1990s

Anyone who lived through the 1990s (or has watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air)  knows that the fashion of the decade included a whole lot of color blocking. While you might expect to see this sort of bold color scheme on a sweater-vest or leggings, it’s not something that turned up regularly on vehicles of the era.

You can currently buy a production BMW roadster in the form of the Z4. Here’s another very different 2-seater designed by the German automaker. The BMW Just 4/2 was actually the winner of an internal design competition at BMW back in 1995.

I kind of consider the 1990s my “lost decade” – I didn’t really care for mainstream music, movies, or cars during most of that period. Sure, there were some outliers like Radiohead, The Matrix, and the Nissan Skyline, but for the most part, I didn’t really connect with pop culture.

I’ll go on record now and say that the 1990s wasn’t exactly my favorite decade for automotive design. Cars became more and more homogeneous in style, and mediocre performance seemed to be the name of the game during those days, with none-too-thrilling cars like the Dodge Neon, the Pontiac Trans Sport, and the Ford Tempo.

Today, the market is filled with compact crossovers like the Kia Soul and the Mazda CX-3. But there was a time when there really wasn’t such a thing. Perhaps the first such production vehicle was the seldom seen, but now beloved Isuzu VehiCROSS.

If you have ever looked at a late ’90s Cadillac and thought what it really needs is a second Northstar V8 in the trunk and bizarrely designed sheet metal, I have found your ride. What you see here is something dubbed the “TwinStar” that was made by Mosler back in the late ’90s, and it’s now up for auction on eBay.