As I understand it, the gas crisis of the mid 70’s saw everyone shifting from making/buying cars that were either as big or as powerful as possible and getting sometimes single digit gas mileage to much more fuel efficient vehicles. But while cars got smaller and lighter and engines got handicapped for the sake of efficiency, it seemed that cars of this period were some of the least aerodynamic vehicles since the dawn of automobiles, especially compared to the bubble cars of the 40s and 50s. This seems counter productive.
In: Engineering
A lot of people are answering your question straight up without challenging the assumptions behind it. I studied engineering in the 70s and was a voracious reader of SAE papers in the engineering library. Trust me, a ton of aerodynamic advances happened in that era. There are two reasons they’re not obvious to you. First, a lot of the development at that time was going on under the skin, in areas such as cooling system air flow and underbody air flow. The other reason is that designing a car with low aerodynamic drag is actually a pretty subtle and complex challenge. A lot of people think they can look at two cars and guess which one has less drag but, except for really radical differences, most people’s guesses would probably be worse than tossing a coin.
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