Award for most change in the cars visual demeanor for the least amount of actual change has the go to Honda for the S2000. The AP1 and AP2 are near identical yet the AP1 looks like a more refined happy go lucky Del Sol on steroids but the AP2 looks legitimately angry.

I don’t know Nissan’s product stack well enough to know what constitutes a refresh vs. a Gen change so I may be off on this but the 370Z was miles better looking than the 350Z.

The facelift for the 4th generation Corvette was by all accounts worse. In isolation it’s not that the later 4th Gen cars were necessarily bad looking, is just that every single appearance change they made was worse than the original design.

To me the 5th Gen doesn’t look as much like a modern interpretation of the original so much as a bad caricature, I never liked it. I think the 6th Gen is fantastic though, even though they are somewhat similar.