Posted on 01/19/2021 8:51:56 AM PST by Red Badger
You had to be there to remember – and to understand – so here’s a refresher.
In 1964, group of young Pontiac engineers created the GTO by pairing an expensive big-car’s engine with an inexpensive medium-sized car – thereby creating the first mass-market muscle car. Which was mass-market because it wasn’t just about muscle. That had been done before, by Chrysler (letter series cars) and Oldsmobile, too.
What made the GTO different – and dangerous, in the view of a certain kind of killjoy – was that it was cheap. Or at least, affordable. You didn’t have to be a rich old man to be able to buy one.
Or get your rich old man to buy one for you.
The GTO was a huge success for that reason and for another reason. There was a huge number of young buyers coming of age at right around the same time – the Baby Boom generation. Combine affordable muscle with lots of young kids who could afford muscle and just like that, muscle cars were everywhere.
Within three years of the ’64 GTO’s debut, every major car company – even AMC (RIP) – had at least one muscle car for sale.
Many car companies offered several. It was a bonanza of horsepower, style and fun.
But as much as muscle cars were loved by those who owned them, they were hated twice as much by those who couldn’t stand them.
They came up with a way to put a stop to the fun.
First, they made insuring a muscle car unaffordable. Then as now, it didn’t matter whether you – the specific individual – had ever wrecked your muscle car. All that mattered, premium-wise, was that someone else did.
You got the presumptive blame – and the actual bill.
But there was a way out, if you could afford to pay cash. It was to skip the coverage – which you could in those days, even if it was illegal. Because in those days The Man lacked the means to find out.
As incredible as it may sound to tender Millennial ears, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s – and even into the ‘80s – the insurance mafia and the government mafia were still separate families. There were even laws pertaining to the respecting of private info.
The government couldn’t directly collude with the insurance mafia as it does now to find out whether you have coverage at any given moment via a quick and even automated sync-check of computer records.
All you – the car owner – had to do to avoid the mordita was to check the box on the government form that said you had coverage.
If it was a lie, so what? Should a guy feel guilt about lying to a mugger about how much cash he has in his wallet?
The people who did not like muscle cars did not like this, of course. So they came up with another – more effective – method to kill the fun.
Two methods, actually.
The first was to strangle them via emissions controls they couldn’t comply with – and didn’t, at first. Those first generation muscle cars of the ‘60s and early-mid-‘70s all had engines designed back in the ‘50s – i.e,. designed without emissions control in mind at all. The only way to make them “compliant” with the emissions regs passed decades after the fact was to cripple them by grafting clumsy emissions controls onto them.
These made them run poorly – and gradually killed off the muscle, too.
It only took four years – from the passage in 1970 of the Clean Air Act – to eliminate literally every muscle car except the last one, which happened to be a Pontiac, too. It was the 1974 Trans-Am equipped with the 290 horsepower SD-455 V8. Just a few hundred made it through the noose and by the following year – 1975 – the Trans-Am’s strongest engine was a 185 horsepower 400 V8 geezing through a catalytic converter and single exhaust made to look like two.
But just like the Terminator rebooting himself after receiving a shotgun blast to the guts, the muscle car only seemed dead. Gradually, performance began to return. Clean performance, too – via engines designed to be “compliant” and powerful.
By the ’90s, performance had returned to what it had been in the late ’60s and soon exceeded it.
So that had to be stopped, too.
This time, the method applied was unanswerable. Federal fuel economy fatwas descended. It no longer mattered that muscle wasn’t dirty. It now had to be fuel-sippy and that is like making a ribeye without the fat.
The fuel economy fatwas also served to attack mass-market large cars, which went the way of the muscle car.
There was an end-run, briefly. It was christened the “SUV” – which didn’t have to comply with fatwas as strict as those applied to cars. The SUV quickly became the car of choice, until the government caught up with and closed the “loophole” and applied the fatwas to them, too.
They got smaller-engined and bigger-priced, a trend which you can see for yourself – today.
But they’re still being made – along with the highest-powered (and cleanest-ever) muscle cars. The engineers have worked near-miracles on the same plane as Jesus feeding a multitude with a single loaf of bread.
So that has to be dealt with, too.
By shifting the meaning of fuel efficiency to mean “emissions” once again – though this time, not pollution. The new meaning is “greenhouse gasses,” which don’t smog the air or foul the lungs but are asserted to change the climate.
Whether it does or does not is a matter for another column.
What it unquestionably will do is achieve the goal which has been their goal since at least the 1960s. That goal, of course, is to get rid of not just the muscle car, not only the large car and not merely the SUV but every car.
By making it impossible to make them compliant. So as to get people into other forms of transportation, under their control.
They have said so, openly, since the ’60s.
If you read their literature, you’d know all about it.
Now you can see it, all around you.
. . .
“This is technologically possible, but as likely to happen as the flying cars we were once promised. The reality is that there will never be enough of these taxis available at times of peak demand to avoid long, frustrating waits.”
Sure it can. Every household now has 2-5 cars in their driveway. In the future from what I have read the plan is the auto manufacturers will own them and supply the service.
This will not happen overnight but a period of years
“I’m racing to get my Mustang back on the road so I can enjoy it before the fascists outlaw it.”
Building a ‘65 right now. Back from the painter last year. Hopefully end of summer.
Every time.....follow the link I sent for the new Tesla Roadster......
650 mile range..... charge to 1/2 full in under one hour on the road.....
You can charge it at night in your garage as well...
LOL, did you fight the change from 8-track to cassette tape?
ROFL!
Tortoise and the Hare all over again.
The electric hare has to stop and rest a lot long than a gas powered tortoise would have have to.
Especially in cold weather.
Gored your sacred cow, did I?
Exactly; there’s nothing heroically difficult about driving 1000 miles. I used to drive from Tucson to Portland regularly. The first leg was 1000 miles or so, with two stops for gas, coffee, and to take a leak. That 1000 miles took about 17 hours, at which point I’d pull into a side road somewhere in the Modoc National Forest, sleep for a few hours, and finish the trip in the morning. Probably could have made it straight through, but I never did.
Coming back, I’d stop for a nap two or three times.
Ahhh, you read the plan.
GM (aka Government Motors) wants to decide where you go and when, and you are fine with that?
Suppose your car arrives, and you instruct it to take you to the gun range, a political event, or a religious service. The car decides you shouldn’t go there, drives away, and reports you to the mother ship. What do you do then?
Besides, it is simply not economically feasible to have enough on-demand vehicles available to satisfy your needs, and the needs of everyone else in the area at the same time.
How long would you willing to wait for your ride?
What sacred cow? Electric cars?
Hardly...
However it looks like your sacred cow of gasoline-powered muscle cars was gored, butchered, cooked, and BBQ’d.....
Performance stats don’t lie......
Most gas cars get about 340-400 miles per tankful.....
The new Tesla is 650 miles at full charge.....
20 minutes at a Tesla Supercharging station gets you an 80% charge which is about another 520 miles.
Home charging is much slower, but it charges while parked in the garage.....
“How long would you willing to wait for your ride?”
How long do you wait now? Not long.
I’m pretty sure they will have the logistics worked out if you need a car to pick you up at 7:30 it will be there at 7:30. The free market system will prevail
Crazy. Those old VW vans are worth bank these days.
My two door truck is maybe rarer..but not as popular. That an my truck is custom...
Been offered $50k for it....
We shall see.....
This article is full of crap. It does not mention the real reason why muscle cars became extinct by 1974.
Two words: energy crisis.
Nothing will ever go wrong in your perfect world. Glad to hear that!
cars last at least twice as long as they did in the 70s
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