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
You *think* they looked less aerodynamic, but in reality they were actually—on average—more aerodynamic than the cars that came before. There were some very aerodynamic cars dating back to the 1930s, but mostly they were actually pretty terrible relative to your average “boxy” 1980s car. It’s maybe deceptive and counterintuitive but a lot of the things the designers did back then did improve aerodynamics tremendously. Things like pop-up headlights—in the down position, of course— and very short, thin grilles at the front of the car helped to cut the drag down by quite a bit. Something as mundane and boxy as an ’82 Chevy Cavalier had a 0.37 Cd, which was ***great*** compared to the 0.497 Cd of the Chevy Nova before it, or even the 0.417 of the Chevy Citation from only a couple years before.
*Some* ’80s American cars sacrificed aerodynamics for the sake of space efficiency. The Chrysler K-car wagons for instance were a pretty awful 0.5 Cd, but they had the boxy, unaerodynamic rear end so that cargo capacity could be maximized. The cars were still far, far more efficient than their predecessors, the Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare.
The Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable set a new benchmark for aerodynamic design in the mid-’80s, with the Sable sedan having a remarkably low 0.29 Cd. After that *everybody* started emulating Ford’s grille-less design.
You clearly said “looks aerodynamic” because that’s totally the truth.
Those old bubbles actually aren’t that aerodynamic, other parts matter a lot more.
For example, the 1984 Audi 5000 is more aerodynamic than a 2020 Bugatti Chiron (by about 10%). Go look up those cars for a laugh.
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.
Latest Answers