Why Cars Get Facelifted And Why Some Are More Successful Than Others

Time, for better or worse comes for us all. Our bodies age and no longer function as well as they used to. Not much can be done to reverse the internal degradation, but external adjustments can help delay the inevitable. I’ve been prescribed reading glasses for a couple of years now, but stubbornly refuse to wear them, because I’m president of the vain goths club. The technology to upload my brain into the synthetic body of my dreams hasn’t been invented yet, so I’ll either have to put up with this shit state of affairs or start looking at package holidays to somewhere hot and with a lax attitude to cosmetic surgery.

The humble automobile is not immune to cosmetic improvements either. It’s not only the surface that gets tweaked and updated throughout a model’s lifetime. Constant improvements under the skin take place pretty much as soon as a new model is being stamped out on the production line. It’s not a new thing that Tesla invented. OEMs have been carrying out rolling upgrades for decades. Grab an old car magazine and read any road test from decades back and somewhere in the copy there will be a list of tweaks that have been made to justify the testing of the latest model. Incremental improvements happen because cars are so complicated even with massive development programs and thousands of test miles, it’s not possible to get everything perfect for launch. Building cars by the thousand in three shifts is a more complicated endeavor than hand assembling pilot builds, so ramp up snafus are common. Chimp fisted customers who could break an anvil subject their vehicles to the types of abuse development drivers have nightmares about, so they expose weaknesses and failure points that might need remedial fixes. Or dealers might complain about the lack of a third shade of silver being available, so can the product mix and paint selection be altered please? All this is a long winded way of saying you shouldn’t buy a car in the first year of production.

Despite these incremental quality of life updates, every so often a more substantial overhaul is required. The shelf life of a model in a manufacturers range is usually about seven to eight years, although it can be a lot longer or a lot shorter. Anything on sale for that amount of time is going to require some nips and tucks somewhere along the line. They normally happen after about four years or so on sale, but the scope of a facelift, or to use a wanky designer term ‘mid-cycle refresh’ varies significantly according to circumstance and business necessity.

They’re Not Done For Cynical Reasons

Rampant advances in consumer technology over the last couple of decades has led to unrealistic expectations of what it is possible to update in a car: infotainment systems for instance have to be automotive rated (like flight rated but not quite such a high standard) and take years to develop. They have to work in extremes conditions and cost millions of dollars that has to be amortized. This is why these systems lag behind the phone in your pocket. Unlike your phone though, they shouldn’t crap out when subjected to Arizona heat or sub-Alaskan cold. It’s not just digital features – sometimes regulation can force change. When I was at Land Rover one particular model was stuck in mid-cycle refresh purgatory for years because there wasn’t the space anywhere to put the battery pack for a plug-in hybrid version, which was needed to avoid the swinging EU fines for going over allowed emissions limits. Eventually the facelifted model did hit the market, but there’s still no plug-in version available, and won’t be until an all new model on a more flexible platform is released.

 

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Facelifts don’t happen for cynical reasons. Once on sale, a car takes two to three years to pay back its design, development and investment costs and start turning a profit. So a long shelf life is an economic necessity in the auto business where the margins are tight. It amuses me when people throw around terms like planned obsolescence when General Motors used to update sheet metal every year with the sole purpose of encouraging customers to buy new cars. That was relatively easy to do when everything was body on frame, but by the time the Japanese turned up with properly built cars in the seventies, bolting new sheet metal on an old frame every year was no longer sustainable. Thanks to the advance of digital tools in the studio, the way cars are constructed and the sheer amount of stuff that has to be packed into them, everything is much more integrated now. It all fits together like an intricate three dimensional jigsaw, so the scope for big appearance changes is much more limited.

In putting together this article, with a little help from my nemesis The Bishop I came up with a list of facelifted cars, and then made a note of whether I considered them bad or good. It would be arrogant of me to say that the original version of a car is always best because it’s closest to the designer’s intent, but there was far more dross than delight. That being said, something I’ve talked about before is that car development and production is planned out years in advance and the timescales for the most part are immovable, so sometimes the design studio has to put down their pens and stop pissing about. You have to go with what you’ve got, knowing you can attempt to fix it come facelift time. The best way to discuss this is to have a look at some successful and not-so successful facelifts and see what we think.

Alfa Romeo Spider

The Alfa Spider had been on sale since 1966 and had three substantial make overs before it underwent the knife one final time in 1990. The overall sales figures were not that great, but after 24 years on sale it was probably all gravy. A new, front wheel drive model was on the slate for 1994, but what probably forced Alfa Romeo into keeping the original on sale for a few more years was the arrival of the Miata in 1990.

The original Duetto Spider was clearly a product of the 1960s. The discipline of car design had advanced out of all recognition by 1990, and the final Spider demonstrates the difficulty of upgrading such an old car. Lengthening and reducing the height of the tail reintroduces some of the elegance of the boat-tail original, painting the bumpers body color makes them look more integrated and of the nineties. I don’t think it’s without its charm though. There’s something quite endearing about the ham-fistedness of this fourth generation car that works better than the black plastic tat adorning the third generation model it replaced.

Verdict: Might not get you into bed with Mrs. Robinson, but still likable.

Jaguar F-Type

One of the best looking cars of recent memory came from my old friends at Gaydon – the Jaguar F-Type. Jaguar had long wanted to replace the E-Type, and after several false starts and cancelled projects the F-Type finally emerged in 2014. As perfect a design as has ever emerged from a design studio, it looked every inch the modern fast cat. The problem was Jaguar didn’t really know what they wanted the F-Type to be: it was oddly positioned in the market against the 911 but without the benefit of +2 rear seats.

Jaguar cocked about with different powertrains and various not-so-special editions, but the worst crime was neutering the F-Type’s looks come facelift time in 2019. Gone were the sensational headlights and in came a boring family look. What was once an individual looking sports car now had a bland front like the rest of the Jaguar range, and no one was buying those cars, either.

Verdict: The E-Type got worse as it got older as well.

Dodge Challenger

I’ve made no attempt to hide my love for the Dodge Challenger. When it entered production in 2008 the surfacing and proportions were clean and modern, leaving the quad headlights and full width taillights to hit the retro pleasure center. An energy drink sugar rush of nostalgia based on a butchered LX platform with a ton of Mercedes bits, the interior was greyer and more depressing than a wet Monday in Gary, Indiana, but it didn’t matter. Shrewd marketing and an all things to all customers model line up ensured it sold and sold.

Realizing they had a money printing machine on their hands, Chrysler didn’t facelift the Challenger until 2015, a full seven years after it went on sale. Industry convention says they should have been readying a replacement, but not wanting to spoil a good thing Chrysler wisely brought the old horse right up to date. There was an improved dashboard and interior with better materials, and the front and rear graphics came into line with prevailing fashions with halo quad lights up front and racetrack taillights out back.

The center section of the grill was made more aggressive (yes I realize not all the new models got the aggressive grill but trying to parse which versions had what was too tedious), and Dodge cunningly kept bolting in more and more powerful V8s, as well as releasing a series of shameless throwback special editions. It worked brilliantly, giving the Challenger another seven years of life and incredibly, an increase in sales.

Verdict: Rare example of the facelift improving the original car.

XJ Jeep Cherokee

Another Chrysler legend with an extremely long shelf life, by the mid-nineties the XJ Cherokee was very much looking its age after 13 years on sale with no major updates. Jeep gave the old stager a thorough going over inside and out, tidying up the side moldings, sprucing up the interior with a new dashboard, and bolting on a softer, more aerodynamic nose. It was still very much the Cherokee everybody knew and loved, just subtly tweaked and made a bit more cohesive for the nineties.

These changes enabled the XJ to remain on sale for another four years until it was not really replaced at all by the ghastly KJ Liberty (which bizarrely was still called the Cherokee in Europe).

Verdict: An earlier Chrysler product where the facelift was arguably better than the first version. Mopar seems to have a bit of a knack for this.

Chevrolet Camaro SS (6th Gen)

Going back to muscle cars, the General has plenty of clangers in the cupboard they like to drop every now and then, and they did just that when in 2019 they facelifted the Camaro. Opening up the somewhat squinty and squashed graphic of the 2016 sixth generation car, for the SS trim level Chevrolet weirdly moved the bow tie emblem from the grill to a black cross bar running between body elements jutting into the front fascia from the fenders.

This redesign was met with howls of derision from pretty much everyone with eyes, so Chevrolet was forced to emergency facelift the car just one year later after showing a better version at SEMA. Again, it’s a redesign that’s so successful it’s arguably what should have been released in the first place, which makes me wonder if it was an alternate proposal that was initially rejected.

Verdict: They got it right eventually, although the non-SS versions were fine. Typical GM.

Chevrolet Camaro (4th Gen)

Sticking with the Camaro, what happened to the fourth generation car? When it appeared in 1993 it was a swoopy, organic update of the themes that had appeared on the seminal third generation in 1982. The laid back windscreen, wrap-over rear windshield and blacked out quad headlight openings were all slicked off and smoothed out ready for the nineties.

Six years later that classic down the road graphic was binned for a blobby, anonymous front clip that looked more like a Chrysler 300M than a snarling muscle car. What’s worse is this was the Camaro GM finally decided to sell in Europe, in one of their half-assed export adventures. Yep, we finally got the Camaro officially and they sent us the ugly one. Good old GM.

Verdict. Jesus throw it back into the ocean!

Ford Cortina

We’ve looked at long life facelifts, good and bad facelifts, and the emergency facelift. We could do this all day, but let’s wrap up with the expedient facelift – done to keep a car in production for a few more years because the replacement isn’t ready and you need to wring a few more years of sales out of the existing car. A while back I wrote about the Ford Sierra and what a seismic shock it was not just for the market but for car design in general. The problem for Ford at the time was they were chasing their tails trying to figure out how to replace the UK’s favorite three box sedan of the seventies, the Cortina (Taunus in Germany). Market research told them by the beginning of the go-go eighties, customers would become more discerning and design literate, so Ford was going to have to come up with something sensational.

Realizing at the time existing proposals were not it, Bob Lutz cancelled the program and ordered a restart. This would kick the Sierra replacement a couple of years further down the road, so he instigated an emergency facelift of the existing TC2 Mk IV Cortina to become the TC3 Mk V Cortina, enabling it to remain on sale for a further three years, giving Ford breathing space to develop the Sierra.

Although the two cars appear superficially similar, side by side they share almost nothing externally. Even the roof was flattened out to be more aerodynamic. The TC3 gained wrap around indicators and the slatted aero grill to bring it into line with newer Fords, and the taillights were extended and gained a sawtooth surface treatment. Coupled with the usual Ford trick of trowelling on the features and trim and doing basically nothing to the mechanicals, this design sleight of hand worked to the extent that early in 1982 customers preferred the Cortina over its replacement.

Verdict: Good but conservative and demonstrated why the Sierra was such a shock.

These days facelifts usually amount to new lights and new bumpers, as these are relatively straightforward to do without expensive changes to the sheet metal. Although lights are probably the second most expensive part of a car to tool up for after the body in white, given the importance OEMs place on the down the road graphic and the rapid advances in lighting technology, changing them is a reasonably cost effective way of giving an existing model a glow up.

Remember what I said about facelifts also giving you the chance to fix in post something you couldn’t get right for launch? If you’re ever stuck in traffic behind a Discovery 5, the pre-facelift version has tiny brake lights because they couldn’t be integrated into the main lit element in time. So that was a quick bodge to get them out of jail and made sure the car wasn’t delayed. Come facelift time this was sorted, but they didn’t take the opportunity to change the most controversial part of the car, that stupid off center license plate.

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