From a design perspective... all that the current "retro" trend tells me is that American car designers are out of good fresh ideas. EVERY American car company is going retro... ford brought back the old mustang and thunderbird look, chevy is bringing back the old camaro look, now this from Dodge. In the design world, it looks really bad. I'm not the only one who has the "out of fresh ideas" notion about American auto design. The consequences of that are going to be felt for a while. Because what's happening is that when designers graduate from school and start looking for jobs, they want to work with the forward-thinking design firms. The "it" auto design houses to work for are Pininfarina (obviously), Audi, DesignWorks (BMW), and Honda. The cream of the crop designers have always gone to the first three, and then it almost becomes like a draft pick, and it trickles down from there. Round 2 picks would go to Nissan, Benz, etc.. Round 3 to Toyota, VW... and it goes on and on. With American design being basically stale as far as designers are concerned, their design houses are moving farther and farther to the bottom of the list. Why should a young designer want to work for them and re-make a car that was made 40 years ago when they can work for Toyota and build concepts that push the limits of what is possible using today's most up to the minute technology? Because of that, American design houses are going to start getting the "bottom of the bucket" designers. The people who eeked through school and are just mediocre designers. From time to time I'm sure there will be the people who are good and had childhood aspirations of desiging Fords, for example, and will go to them, but for the most part, by doing retro vehicle after retro vehicle, these companies are shooting themselves in the foot.

That vicious cycle that I was just talking about has basically been happening since the early 90s, and to be honest, I blame it on the reason that domestic companies are moving to the retro idea in the first place. Domestic companies have been left in the dust by European and Japanese (primarily) companies, and the few new cars that have come out in the last 15-20 cars have been mostly junk. There's a few that are doing ok, but your basic lineup of vehicles has remained the exact same. By the time an American company DOES come out with a new vehicle, take the Cadillac XLR convertible, they have dumped so much money into getting a good design on it that the price of the vehicle is through the roof.

Long story short, I'm tired of seeing retro cars, and if American companies know what's good for them, they will knock it off, take their heads out of the 60s and 70s, and catch up with the rest of the world.