You need to distinguish design trends from what the regulation enforced.
The most obvious examples that come to mind:
- Small cars aren't that small anymore to stop them from being blatant death traps.
- A lot of the edges have been smoothed and curved to make impact with pedestrians less deadly (also killed pop-up lights and hood ornaments, which is kinda funny considering the Mercedes Benz hood ornament was sometimes jokingly described as a sight to aim for pedestrians)
- Thick A pillars due to crash tests regulations
While I can blame these for killing out novel or even trademark features of some vehicles lineups, I don't think alone they made everyone homogenize their design, it's just what the industry eventually converged on by themselves.
Look at phones, there's no regulation on what a phone should look like, yet today phones are just a fancy screen, nothing like the incredible variety that Nokia alone sported back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
The most obvious examples that come to mind:
- Small cars aren't that small anymore to stop them from being blatant death traps.
- A lot of the edges have been smoothed and curved to make impact with pedestrians less deadly (also killed pop-up lights and hood ornaments, which is kinda funny considering the Mercedes Benz hood ornament was sometimes jokingly described as a sight to aim for pedestrians)
- Thick A pillars due to crash tests regulations
While I can blame these for killing out novel or even trademark features of some vehicles lineups, I don't think alone they made everyone homogenize their design, it's just what the industry eventually converged on by themselves.
Look at phones, there's no regulation on what a phone should look like, yet today phones are just a fancy screen, nothing like the incredible variety that Nokia alone sported back in the late 90s/early 2000s.