, we’d been told Saturn would be a wondercar built in a factory of

In the 1980s, Chevrolet Corvette engineers received an assignment as ambitious as it was simple: Build the world’s best-performing production car. They delivered the 1990 Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1, a monstrously powerful and furiously quick car that ke

No other version of the VW Golf is more emblematic of 1990s style and hues than the Harlequin, a car with a backstory as wild as its quad-color paint job. Diehard VW fans and retro car enthusiasts are familiar with the Harlequin, but the wacky hatchb

It begins with the shifter. The visual connection is obvious—it’s the same shift knob, and not by accident—but it goes deeper, all the way to the transmission it operates. More than any other single part, though, the shifter in the 2023 Honda Civic T

Debate continues about when and where the tuner scene began, but like the hot-rodding and lowriding movements that came before, it’s now a deeply ingrained part of the automotive landscape. The culture, largely centered on compact cars, is today cate

Fashion trends in the 1990s were brutal. The music was better than today’s, sure, but watch an old Seinfeld rerun—why is everyone dressed like an outcast from the Eddie Bauer catalog? Or what about the clothes on Friends? Or worse, the hair? That wei

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ENGINES in the 1990s we saw such improvements as high-pressure gasoline direct injection, which cools the intake charge as the fuel evaporates, allowing higher compression ratios for better performance and economy. The Mitsubishi Galant was first to

A large swath of American drivers today have always known Lexus as an established power player. But when Lexus unveiled its first car, the LS, at the Detroit auto show in January 1989, America had a lot to learn about Toyota’s upstart luxury brand. T

Long-term tests aren’t new. Putting a vehicle through its paces over several months had long been a car magazine staple, but it wasn’t until the ’90s that MotorTrend’s program began to look like the Garage you know today. The shift began in September

The scent hits you first, an undeniably vintage odor of tired adhesives outgassing their last vapors through weathered vinyl. This M3 has none of the rich olfactory effect you get when entering a new BMW, no luxurious animal hides, just a sliver of s