Perhaps this question came to me because I'm reading All Corvettes Are Red or perhaps because I've been exposed to some C4 hate of late. I also realize a vehicles "looks" are subjective and that being a C4 owner posting in a C4 section may be preaching to the choir. I love all Corvettes and worked on and around them professionally for years, but, purely from an appearance perspective, I like the C5s the least by a wide margin.

Haters always seem to point to the C4 as dated. The interior, especially the early ones, I can see as a product of their time. The exterior, I personally think, has aged well. Palmer's tight, yet somewhat restrained lines hold up well to me. There doesn't seem to be anything glaring or screaming "dated". It seems very evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Perhaps the long model run through the bulk of two decades helps. Yet, every other person somehow complains that they seem dated. I guess they fall into that chasm of not new and not classic.

I didn't think too much of the C5's styling when new. The mechanicals were a great improvement of course, even if I still prefer the fighter cockpit of a C4. I time goes on, I find more and more I actually dislike about the C5's looks. The colossal rear end was the first turn off. Its not just the billboard sized flat tail light panel but the whole rear of the car seems a touch bloated. The way the rear glass tapers back from the pillars only seems to emphasize this. The crisp, tautness of the C4 is gone and replaced with what I jokingly call a "melted stick of butter" appearance. The way the front turn signal/intake area droops down, sagging toward the front license plate cover does no favors. What I find interesting is all the issues I have with the C5 styling were fixed or at least addressed to a degree with the C6 which makes me wonder if I'm not alone. Again, perhaps I'm just perplexed as I'm reading how enthused people were with the C5's looks as it was styled in All Corvettes Are Red.

Not trying to start a flame war. My opinions on C5 styling aren't any more valid than the next guy's. I just want to understand what folks see in the C5 from a looks perspective. I figured I ask here first to see if civil discourse was possible before asking those in the C5 section next.

 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
I've had 3 C4s, a C5 and a C6. I share some of the OP opinions on the C5. However from owning one for 3 years it grew on me. Styling wise the C6 is way better than the C5, IMHO. C4 is simple clean sports car lines I haven't tired of in 26 years!

 

The C4 has some weak design cues of its own. It looks best from a 3/4 rear view.
Straight side view is acceptable.
Front views, either head-on or quartering the C4 is very weak, even the later ones.

Beauty is ALWAYS in the eye of the beholder. I think the (non-Z06) C5 is a beautiful car even from the rear.

 

They both appeal to me, however I have noticed that the digital dash and 80's look of the early interiors is more nostalgic to some but "dated" to others - I personally like it and identify it as "unapologetically 80's"

 

The C4 has perfect fundamental proportions, and it's a very small car overall. Those are its strengths. I think they are beautiful cars, both versions of them. In the last few years especially, Chevy made them much more softly sprung, so they had to have much higher ride height. That looked goofy. However, once you lower one of those cars a little, they are absolutely stunning. With 11" wheels front and rear, they become so good looking that people randomly give you compliments on a regular basis when you have the car out in public.

The C5/6/7 all have one fundamental problem: with their rear transaxles, Chevy had to push the rear axle line way back, but they tried to keep the same overall look of earlier gens with a long-hood/short-rear-deck style. This screws up those cars' proportions, and you can't really change that. This is why they all have vertically huge rear fascia, and it's also why they all have staggered wheel diameters: Chevy was trying to disguise the weird proportions. In the C5s, the FRC and Z06 were the most successful designs because they truncated the rear glass and just acknowledged the large rear deck. The C6 and 7 handled the rear glass taper better and look a little better. The smaller design details on the C5s are still great, keeping the pop-up headlights and round rear tail lights. Because they are such big cars, wider wheels and tires help them a lot.

 

As the owner of a C4, C7, and C8, I feel that most of the love for the C4 is nostalgia. The vast majority of people that feel its the best corvette are roughly the age where the C4 was once their poster car. That being said, that's just a personal experience and its all subjective. When I got my C4, it was white with red interior, looked extremely plain, had some very worn sawblades on it. It didn't look in any way aggressive to me and was extremely lackluster in the stock performance department (both of my 4-cylinders at the time were considerably quicker). My neighbor thought it was the greatest thing he had ever seen.

I personally don't like the look of the C4. At the same time, I do occasionally see them that look spectacular. MathewMiller's profile picture looks incredible to me, so does the GS I'm seeing in the ad at the bottom of this page. I feel that the stock wheels hold them back a lot, and a good set of wheels can leap the look of the C4 forward considerably. Color makes a big difference.

This picture for example. If I had to choose things the C5 does better than the C4: Wheels (functionally better sizing), roof line (more aerodynamic), lack of the wrap around molding on the C4 (purely cosmetic on the C4), improved fender vent design (a number of admittedly small benefits). I also prefer the styling of each of these on the C5. The boxy vs round thing is obviously personal preference, but I'm not a fan of "squared" 80s styling. Again, I understand this is a preference.

 

I've always found the C5 very dated/period looking and a huge aesthetic downgrade from the C4.

Whereas the C4 is tight, lean, and very restrained, where every single line of the car seems to adhere to a particular logic they were employing in its creation, the C5 comes off as arbitrary. That 90s soap bar aesthetic, which was an over reaction to the hard lines of the 80s, has not aged well. It never appealed to me at all, even at the time.

To my eye, there's no cohesive logic wrought into the shapes of the C5. It's a collection of seemingly spur of the moment decisions by the person holding fistfulls of wet clay. The irregular oblong cutouts in the front grille, slightly canted off horizontal for no apparent reason other than someone thought it might look "cool." The addition of two smaller cutouts directly below those, separated in rather glaring fashion. The vertical straightening of the rocker panels where the C4's were radically tucked under, making the car appear less girthy. The C5 looks bloated and massive in comparison. And, as Matthew Miller noted, the stretched wheelbase only degrades the overall proportions.

And that *** end. This was the point at which GM became obsessed with the notion of Corvette drivers carrying two sets of golf clubs around. What a pathetic and absurd parameter to force upon what is supposed to be a sports car. Even Dave McLellan laments what they did to the proportions of the C5 in his book. The staggered wheels hardly disguise the fact that it's butt is like three sizes too large. From the rear, it's a billboard. Set off by the gross oval taillights. Even those four iconic circles couldn't escape the great melting of the 90s.

It's a shame that all the great mechanical and technical leaps forward in the C5 were let down by its mediocre styling. Sometimes when I'm walking back to my car in a parking lot and get a good view from far away where there's little perspective distortion, I'm just blown away by how amazing and timeless it looks, perfect in proportion from every angle. This never happens with C5s. They just look unbalanced and silly in comparison.

Okay, now let's do the C8! I'll start. It looks like it was drawn by a room full of 12 year olds who missed their ritalin for three days in a row.


Here's a picture of one of the early C5 concepts demonstrating the proportions the designers wanted, overlaid with the production version and its giant golf club stuffed rectum.

 

They all have their place in my mind. I think the C8 is the only one that I am meh about, mainly because it is trying to be something no one wanted it to be. Performance, it is a great car though.

I like the C7s too. Every model has a killer variant.

 

For the C4 I always felt that the styling change in 91 was an improvement over the 84-90 years. In my dream wish list of Corvettes of course I'd want a split window or a late 60's big block. Of all the generations From C5 through C8 I like the styling of the C7s.best.

 

This describes me to a T. I wouldn't mind getting another '80-'82 at some point. If the only thing I cared about was performance, I might have gotten something entirely different to begin with.

 

Standard disclaimer: It's all personal preference.

I'm in the OP's camp.

Frankly, the C5 and C6 are all cut from the C4 cloth. Evolutionary.

Maybe my perspective comes from growing up in the C3 era and coming of age when the C4 arrived. The C3 was rather revolutionary in 1968. Unfortunately, it was revolutionary in the worst possible time in our culture. It's the automotive equivalent of a Leisure Suit.

The fact that they're made from polyester resin isn't mere irony.

So then, the C4 arrives and takes the legitimate, critical elements from the C3 and tones them down into a subtle style that the artistic eye discerns. It doesn't scream in your face like a campus protester.

The next two generations were effectively rehashes of the C4s proportions, just bloated and blobbier. Personally, I have a hard time telling C5s, 6s and sometimes 7s apart from alternately the front or the rear depending on what I'm looking at. Oval taillights, round taillights, popup headlights, fixed headlights. To me, they did their styling exercises alternately on the front and the back. Evolutionary.

And for reference, my subjective opinion is that the C2 is the most visually appealing Corvette.

 

The C4 is a raw sports car especially early production years and rides like it.
The C5 is much more refined but given the choice between them I would always opt for the C4

 

I used to own a 1995 C4 and I currently own a 2000 C5. Lets just say, I could never go back to a C4. The interior is so much easier to get in and out of and I love having the analog gauges with a heads up display. I even like the exterior looks a little better on the C5, especially the front and side views.

 

I'll actually go out on a limb and admit the C4 was not my "poster car", despite reaching driving age in the middle of the C4's lifespan. I was (and still am to a degree) a C3 fan. The C4 looked boring to me as a kid by comparison. I first saw the C5 at the Baltimore International Auto Show and the kid inside me hoped we'd see a return of the C3 design cues, lol. Not so.

The older I got, the more the appreciative I got of the C4's looks. Its does look balanced and actually smallish, especially compared to the C5s which look like wide, rolling king-sized waterbeds coming down the street at you. Of course as my taste matured and I began to really like the car's looks, respect for the C4 in general went down and it became "cool" to hate on the car. Despite being hamstrung in some cases, from a technical standpoint, the C4 was a massive leap forward into a world class car. If anything, I lost respect for the way GM let the C3 age into a bloated boulevard cruiser, a mockery of its former self. But they sold them as quick as the made them so there was little incentive. None of that seemed to matter and the C4 remains the Corvette the hate for average car or non-car person.

I like curves (you have to if you love a C3) but I also like crisp lines. This is one point where the C5 falls apart as blob-ish and the C6 regains some of the goods looks. C4s still have both, even if the curves are subdued. At least some of the points brought up about the packaging restraints like the golf clubs/trunk requirement and the trans-axle, plus having the wheels pushed further to the corners of the car explain how the C5 got to where it did. I guess I'm just more of a Mclellan/Palmer fan vs a Hill/Cafaro fan. As others have said beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there's no "right" answer.

 

Well thanks! And just because you said that, take this! As with my Avatar pic, these next two are with the car on 18x11 Forgestar CF5 wheels with 315/30/18 tires:

This is the money shot:

Older pic with the previous owner driving at MSR Houston on 17x11.5 CCW Classic three-piece wheels and 315/35/17 tires:

Same previous owner, same track, but on AFS 17x11 A-Mold replicas with 315/35/17 tires.


Ride height (low but not stupidly low) and modern-width wheels and tires really bring out the aggression in a C4. I generally like the curvy 92+ models better, too, but I still like the early C4 design a lot as well. Also, the gills on the 95/96 are the best ones IMO.

The early "squared-off" C4s look pretty damn good when subjected to similar - but more extreme - treatment as my 96 was. Here is a pic of Kenny Mitchell's (goes by "nokones" in this forum) early car:

 

Beautiful!

 

I like almost all Corvettes with the rubber bumper C3s and the C8 being my least favorite of them. I LOVE the pre-facelift C4s (the original design was just so clean and tight). I came of driving age during the early C4 years and had it as a poster car as well. I've owned a couple of them and now have an '89 Vert that I really like. I see it as a time-capsule representation of an 80s icon and expect nothing more from it than to perform to that standard. It is what it is and I love it for that. As for the C5s, I really do like their styling as well and would like to find a minty, blue FRC.

2cam

 

My brother has a C-5...I tell him it's the Fat A$$ look!

 

My favorite car ever. I loved it so much I bought it twice...would have bought a third time but it ended up in New Hampshire! No one is 100 percent! This was a 1987 and my favorite of all the corvettes I have owned (5).

Kevin

 

Both C4 and C5 look great in their own ways. I always thought the C6 looked better than the C5 but I now think the opposite. I think I prefer the longer stance of the C5 and maybe I just like big butts🤷🏻