[saltcured]

I think you're partly talking about the side effects of safety changes. An older car could feel like a "green house" with lots of glass and small frames. The cabin was also less protected, so the volume of empty space inside was closer to the volume of the outer skin of that section of the car. Thin doors, not much between you and the engine compartment firewall, wheel wells, etc.

But I also wonder if you were a kid back then. Everything seemed larger when we were small. I can look at the garage in my parents 50 year old house and realize that cars back then fit in the same spaces as cars now, and were roughly the same footprint as far as worrying about the exact position so that you could still open the door to get in or out of the parked car.

[yamtaddle]

Oh, yeah, it's a combination of safety changes and shape-optimization for fuel efficiency. I didn't say it was bad, just that it's less-pleasant to go on a lazy Sunday drive in a modern car than it was in cars back when taking an aimless drive was a fairly common leisure activity.

I've been in some of those older cars more recently and yeah, they're just big and feel very open—and, anyway, these cars' being common pre-dates my childhood; though, even my sporty late-90s high school sedan felt more open than newer cars, because it was, due to all those safety changes—better visibility, less of a feeling of the car's interior trying to crush in toward you—and it wasn't a spacious-interior car for the time.