Last week we solicited your choices for the worst vehicle facelifts, and I sincerely thank you for your participation. The According To You series is nothing without reader feedback, and the examples you found of the worst facelifts are thoughtful and entertaining.
Peter: The “clown face” facelifts of the revised NC Miata (and the RX-8, even if it wasn’t a facelift) were both failures IMHO. I blame Van den Acker (who was briefly global head of design) for both.
David M: 1974 Camaro, along with just about every other car that had to modify their bumpers back then.
TG: As the owner of a 1974 rubber-baby-buggy-bumper Corvette, I would say the Camaro is one of the least objectionable forced facelifts during the era.
eagerdever: I also had a ’74 Corvette. I know I’ll get a lot of flak for this, but, IMHO, it was an improvement over the ’73 and earlier C3s. The one-piece rear bumper cover on the ’75 was a further improvement.
instarx: Any of the Datsun 240Zs, beyond the original 1971-1972 models. The Zs never looked as good as those first years.
Kenny J: I think the horrible bumpers on the 280Z vs the 240Z stands out. I have a 1978 version and took the bumpers off right after purchase and replaced with chrome-style 240Z bumpers. Much cleaner!
Joe K: The 1973 facelift to the C3 Corvette is pretty unfortunate. Sure, it was out of necessity, but man, they’re just don’t exude anywhere near the class and styling of the chrome bumper cars.
Paul I: Larry Shinoda, who designed the 1969 Boss 302 Mustang and the 1973 Corvette, might disagree. He has been quoted as saying the 1973 was his favorite Corvette. He liked the contrast between the front and rear bumpers.
Steve B: I got to be friends with Larry Shinoda not long before he passed. He said the 1973 Corvette was closest to what the designers had in mind. Soft front, chrome rear.
Tim: I don’t think it’s fair to put 5-mph bumper mandate facelifts on this list. This was a federal requirement, and there wasn’t going to be a way around it until manufacturers figured out how they could play around the rules. One could argue that the work-arounds actually made us worse off for it.
What used to be damage to just a bumper became damage to painted body work (bumper covers) and structure behind. That ding that was hardly considered, or a simple two-bolt swap-out suddenly became 4-digit damage. Anyway, mandated changes should be exempt from this discussion. Voluntarily making a car worse is the real issue.
(The G11 7-series BMW was redesigned in 2020 with a very large pair of kidney grilles.)
Scott B: The new BMW grilles—stop following the lead of the other car companies and stick to your roots.
Cozy: Agree! I have a 2017 750xi with M option that “blacks out” the chrome. Grill looks great, one reason I don’t trade it on a new one.
entirelyturbo: With the exception of the third-generation (which barely even counts because it was so subtle), there has never been a good facelift to a Chevy Camaro. The facelift on the second-gen (the loss of the split bumper) is my vote for the second worst, and the 2019 facelift of the sixth-gen Camaro is my vote for the worst.
Jack B: The ’79-81 Pontiac Firebird looks worse than either the ’74-76 version or the ’77-78 version.
David: The mid-cycle fifth-gen Camaro was uglier than the original fifth-gen. They got the taillights right with gen six, but the front just got worse and worse. Such a shame, it outperformed the competition everywhere except sales.
Gary B: The now departed Camaro, which got that one refresh of the front that everyone hated to the point Chevy revised it again the next year. The sales never recovered after that horrible year.
J T: Not even including generation changes, it happened so often at Chevrolet that I couldn’t count. But the worst facelift to my eyes was the 1997 to ’98 Camaro.
Bill H: I don’t expect many to agree, but the early XKE (1963) was about perfect; sleek, balanced, and just simply a joy to look at. Then they had issues with tall people not fitting into the driver’s seat, so they raised the roof height by making the windshield taller. In my opinion, they ended up with a bad-looking car based on one of the best-looking ones ever made.
Porter H: I have to go with something that isn’t TOO bad, but I haven’t seen mentioned: the dual-headlight squarebody GM trucks. I love squarebodies as a whole, but the stacked bricks don’t do it for me.
Desmond G: This isn’t a particularly egregious example, but it’s the first I thought of. I owned a 3rd-gen Integra when the ‘98 models were released, and I never thought the redesigned front facia and rear bumper looked as good as the earlier versions.
It seemed to have a bit of an underbite, unless it had the Integra Type-R front lip, and the fake diffuser in the back just seemed corny. But I did like the change to red turn signals out back.
Guy That Posts Too Much: I’ll throw my own car under the bus too: The early MGA had a grille that followed the contour of the body, but somewhere along the run, someone decided it would be better to have the grille teeth meet the shelf, well before the lower body. It gave the MGA an extreme buck-tooth look.
Guy That Posts Too Much: I thought of another controversial one. I’d probably be happy to have either, but the one-headlight 1956 Corvette looks way cleaner than the double-headlight 1958 model.
eagerdever: I agree. To paraphrase, at the time, someone wrote, nature is the only medium that has been able to attractively place two round objects side by side.
Cozy: My vote for a step backward was the styling of the 1979 to 1980 Corvette. Although I guess they were lighter, the 1980-1982 Corvettes looked bulky, and the hoods were much less cool than the 1973 – 1979 Corvettes.
jbbush: The original Lexus SC300/SC400 (Z30 chassis). The first cars in the series wore a clean, sleek shape, one, aside from a subtle available deck spoiler, without random adornments. Over the run, specifically in the mid-1990s, the bumpers and rockers grew, the nose gained a thin grille, the spoiler bulged, and the taillights sprouted odd chrome trim.
Kind of ruined the whole sleek thing. It felt like a design intern came in and said, “Well, we have to change SOMETHING, so…”
Jack B: The original 1990 GM APV minivans looked a lot better than the 1994 refresh too.
I’m surprised no one mentioned the huge cow-catcher grille Lexus began putting on all their vehicles.
I see my Camaro comment got the top picture. That was such a horribly overstyled front.
Did any version of the Dust Busted Minivans look good? They were not Aztec bad but highly forgettable.
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