BONK! Let’s say your Autopian self is actually living on in the year 1960, and you’ve just been hit in the head by your car’s engine hood shutting while you were under it. You were under there with a timing light (under the age of forty? Look it up) to tune your small block V8, and now you’re comatose. Don’t worry, though; you will come out of this coma, but a whopping twenty-five years later.
Awakening in a daze, people are trying to ease you into the world of 1985. You’re amazed at how big everyone’s hair is, and you’re shocked that Ronald Reagan, the star of really dumb movies, is now President of the United States. Still, that’s not what disturbs you the most as you look out the hospital window at the parking lot. “Good God!” you scream out with great shock. “What the hell happened to the cars?!”
Who Shrunk The Cars?
Your confusion is understandable. When you were knocked out in 1960, a new Cadillac was a massive, outrageous, and glorious machine more lavish than a Rolls Royce that stopped people in their tracks with awe:
In 1985, a new Caddy is a generic-looking compact-sized box; one of these things only stopped people in their tracks if the 4100 V8 under the hood blew its head gasket, which happened regularly.
Sure, the new Cadillac has a similarly-sized passenger compartment to the 1960 car, but the fact that both of these things are considered top-of-the-line American cars is hurting your brain.
Wait until your Rip Van Winkle self sees a Cadillac Cimarron– yikes. Obviously, some catastrophic event happened to cause this massive and seemingly hasty, half-baked shift in car design – but in fact, it was two similar events. America had over time become more and more dependent on oil from the middle east. A conflict with Israel in 1973 created a scenario where oil was used as a weapon, and prices skyrocketed for fuel. That is, if you could find fuel; shortages resulted in lines of cars around the block at stations that actually had gas to sell.
General Motors responded to the situtation by chopping nine inches of length and half a ton from the Cadillac Deville. Part of GM’s celebrated, outstanding new 1977 line of “downsized” large cars, this smaller Caddy just managed to pull off being almost as imposing looking (and just as big on the inside) as the previous one while driving much better and getting improved fuel economy (the engine shrank from 8.2 liters to a miniscule 7.0 liters in displacement).
Sadly, things only got worse. In 1979, a revolution in Iran once again resulted in the cutoff of oil, with a replay of the gas lines and insane price hikes of five years before. This time, GM went headlong into totally transforming their car lineup with things like its ill-developed diesel engines and the aforementioned overly-compacted C-body Cadillac DeVille/ Buick Electra/ Oldsmobile 98 for 1985 models that were nearly two feet shorter than their predecessors. This time, there was no mistaking that premium cars had not been sympathetically “downsized.” Interior space was surprisingly good for the overall size, but outwardly the results made fans of the brand scratch their heads. Worse was the lack of differentiation between Cadillac and the lesser-branded cars. Many typical Cadillac customers switched brands and bought the Panther-body, true full-sized Lincoln Town Cars which had stayed in production – a fact that Lincoln played up in its advertising:
If you got behind the wheel of the little front-drive DeVille, you’d be even more disappointed; Car and Driver tested one of the first of these Shrinky-Dink’d Cadillacs and claimed it drove worse than the car it replaced (and was barely any more efficient). This was a sad state of affairs.
A Commenter Ponders An Alternate Reality
I’ve been digging through the comments of my old post where readers have offered suggestions for bizarre alternate realities that make we wonder why I’m the one called out for being strange. A recent one, however, seemed less than silly: an Autopian named “Space” commented on an article that Mercedes Streeter had written about a fiberglass pickup truck-based motorhome that died in the market thanks to the first oil crisis:
That’s a really good question, and Mercedes Streeter agreed with Space that if anyone could illustrate what cars might look like with an endless oil supply, it would be me. Sadly, she’s probably right. While “Space’s” suggestion is quite straightforward, don’t worry; I promise that the solution will be a bit over the top.
Bigger Would Still Be Seen As Better
My guess is that the real question that “Space” is likely asking is if cheap, readily available fuel would have resulted in American cars remaining large, or getting even larger. Honestly, there’s nothing to prove that such a scenario wouldn’t happen. Many of you are likely skeptical of this. “Well”, you say as you scratch your chin, “I think Americans would begin to follow European designs and create smaller cars”. That seems to be a solid argument, but ultimately it doesn’t hold water. Let’s go back to 1960 again; the disparity between the typical US family Chevy and a French Renault couldn’t have been greater. You could have bought a Renault in America back then, but sales were limited to cheapskates, people that appreciated maneuverability, and hipsters that wanted to rebel against the mainstream.
Years later, right before the first oil crisis in the early seventies, things hadn’t changed much; a Honda Civic was dwarfed by a Chevy Caprice, and many European and Japanese cars were actually getting larger instead of smaller with things like “Super Beetles” and six-cylinder Toyota Crowns (Honda was working on its Accord “mid sized” car as well). I don’t think large American luxury cars would have shrunken considerably; look at the aforementioned shame that General Motors went through when gas prices dropped in the eighties and they had dinky cars.
The question is, how big could cars have gotten?
Pushing The Limits Of Space (Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy)
Regardless of how cheap fuel remained, there are still some established sizes of the places that cars have to go that might limit how large they could get. Garages in most American homes don’t stretch beyond twenty feet, and parking spaces never get larger than a certain size. Despite this, I think that car makers would still push these boundaries, and some buyers would accept or even demand this.
There ain’t no substitute for sheer size. Case in point: the massive, last-of-the-line 1979 Lincoln Mark V was one of the largest, most space inefficient cars ever produced, yet it sold surprisingly well in its final year. Replacing it was the 1980 Mark VI, based on the brand-new-for-then Panther platform (incomprehensively, I’ve put a sum total of 200,000 miles on two Panthers). The signature Lincoln “fender gills” barely fit between the front wheels and the door. Admittedly, the Panther chassis was far more sensible and roadable than the giant seventies car but this smaller Mark was honestly no longer something that any self-respecting pimp would want to be seen in. Damn, the nattily-clad yachtsman in the picture below with the Mark V have been replaced by some dude next to a Mark VI that looks like he operates the kiddie boat ride and the local fair:
Had there never been fuel shortages or lines at gas pumps, that Mark VI would have looked much different. Let’s go big! But how?
Cheap Fuel Creates A Monster
Even if we accept the fact that parking spaces and garages are limiting the size of our luxury car, there are still tricks that could be done to “upsize”. Take a look at an example of a last-of-the-line Lincoln similar to the Rose family car from Schitt’s Creek below, for example.
Notice how the five-mile-per-hour bumpers extend like battering rams out the front and rear of the body? If manufacturers could copy what a C4 Corvette or a Porsche 928 did with incorporating the bumpers into the body, they could make a far longer looking car that was in fact not much (if any longer) than the car it would be replacing. Ultimately, we be getting more physical car body within the overall length. The last of the giant Cadillac Eldorados (up to 1978) actually did something similar to this with the bumpers incorporated into the cathedral-like corner trims (backed up by flexible body-colored sections, or at least flexible for the first five years or so until the cracked to bits):
We’ll do the same body-all-the-way-to-the-limits thing with my alternate concept to that new-for-1980 Lincoln Mark VI. For inspiration, I wanted to find some of the most extreme examples of “the future” as seen from the time before and the era after. In the sixties, before he became known for Blade Runner and Tron, illustrator Syd Mead created some renderings of luxury cars of tomorrow (meaning around 1980 or so); all low, hopelessly long machines with ample chrome and glitz:
Of course, in the eighties, tomorrow’s world was envisioned as a dystopian mess where the well-to-do drove the similarly oversized and overstyled 6000SUX (a customized Collonade-body 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass).
Putting those two visions together, I give you this magnificent monster; long and loooooow. In fact, the hood is so long that it might need to open from center, accessible from the side like on a pre-war car. The long doors would need to have articulated hinges similar to what’s been used on coupes like the Z30 Toyota Soarer/Lexus SC. I also envision helper motors to allow them to close, or at least “soft close” motors. Surprisingly, my one nod to “modern” is the lack of vinyl or landau roof on the car; there is a blacked-out glass accent panel on the B pillar with a chrome logo that has an electroluminescent glow at night.
At the rear, the traditional tire hump exists, and the “peaks” of the fenders actually can light up at night with a fiber optic glow to allow you to see the extremes of the car (and I mean extremes). Not that anyone driving this thing would ever want to parallel park it; one would assume that people with the means to own it would valet wherever they go and make this behemoth someone else’s problem. These owners wouldn’t care about ease of parking or the ability for it to stop on a dime; they would hopefully not even know what a dime is.
What’s actually under that massive hood? I think that the war of escalated engine sizes would eventually level off at around 8 liters or so, but not the sophistication of the motors. Our Lincoln would offer the new “Titan XVI” engine (Roman numeral 16, ya know), also known as the “Twinsor” by some wags since it would be comprised of two Windsor V8s connected together for a total of sixteen cylinders. Each unit would only displace about 4.2 liters (like the awful, anemic 4.2 offered in 1981-82 Ford cars), giving room for expansion later on. Two throttle body fuel injection units sit atop each powerplant, and even though fuel is cheap in this alternate reality, we’d still have all of the emission controls of the era. Don’t expect much more than 260-275 horsepower out of this monster.
What An (American) Luxury Car Should Be
I’ll use the dashboard of the late seventies Lincoln as a guide for what my replacement 1980 model will look like. The most important thing to keep in mind with American barges is no matter how complex the mechanical systems are (like the two engines and multiple fuel systems) you never provide the driver with anything more than readouts for speed and fuel. Manufacturers didn’t want to concern drivers with something that they have no interest in, and couldn’t deal with if they became a problem anyway (joking aside, a tach and multiple gauge readouts are pretty useless for ninety percent of drivers).
The digital readouts for minimal information and the tech-fot-the-time trip computer all appear in a small strip right at the top of the dash, and what looks like a black trim strip across the upper surface of the protruding “box” actually hides the warning lights.
The thick “box” is to conceal an airbag which was yet to be required by US law, so Lincoln would use that big glove box lid to hold your choice of inserts. It could contain cassette or 8 track tapes, or have real working-depth cup holders. Other options are a little tool kit (flashlight, tire gauge) or a cosmetics organizer with a tissue dispenser.
Could It Happen Again?
So are you telling me that we’d all be driving mammoth-sized rides like this had there been no energy crisis? Of course not. My parents, for example, drove Volkswagens and the small-for-the-time Mustang when gasoline flowed like a river. They had no interest in driving something the size of the Principality of Monaco to the A&P. However, that’s not the case for those traditional buyers that thought an enormous car was a reward for a life of toiling at the office and to show the neighborhood that they’d made it; go big or go home is their motto. General Motors’ 1985 small-scale “big” cars proved that out, a victim of the bigger-is-better monster that GM had in fact created themselves over the years before.
Proving this theory of the giant dream car is the fact that when gas prices dropped again in later decades (albeit never to pre-crisis levels) many “large family vehicles” grew tremendously. The trick? They weren’t “cars”, but trucks. Some of these full-sized SUVs were even larger than the biggest GM “clamshell” wagons of the early seventies; the high water mark likely was the humongous Ford Excursion which sold nearly 70,000 units when introduced in 1999 but became liabilities with (you guessed it) the energy crisis of the 2000s.
Will we ever see the likes of these barges again? With cars shifting to electric power the whole “gas guzzler” and “super polluter” elements are out the window, so there really isn’t anything holding car makers back. Never say never.
Regardless, I want to thank “Space” for his suggestion; keep them coming!
The World Hated The Ford Excursion. Now It’s Becoming A Collectable Friendly-Giant – The Autopian
I Made Our Daydreaming Designer Imagine An Oldsmobile For Actual Old People – The Autopian
“CAUTION FAN” sent me. Nice work, Your Eminence.
As I said, Geoff, I owned two Panthers, one starting at 60,000 miles on and the other from 120,000. Unfortunately, I am well versed in the details under the hood of a malaise full-sized Ford product.
That would be “Your Excellency”, not “Your Eminence”, which is reserved for the cardinals, not for the bishops and archbishops.
It’s a sign of the esteem in which I hold the Bishop.
Do you kiss his ring too?
As far as you know, no.
Like they say in construction if you can’t build out, build up. So my guess no energy shortage would have rushed in the SUV Era sooner, and delayed the EV Era.
Hey The Bishop*, it just occurred to me that this would work great as a short video with your concept cars as animation, and a soothing narration from the best sounding member of the staff (let the auditions begin!). We click for the “what if” cars, but you never fail to deliver with both historical background and alternate history!
The BONK I particular is a great way to start the video, and I can imagine how cool illustrations a la “sidequest**” would be – the perplexed “you” in the story waking up, under that narration, and pictures of malaise cars parked everywhere…
Come to think about it, you guys have a lot of potential animated content – the “would you rather” scenarios, the Taillight bar brawls, even Shitbox Showdown could be an actual showdown (ok, maybe I, stretching a bit…)
*What, isn’t the name like The Hague?
**YouTube channel about history with simple animations and British sounding narration. Maybe Adrian is up to it?
It’s crazy, Bishop, but your rendering is making blood go to my body parts it hasn’t gone to in years. Am I having a malaise inspired orgasm? I’m having a Morgasm! Now give me that landau top you big tease… I need it STAT!
Here I would like to remember Bruce McCall, who passed away last year, and who created uncountable renditions of impossible land yachts for Car and Driver and the New Yorker. His were more ridiculous (Maybe! The Twinsor?) and flamboyant but I would say less production-ready than the Bishop’s Lincoln. Thank you Bishop.
Pour one out for the Denbeigh Super Chauvinist.
Thank you. That’s admirably deep. The internet suggests it’s a popular model, but I’ve never seen one for sale. Hate to think of them moldering in garages.
Both Ford and GM benefited (sort of) from the onset of the fuel crises of the 1970s because they had downsizing of existing models already underway before the Yom Kippur war. The bloated Mustang of 1971-1973 was supplanted by the 1974 Mustang II just as Egyptian and Syrian troops crossed into the Israeli- occupied Sinai and Golan Heights in early October 1973, and the decision to downsize GM’s B and C bodies predated the war as well, although maybe a Cadillac V16 would have been introduced by 1980 to make up for the power hits from primitive emissions controls. (Probably not, but Jaguar debuted its V12 around the same time for a primary market whose economy was under severe pressure well before 1973.) I suspect that the future would have hinges on how well the 1977 GM B/C did in the marketplace, and even if the pendulum and Ford swung over to the smaller side, Chrysler’s lack of development money would have extended the length (heh, heh) of the lifespans for the truly full-sized New Yorker and Newport.
Bishop just designed the 1980s Aston Martin Lagonda.
https://www.carpixel.net/wallpapers/8116/1982-aston-martin-lagonda-us.html
Like the dude making Devil’s Tower out of potatoes in Close Encounters, I’ll make a Lagonda out of anything. William Towns controls my thoughts; I just can’t help it.
I can only applaud you.
The irony is that the 1998 Lincoln Town Car design – particularly the rounded styling and fascia – was based on the 1993 Aston Martin Lagonda Vignale concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aston_Martin_Lagonda_Vignale
it all comes around
Neat, I didn’t know that!
Nice…I’ve been wanting a Mark V for a while now- I’ve been warming up to them. Now I want one w/ the Twinsor w/ 16 cylinders…now that would be awesome (Add opera windows too)
Theme for another story: What IMSA race cars would look like today if Group 5 was the top level of prototypes.
The glove box reminds me of the old Studebakers vanity glovebox with the mirror. And, what the hell, Bishop, no landau roof cap with a “frenched” back window treatment and proper opera windows on the rendering? I feel cheated! At least give me a carriage roof with the fake mechanism bows popping out under the vinyl. jeeeeeez
I mean, Lincoln would have to offer a Bill Blass version with the “carriage roof”
and some damm sexy tu-tone paint treatment….right??? I’,m feeling white and navy….no, navy blue and chamois… oh hell, just make the damm thing tu-toned for gawds sake!
If there was any way I could send pics on this sight, I would I just discovered many of my car renderings and actual 1/12 models I made of some of them from 1984. I stored the models in a basement, bad idea as mold killed them. Thank God I took pics
Oh.
My.
Gawd.
Thanks to the Bishop, I now know what to do with today’s Shitbox Showdown winner, the Colonade Malibu.
I’m building a 6000 SUX.
Me too! the junkyards around me are awash in old A bodies. I want a 6000 SUX with a proper landau roof dammit! A fake carriage roof and a fake continental kit on the ass end would be over the edge!!!
If it hasn’t been done yet, a 6000SUX would be an epic Lemons entry.
I have a 2023 Chevrolet family sedan with body-on-frame construction, a 147.4 inch wheelbase, and 231.9 inch total length.
It is Chevy’s, and GM’s, top-selling model.
How Absurd Cars Could Have Been If There Had Never Been An Energy Crisis is our current reality.
Well, apart from the sedan part.
It is weird that Chevy sells the sedans with bare metal trunks without tops (my wife thinks it is really stupid to sell them that way). But I was able to fix that with a Line-X trunk-liner and a roll-away, locking, paint-matched aluminum trunk cover for my 5′ 10″ trunk. Plus I got a trunk extender/divider to keep things from rolling to the front of the trunk where they are hard to reach.
Now I’m rolling down the street in my ’23 Impala.
Plus I get to flex on the poors who can’t afford covers for their trunks after the dealer finessed them out of twice as much on the purchase price.
5′ 10″? Dang, I didn’t know Impalas offered a bigger trunk than Fairlanes do, at a paltry 5′ 6″.
I would like to thank “The Bishop” for writing this article. It really made my day, truly I’m positively beaming. This is why the Autopian is the best car site on the net, you care about your readers and engage with them. I will gladly submit more less than silly “what it’s” in your comments. (and some bonkers ones)
My pleasure! Always looking for ideas, and no better place to dig than the gold mine that is the comments section.
Here’s one that’s out there
What if the Cold War went hot and the U.S. lost to the soviet union , the soviets took control of every industry including the auto industry, Ford, GM, Checker all gone and replaced with Lada. After many decades of making generic people movers the premier of the Soviet Empire decides that it is time for EV’s.
What would the North American Lada make?
Torch can talk about the taillights too.
What year did we lose the war? Let’s say it’s 1978. We’d still be buying new Ladas that are rebadged, slightly facelifted Ford Fairmonts that were being made when the Soviets invaded Dearborn.
Rare 1980 Ford Fairmont EVA Electric Conversion For Sale (greencarreports.com)
Go with whatever year you want everyone loves wagons. In my head I was thinking 1962, we surrendered after the Cuban missile crisis. Since Lada came around in 1966 maybe it took a few years to dismantle capitalism.
Pretty sure a Sovietized people’s car like Checker would have been renamed “Czecher” but otherwise maintained production completely unchanged through today.
Back to the Lagonda bit: a coach builder made INCREDIBLE Lagonda wagons. Have you thought of a “what if all cars came in a wagon body in 2024” series?
Best I could do on car sized:
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/lincoln-continental-1977-coupe-vs-chevrolet-suburban-2020-suv/?units=imperial
Looks like the good times are back, gents.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have an actual measurement for the distance between the forward plane of the ac condensor and the rear of the grill in a 79 Mark V? In my memory, a small child could disappear between them
Our much smaller old Panthers (Town Car and a Colony Park wagon) had at least a foot of dead space
My memory is of 2 feet or so—but it’s been decades
when it comes to cars feet count, when it comes to adult dating sites, inches and millimeters either break or make a date. Just saying…….
I do not understand why cars did and totally still do have so much dead space here. On my 2007 Expedition it’s like a foot. On newer Tacomas it’s like eighteen inches. If you pay attention to that in a parking lot sometime, you will see that space inefficiency and wasted space are well and alive in 2024.
Maybe due to the crash structure? My 123s & 126s had a fair bit of room as well. And they were some of the first to make it so the motor was supposed to go >under< the cabin in an extreme crash iirc
I parked my r107 next to an Excursion for the lulz the other day. It was comical.
I was relieved to see the Excursion *still* looks huginormous today, even with Yukons and Escalades roaming the streets.
Really? I don’t think Excursions look that huginormous. My 2007 Expedition EL(pretty much the direct replacement for the 2006 excursion) is almost exactly the same size, as is every Expedition EL/Max and Navigator since. Suburbans always were exactly the same size as an excursion. All of these are dwarfed by any new crew cab with an 8.5′ bed and a 7′ tall cab.
Every full size pickup, Yukon, Suburban, Escalade, Excursion, ect. is 80″ flare to flare. There have only been two normal passenger vehicles sold in the US wider than 80″, ever: the new Hummer EV, and the new Jeep Wagoneer. Now those are vast, and both of those make an excursion look small.
If I recall it was about 18″ on a ’78 LTD II (Torino Platform). Probably evert bit of 2 feet on a Mark V.
We (well, my parents, since I was a minor) lived this scenario for both US gas crises by virtue of being not in the US but in an OPEC country (Venezuela), where gas was practically free and emissions controls were unheard of. Since this was not an alternate timeline and there was no native automotive design, we got (among others) the same cars the US built for itself, just not strangled.
Oil prices were half of a 2-pronged attack on the existing cars of the early 70s. The other prong was Environmental Protection. The two went hand-in-hand in forcing industry changes. And if you want to know what would have happened without *either* of those two things, well… I shudder to think. without needing to strive for environmental or fuel efficiency, why bother to develop the efficient engines we have today? So we’d still have big- block engines producing maybe 400hp and spewing noxious stuff all over the planet. Blech.
We literally currently have big block engines producing 400hp. Available in 2024 model year cars.
They use half the fuel and emit 1000% less CO and NOx. Problem is there are 500% more on the road compared to the 1970’s.
Probably still with leaded gas…
Also insurance, the insurance industry seriously jumped rates on muscle cars in the early 70s, making them increasingly unaffordable to their target demo
Could you add another set of front wheels to the dual motor Lincoln? That would look very cool. Or maybe a dual engine, four front wheel drive Eldog?
Also, lower the skirts for an even lower longer overall look?
I had a spare tire up there in the pencil drawing but that was too obvious of a pimptastic addition. I do have a six wheeled car thing coming up and it’s very stupid.
We are here for that! 🙂
Sounds perfect. I look forward to it. Thanks!
May I suggest a viewing of Superfly first?
I hope it’s as stupid as the Panther Six.
What’s Eldog?
Eldorado. I’m just too lazy to type it all out. And I’m a cool trendsetting influencer who writes cool things like Eldog. Look for me on TikTok.
Panther did come up with the car with four front wheels and two massive rear wheels: Panther 6. It used the engine and drivetrain from Cadillac Eldorado, driving the rear wheels.
That is hysterical! Apparently warped minds think alike.
What I really would have liked to see was the TH-435 stick around and end up in a ton more applications, perhaps with various new housings so it could be used with a Chevy 454, Chevy 350, etc.
It was durable enough to drive the GM motorhome, it would have been awesome in a Mail Truck and tons of other commercial applications!
THM425
My bad, thank you.
The Bishop Lincoln, it’s like Lincoln and the Aston Martin Lagonda had a baby.
There was some reversal in the 90s – Chrysler downsized the New Yorker to the 221.5 inch long R-body in the late 70s, and further dropped it to the K-based platform in ’83 at 187.2 inches, but, by 1994, the LH New Yorker was back up to 207.4 inches
At Ford, the Panthers regained 1.4 inches in the early ’90s redesign, but the biggest was at GM.
The big Cadillacs went from 233.7 inches long in 1976 to 221.2 with the B-body in 1977, then down to 195 inches with the move to FWD in the mid ’80s, however, the once-again rear drive Fleetwood popped back to 225 inches long in 1993
Even the still front-drive Oldsmobile 98 stretched back up to 205.8 inches in the early 90s, after downsizing to 196 in the mid 80s.
I have heard people say over the years that the 1955 Chevy is probably about the ideal size for an American family sedan, not too big, not too small, accepted by most consumers, and that automakers seem to generally gravitate back to that size after periods of bloat, making it kind of a default setting. The Tesla Model S is almost exact on the money in that regard
I am quite shocked today when I see a Ford Panther, a late seventies GM B-Body (1977-1990 Caprice, for example) or GM A/G Body (1978-87 Cutlass); these were once “big” cars that dwarfed the other cars in 80s/90s parking lots and now they don’t even stand out as being that large.
I have a late Crown Vic, it disappears next to current pickups like a toy
The 1992-2011 Crown Vic isn’t large next to 1992 fullsize pickups, 2011 fullsize pickups, or 2024 fullsize pickups.
These cars are not actually all that humongous, but they feel like it behind the wheel. I think that’s why they have a mostly-unearned reputation for being vast yachts.
Exactly. This shit is nuts. And we love to bitch about how crowded the interstates and roads are. Not everyone needs to drive a huge friggin’ vehicle.
TBH, I think there is a lot of folks who think a BIG truck makes up for a small wang. YMMV.
It’s worth noting that “the days of cheap gas” and “huge price hikes during the crisis” are both mostly a myth.
In 1973, the national average gas price was $0.39. in 2023 dollars, that’s $2.68. Which is a whole 10% cheaper than gas is at my local Costco right now. It wasn’t actually grossly cheaper.
In 1974, the national average was $0.53, or $3.28 in 2023 dollars. Which is cheaper than gas was a month ago.
So gas was neither extremely cheap before the crisis, not extremely expensive after.
The reason so many people drove yachts back then is just because they were willing to spend more money on gas than people are now…… Sometimes. It’s not like there weren’t fuel efficient cars in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Volkswagen and Nash/Rambler/Kelvinator/Studebaker sold fuel efficient cars in the 50s, and they sold enough of them, and annoyed the Big Three enough, that in 1960 they came out with fuel efficient competitors(Valiant, falcon, Corvair).
Even if there was no fuel crisis, people would have gotten tired of paying so much for gas and there would have eventually been demand for all the Hondas and Toyotas of the world.
Actually, I just looked it up. In 1999, the year the Honda Insight and Prius came out, gas cost about $1.00. The $0.39 in 1973 converted to 1999 dollars is…… $1.46. That’s right, at the time the Prius and Insight came out, gas was 46% cheaper than gas was in the good ol’ “7mpg is fine, gas is cheap!” days.
Also, I’m always amazed when I see that car prices adjusted for inflation seem so low; I am thinking those adjustments dont take into account the 15 percent plus interest rates of those times.
It also doesn’t account for the fact that families, on average, were saving %25 of their income vs now where we’re, on average, going into dept
At that time, a glut of disposable income was normal and spending a bunch on gas just meant you didn’t save as much. If you already had a house and two cars, who cares?
No cell phone, cable, or internet bills either. But I think your land line cost a lot more.
People weren’t crushed by 6-figure college loans, and healthcare didn’t yet cost 20+% of household incomes.
Actually it was a lot less for a phone then. But you had to lease the phone from Ma Bell, so you got screwed twice.
Would like to see some figures on the “real” cost of living then vs the “real” cost of living today. Having been a child of the 1960s it feels like even with the inflation adjustments that it still was a whole lot cheaper to exist back then.
And TBH I don’t feel like wages have actually increased enough to match the standard of living we had in the 60s or at least till the Nixon era. It sucks. Then Reagan shows up with his “trickle down” economics and we all got pissed on for eight years. (good times my ass.)
As a resident of a proud redneck state, I can say with confidence it’s all the god damn Arab’s fault. And everything else that is fucked up is the fault of Biden, and the Godless Democrats. /s
I lived the decades of this article. I could do a tune-up at home and set timing to within 1 or 2 degrees “by ear”, then drive to see one of my friends whose dad had a timing light and set it to spec. In high school I worked at the local Mobil station doing repairs and pumping gas during the first oil crisis. Yes, the inflation-adjusted price per gallon of gas is accurate. The things to consider are 1) the fuel efficiency of cars of the early ’70s vs today, 2) the relative increase in fuel price was 50% from ’73-’74, and the second time around was 49% from ’78-’80, and 3) critically during the first oil crisis, you just couldn’t get fuel, no matter how much you were willing to pay.
That’s legit. If you simply can’t get fuel then it is deadly essential you extend the fuel in your tank AS FAR as it will go
Audi had relatively large gas tanks for their relatively efficient cars. The chairman was quoted as saying “when fuel is unavailable, I want an Audi to be the last car that rolls to a stop”
#3 right there is the kicker. Not the (artificially capped) price of fuel, but the availability.
Yeah it was a big price increase in 74 and in 79, but not really historically that high. We’ve seen worse fluctuations in the last three years. Like I mentioned, at least in my area, just in the last month gas prices have gone from above 1974 levels almost down to 1973 levels.
Looking it up, the national average went from $1.94 in April 2020 to $5.02 in June 2022. What’s interesting is that it has affected the market much less than the 1974, 1979, or 2008 spikes. I really don’t know why people freaked out and bought Hondas in 1974, and why people freaked out and sold their Expeditions in 2008, but the same thing really really hasn’t happened in 2022.
Probably pandemic related new car shortages. And the unmitigated disaster that was cash for clunkers.
Remember that the overall economic environment in the US (and even more so in Britain) was inflationary before the oil embargo, so rising fuel prices made things that much worse. Unemployment shot up to over 11% in 1974 and didn’t start to really recede until 1975, and this was the first severe economic shock since World War II kicked off our own Les Trentes Glorieuses. We’d only just signed a peace agreement in Vietnam in January, urban air quality was horrible, and crime was going up while Nixon was going down. There’s a reason dystopian science fiction was already doing well at the box office, and with new cars making up a larger share of overall sales because automotive lifespans were short, so I guess it seemed to make sense when you made your biennial or triennial trip to the dealer to buy something more fitted to the coming apocalypse than a Bicentennial-edition Chevy or a Delta 88 Royale. Big car sales went right back up in 1976, though.
“Peak oil” scares were happening regularly then. If you get 10mpg then your car will be a brick much sooner than your neighbor’s CVCC and he’ll be able to go to work.
I think eventually a comet or nuclear holocaust will initiate an extinction level event of all machinery on the planet. In the aftermath, only the little run-and-hidey things that avoided being crushed, burned or EMP’d to death, like nanobots, will re-emerge and take over the mechosphere. Things will be small for a long time, but eventually we’ll have Excursions again. Humans? You’re toast.
not all machinery. We need to come up with a list of things that will still be going after the apocalypse:
any 1980-2000 Toyota Hilux
any Land Cruiser/ Lexus LX/GX
1965-1976 Dodge Dart/Plymouth Valiant
1978-87 GM A/G Body
1977-90 GM B Body
1979-90 Ford Panther
1992-96 Toyota Camry XV10
I notice an unacceptable lack of 4.0 Jeeps on this list, especially for Davids coworker.
Yes, let’s get that on there before he notices- thanks!
They won’t survive the Apocalypse. They can barely survive normal weather conditions and shitty mopar manufacturing.
Good thing mine was manufactured by AMC, not Mopar. Also good thing mine already survived sitting in a field for an unspecified number of years, so I can be certain it will survive normal weather.
I think you’re confusing(as many do) the positively immortal 1987-2006 4.0 with the 2006+ assorted Mercedes/Fiat/Peugot dumpster fires. Sometimes literally.
Probably lots of VW Beetles, they seem to survive everything.
Mercedes 123 chassis’s
but the roads will deteriorate quickly, so maybe stick to a Model T
indeed, a W123 belongs on there if it’s a diesel. I had a gas W126 until it was 23 years old/220,000 miles, but it didn’t make it there without thousands of dollars spent.
All my 123s & 126s were diesel: I made my own fuel for some years.
And I was way too timid to get near the gasoline ones
Yes, I even thought about a veggiemobile at one point (300SD, not the 350SDL which supposedly had issues). Apparently the vertically oriented fuel tank in a W126 is great for that.
I cheaped out: filtered the daylights out of used veggie oil, then thinned it with gas. Thus I avoided the complicated heating system—and the possibility of co-mingling fuel & coolant.
Also, Va law at the time did not specify exactly what percentage constituted an additive, so I planned to plead that I put a lot of additive in—but that this practice was not explicitly illegal.
They were cracking down on biodiesel at the time, and I also didn’t really want to mess with methanol as disposal of the wash-water would have been problematic for a tree-hugger like me.
Thinning it with gas doesn’t cut the lubricity to an unacceptable degree? Although I guess it’s pretty hard to make the lubricity worse than ultra low sulfur diesel.
5% in summer and 10% in winter—but I’m inSW Va and kept close track of projected temperatures. It actually lubricates way better. I kid you not: when my first batch hit the injectors at idle, it smoothed out, shook less, and the noise level went down by I’m guessing a third. And it cleaned the tank & lines really well, to boot.
Yeah, ulsd is not great for those old motors. When using straight diesel I always added some snake oil.
Worth it though
The animals that make it will be feral house cats, rats, ants and cockroaches… and mosquitos and flies… and fish. Bermuda grass and crab grass will rule the prairies, and pigeons and crows will dominate the bird life.
Interesting theory but how would the increased safety regulations tie in with the larger cars? after unsafe at any speed the NHTSA started to enforce safety devices
Scott- look at those crumple zones! You can’t get safer than that. You rear end someone and it will take a few minutes to feel the shock wave.
As I mentioned in the write-up, those are 5MPH bumpers front and rear, a safety regulation that the car manufacturers had reduced to 2.5MPH “in the interest of ligther weight cars and better economy”. Can you say bullshit?
Yeah, and the regulation was pulled back just as a new generation of cars specifically designed for it were coming out, where designers had actually worked out how to neatly integrate the 5mph bumpers so they didn’t look like tacked-on diving boards anymore. As it turned out, the insurance industry’s lobby just wasn’t as loud or as well-funded as the auto industry’s lobby, and they’ve fallen further into irrelevance in the current era of $6,000 tail lights.
I honestly don’t think we ended up that much further from this. Look at the giant trucks and SUVs. Instead of land barges we have those.
Yes, due to the CAFE split pushing passenger cars to become more fuel efficient, while holding light trucks to a lesser standard. Replace full-size landyacht cars with full-size landyacht pickups and SUVs, problem solved. Some of them, like the Ram Laramie Longhorns, are also pretty damn brougham-y
Seriously. I drove my boss’s King Ranch F150 and all I can think is it wasn’t a pickup truck, too fancy. Too many gidgets and wizmos and why does a work truck need panoramic sunroof and massage seats?
This is my favorite take. Our vehicle size simply went vertical instead of horizontal.
The old land yachts are positively low-slung compared with our current normal.