Forget about looking under the hood. These days, interior decorating counts for more than horsepower. Drab plastic dashboards with a few cup holders just won’t do. Auto-interior designers, once the Rodney Dangerfields of the auto industry, are now crafting sleek postmodern dashboards with metallic finishes and clocks that look like expensive jewelry. What’s driving this look inward? All that time we spend stuck in traffic, for one thing. Today’s road warrior logs an average of 82 minutes a day behind the wheel, more than double the commuting time of 20 years ago, according to the latest federal transportation studies. And drivers have come to expect the same sense of style they see in everything from handbags to coffee makers. Automakers that treat interior design as an afterthought risk being left behind. Says J Mays, Ford’s chief designer: “The tipping point of a sale now is the interior.”

To see how far automotive-interior design has come, take a look inside Ford’s newly redesigned Lincoln Navigator. In the old version, the garish interior was most notable for a bulbous center console its designers dubbed “the bidet.” The new Navigator conjures the corner office. Its clean, minimalist dashboard is covered with a satin nickel finish, accented with glossy burled walnut. At night the Navigator’s interior is awash in cool white lights, modeled on the cockpits of private jets. To get the right shade of white–not too yellow, with a slight blue hue–designers used LED lights that cost 10 times more than standard bulbs.

Haute interior, however, is not reserved for $50,000 SUVs. Some of the cleverest cockpits first appeared in Volkswagens priced under $20,000. The New Beetle blazed trails in 1998 with its interior lighting–red for the switches you touch and iridescent blue for the gauges you look at–along with its bud vase and salad-plate-size speedometer. “VW was the first to bring soul, emotion and character inside the car,” says auto consultant Wes Brown of Nextrend in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Now Honda is getting in the game. Its $28,000 Pilot SUV debuting this summer has rotary gauges designed to look like a Swiss chronograph watch. And to appeal to Gen-Y drivers’ inner designer, Honda is outfitting its boxy $18,000 Element SUV with rubber floors and ballistic nylon seats that look like backpacks, complete with elastic mesh pockets. But for cheap chic, the hot new Mini Cooper’s racy roll-cage interior and space-shuttle-inspired toggle switches are generating the most buzz.

The Mini’s retro roots are a reminder that well-crafted interiors aren’t new. In Detroit’s halcyon postwar days, they made distinctive design statements. The insides of classics like the 1955 Chevy Bel Air and 1961 Lincoln Continental evoke the exuberance of the jet age, with broad swaths of chrome and sci-fi cues. But Detroit’s golden era of interior design turned to lead in the 1970s, when twin oil shocks set off a downsizing campaign that sucked the style out of cars. To cut costs and compete with surging Japanese automakers, the Big Three cheapened their interiors with fake wood and tufted velour. But the European automakers continued to refine their interiors. Now Detroit is playing catch-up. Chrysler chief designer Trevor Creed admits he experienced a design epiphany when he first saw the crisply tailored interior of the Audi A6 at a German auto show a few years ago. “Everything was so precise it was mind-blowing,” recalls Creed. “My first reaction was, ‘How did they do that?’ " To find out, he spirited an A6 into the United States and tore it apart. It became the design template for the soaring interior styling of the Chrysler Pacifica sports wagon debuting next year. “The Pacifica marks a big change for us,” Creed says. “When I look back now on our other cars, I’m just not satisfied.”

Style always moves in cycles, but don’t expect dull interiors to make a comeback. Even fusty old GM is doing some interior decorating. GM’s revered new model chief, Bob Lutz, ordered the interior overhaul of several new models he found lacking in style, including the edgy Cadillac CTS, insiders say. GM’s new chief interior designer, Anne Asensio, who was put in charge of redecorating the cockpits, says that Lutz recently praised her by saying: “I know you’re making a difference, because everybody is complaining about you.” Better that than car shoppers complaining about dull dashboards.