Is the trend your friend? Exploring the interior shape and material use across Australian ‘Car of the Year’ winners

As car interiors transition toward emerging sustainable materials, exploring historical patterns of material use may inform future iteration and adoption. While automotive exterior literature is abundant, historical studies of interior trend evolution are rare. This study investigates over 60 years of interior material and form trends using Australian Wheels magazine’s annual ‘Car of the Year’ winners (1963-2024). Objective visual observations of 57 car interior image-sets built an abductive-coded matrix, followed by visual pattern analysis. This identified a cyclical trend in metal usage, and an evolutionary transition of gloss to matte surface finishes. Subjective scoring of interior shape using scales of simple-complex and curved-angular generated a scatterplot demonstrating form language evolution across the four quadrants. This study contributes to Australian car history literature and establishes a replicable visual analysis method to explore similar datasets globally, paving the way for a comparable body of material-form data in interior automotive research.