This young couple knows what colour floats their boat.

The 1970s are known for a lot of things – Watergate, the Oil Crisis, disco, leisure suits, ABBA – but it will also be known for a singular colour.

Brown.

Yes, the crayon everyone ignores was the shade of choice in this heady, wide-lapelled decade. Its offshoots were there too – tan, beige, bronze, copper – rounding out a colour palate that went perfectly with sunflower yellow and olive green, seemingly the next most popular shades.

Proudly carrying the brown flag for GM was the Pontiac Catalina.

Definitely, you wanted a car that matched your wardrobe, kitchen, rec room, and drinking glasses. (Check out how far the indoor trend went here.)

As everyone knows, I have a distinct passion for land yachts of this era. Yes, show me a Baroque barge with a detuned engine and a landau roof, and I’ll start salivating like Pavlov’s dog.

So long, so heavy, so underperforming, so plush, and often, so BROWN. These are the cars that would be piloted by a bad guy’s henchmen as they shadowed Jim Rockford or Detective Kojak through the grimy streets of Gerald Ford-era America.

Gazing at one of these block-long wonders, you can almost smell the velour (or vinyl) seats, deep-pile carpet and fake wood veneer that lurks within, waiting to surprise a lucky driver with an explosion of tacky opulence.

Everything about them hinted at a decadent lifestyle of excitement and pleasure, slathered in brown (brown everywhere!), just like in this homoerotic, Japanese cologne commercial starring Charles Bronson:

Nothing lasts forever, as the saying goes, and as the decade drew to a close, so did the earth-toned excess. A new era of taste and sophistication was dawning – one that would bring pastel shirts and rayon blazers, neon bike shorts, turbocharged fours, cocaine-filled speedboats and minivans.

The fuselage-bodied Chryslers and Lincoln-Mercury barges of the early 70s adopted the brown motif like it was going out of style. Which it was.

With hindsight being 20/20, maybe the gold/brown/orange/tan/beige/copper/bronze paint and polyester of the ’70s wasn’t the worst thing ever thrust on Western society.

While the earth tones era covered seemingly everything in a layer of mud, its important to remember that car colours regularly go through phases of popularity.

Who can forget the ‘champagne metallic’ (bright beige) cars of the mid-to-late 1990s?

And how about silver? At one point in the previous decade, nearly half of new vehicles hitting the road were silver.

What’s funny about these phases is that in the early years of motoring, few cars were any colour other than black. Ford Model T ads of the early 20th century poked fun at this byproduct of assembly line manufacturing, declaring that a customer could have any colour they wanted, as long as it was black.

In the late 1950s, customers of nearly every manufacturer could order tri-coloured cars in dozens of combinations. Tu-tone colour combinations lasted until the 1980s, though were not nearly as popular by then.

‘Elite’ is right. No one would argue with that color.

Nowadays, it’s normal to see a car or crossover offered in just five colours – usually black, white, grey/silver, blue and red.

Why the consolidation? Ask a manufacturer. Dollars and cents. Too much choice affects the bottom line, as there will always be an unpopular option that can be jettisoned. ‘Close enough’ rules when car colours are concerned.

After all, it’s the car and all that technology and luxury underneath the paint you’re interested in, right? Why offer limitless paint colours when we can settle on an abbreviated palate that satisfies most people most of the time.

Heck, offering questionable colours could leave some cars sitting unsold on the lot!

So predictable are today’s colours that it’s nice to see someone offering choice, even if it’s something you or I wouldn’t go for. Hats off to Dodge for taking that plunge.

I give them four out of four ABBA’s for their bravery.

The death row ’59 Edsel shined… on paper, at least.

The enduring saga of the ill-fated Edsel is like a dog-eared copy of To Kill a Mockingbird – a cautionary lesson, wrapped in Americana, about the failures of man and the processes that are supposed to guide, protect and lend stability to society.

And everyone knows the ending.

The short-lived Ford Motor Company marque was one of the biggest marketing failures in corporate history, but the jokes and comparisons live on to this day.

And so does the advertising, spawned from the colourful brushes of commercial artists during the heady (and boozy) heyday of American ad men.

Only a year after the Edsel landed in the marketplace with a thud and a fizzle, its fate was sealed by a bean-counting exec named Robert McNamara – a man determined to chop off the dead weight that was threatening to pull down the entire company.

Before taking the Edsel behind the barn, McNamara, who went on to direct the Vietnam War as Secretary of Defence for presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, first chose to slash the ad budget for the simplified 1959 lineup.

Unlike the ungainly and controversial ’58s that debuted to a dumbfounded and unimpressed American public, the styling of the ’59 Edsel could at least be described as acceptable.

And even though their contracts would be short, the illustrators employed by the downsized advertising team did their best to make the ’59 Edsel look at home in America.

The results looked far better than the car’s future.

2006 Infiniti G35: a canvas waiting for cheese. (IFCAR/Wikimedia)

You know the car.

“Flashy, making a scene, flaunting conventions.” (To quote Mr. Bookman, the hard-boiled library detective from Seinfeld)

Yup, we’re talking about the guy who wants everyone on the block to take notice of his ride.

Aftermarket parts, a burpy exhaust, decals, tinting – the kind of car no father wants to see his daughter get into.

A total heat score.

15 years ago the ride du jour for such characters was a Civic or Accord (Honda remains popular for this, but not nearly as much). Good handling and a peppy engine formed the backbone, while coffee can mufflers, ill-fitting rims, painted mirrors and purple, bubbled tinting made up the rest of the beast.

A close runner-up, usually less obvious and tricked-out than its Honda brethren, was the early 90s Nissan Maxima.

A circa-2006 Infiniti G35 coupe. You’ll hear it before you see it. (IFCAR/Wikimedia)

Since then, the scene has changed a bit and a new heat score has risen to the top (according to this writer’s completely non-scientific observations).

The Infiniti G35/G37, especially those made circa 2002-2010.

Once a fairly conservative intermediate luxury sedan/coupe, this V6-powered, rear-drive import is often seen with massive rims, a matte paint job, and an aftermarket exhaust that screams “Don’t pry in my business or we’ll both get in trouble.”

There’s nothing wrong with lavishing attention on used rear-drive imports with brawny engines – hell, who wouldn’t? – but the act of driving a car that gets you noticed while doing things you don’t want to be noticed doing… well, that seems counter-intuitive.

A former neighbour with a subtly done up early-2000s Accord taught me this lesson. If your otherwise plain ride is seen all over town making brief visits, but you’re not carrying a pizza box into the building, you’re more visible than you think.

Fellas: you can keep the G35 with the slammed suspension and 20-inch rims for social work, but for ‘business’ (whatever that might be, not trying to pry), maybe it would be a good idea to keep a 2008 Impala in reserve.