There's not really an answer in the article besides not wanting to clearly identify a point in time, and wanting the cars to match in some sense the personalities of the characters that drive them.
The show's aesthetic takes a high dose of "cassette tape futurism", juxtaposing advanced tech with the primitive. Also featured are anachronistic computer terminals, VHS tapes, and music records. The car choices play well with that.
N.B.: Particularly primitive is Lumon's surveillance of severed employees. This hardly makes sense when the chips can be activated remotely, but heavy surveillance would kill the exploratory velocity of the story so that was a good choice, in my opinion.
I very much enjoy Severance, but this illustrates why I'm not a huge fan of mystery stories in general. I spend my time playing "Clue, red herring, or mistake?" Severance clearly invites you to look very, very closely, but there are things that will eventually have to be overlooked. I hope that the show resolves itself before those become aggravating.
I've avoided recommending Severance to a friend, who would enjoy its performances and aesthetic but would be very annoyed at the characters making obvious mistakes.
Patricia Arquette’s car was most disorienting to me. This woman was a high level manager/exec at a very successful company, surely she can afford more than a rabbit.
it's not clear where Severance takes place exactly. But it is wintery and has universities and decrepit fishing towns. So if it's supposed to be New England, i think this makes sense. There are a lot of very successful people in New England who drive old VWs and Subarus.
The office building is a Bell Labs building in Holmdel. The aesthetic of the town feels a bit like upstate New York. But the town of Salt Neck (200m away) was filmed in Newfoundland. So they are going for permanently cold and remote but with familiar elements.
But the cars are not normal for any of those places in the modern era where people own smartphones (as the characters do.) In fact, my parents used to own Ms. Cobel’d exact VW Rabbit in 1983 (in silver) and it was not a great car for snow. They replaced it with multiple successive 4WD Subarus as soon as that was an option. The RWD Volvos are better and kind of timeless New England cars, but I’d imagine those year/models have passed into rust by now except for a few that were exquisitely pampered and kept away from road salt.
The show's aesthetic takes a high dose of "cassette tape futurism", juxtaposing advanced tech with the primitive. Also featured are anachronistic computer terminals, VHS tapes, and music records. The car choices play well with that.
N.B.: Particularly primitive is Lumon's surveillance of severed employees. This hardly makes sense when the chips can be activated remotely, but heavy surveillance would kill the exploratory velocity of the story so that was a good choice, in my opinion.