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
So in the 1970’s and 1980’s, there were several things at play. Fuel economy was a concern. The EPA mandated catalytic converters for all 1975 production gasoline vehicles in addition to other Clean Air act requirements which severely limited the overall efficiency of the engines (not to mention you had manufacturers like Ford reclassifying the F100 half ton pickup as a heavy half ton F150 to circumvent some of those requirements for a few years). In addition, the American Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) came in and standardized how engines were tested for power output. So within a couple of years you had American muscle that went from being rated to 300 hp, 350 hp and even 400 hp to not even breaking the 200 hp mark.
In the 80’s manufacturers began introducing fuel injection (granted throttle body fuel injection is just glorified carburetion), transmissions with overdrive gearing, etc but gas was cheap again and would stay that way until a pretty major event in 2001. However, the Japanese imports won the economy war as they were building reliable, simple and efficient vehicles. Detroit is still catching up…granted I love my GM small blocks but when it comes to domestics, you can have reliable, well built, and efficient but you can only pick two.
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