Humans have a natural proclivity for picking out patterns. It’s probably evidence of the survival of the fittest as those proto-human hairy apes that were most adept at picking out out the leopard’s camouflage from the background waving grass were the most likely to survive and get busy with their other sharp-eyed hairy ape brethren.

That’s a possible basis for our seemingly short attention spans when it comes to car styling, responding positively to annual changes in tail light texture or under bumper shape. And for some reason – another pattern perhaps – it seems like every decade of the auto era has seen a major shift in automotive styling. Oh, that shift may take place  a year or so before or after the start of a new decade, but it’s close enough that yo could easily define the ten-year stretch by the major styling themes inherent in those collected model years.

And some of those styling changes – defining one decade over the one just past – have been more dramatic than others. Major shifts in dimension and materials use, made possible by the steady march of technologies, have driven them. Despite that, it seems that as technology has become even more rapidly changing the styling shifts in automobiles from one decade to the next have been inversely less monumental. Sort of a reverse-Moore’s law for car styling. Whatever the case, what decade do you think has had the most striking automotive styling shift from the one previous?

Image: [Alex Shatan via Flickr]