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.
. . .
Some mighty fine storytellin’ right there! Kinda says it all.
If anything, the opposite.
The Control Freaks won’t be happy until we’re all riding busses or trains with cameras everywhere. Reading Pravda, singing praises to the govern about their latest wonder.
“Comrade! Did you see the NYT article about the wonderful new employment plan?”
“Da! Have it right here, comrade. Our benevolent government is so wonderful!”
:-)
Have at it.
OMG, I need you as a witness!
Hubby always has Harleys with much bigger motors than mine has *but* I can speed shift like a rattlesnake on crack.
I always stomp him on the quarter but then his gear ratio kicks in and he blows by me.
He says “I won” and and I say “Pffft. Ain’t nothin’ after the 1/4, man”
“a 750 double pumper carb with vacuum secondaries”
What brand of carburetor would that be?
Double pumper carburetors do not need vacuum secondaries.
BigBlockk
Later.....
:D
/or the 4 door Chargers
Exactly so. Which one will sell?
I drove the Olds one time to the car wash. One the way home, a Trans Am pulled next to me at a stoplight and was zooming the engine at me for some reason so I hooked it up into a drag race. Blew the doors off the Trans Am then shut it down. As the Trans Am shot by me, I gave the Trans Am a couple of yelps on the siren. Bad bad bad of me but there you go.
BTW, my car at the time was a 67 Barracuda fastback.
In terms of performance, the new electric cars can blow them away.....
= = =
At least part of the way out of Florida, when the hurricane is coming.
Lost two good friends around 1969 or so to losing control of their cars on the country roads in northern Michigan. Both alcohol related.
The most tragic one was Randy, the owner of his 57 Chevy was too drunk to drive so his buddy Bob decided to drive them home and he lost control of the car on the back road, and Randy was killed while Bob survived......
I can’t say I’d be nuts about a mini van but I could always drop the Hellcat in the Magnum, so...
:D
“67 Barracuda fastback”
Ooooooooo!
I was in a Chrysler dealership before that car was put out on the market. A salesman showed me a picture of the ‘new’ Charger. I said, disgustingly, “It’s got FOUR DOORS!”
“Yeah,” he replied, “We’re going after the family guys.”....................
Yes, we are headed to a very different future. Imagine a Car & Driver magazine in a world of autonomous vehicles. ZZZzzzzz.
I was in grade school when the golden age of muscle cars was happening. I do understand folks just a bit older than me who are keeping the muscle car nostalgia market going, using some of the wealth they accumulated to buy the dream car they could not afford in their youth.
The indictment of the insurance industry as the mendacious killer of muscle cars falls a bit short. There were a lot of bad drivers getting a hold of more power than they could handle, and the accident data bore that out. Lbs/HP was a crude measure, but what else were you going to use back in the day? And don’t argue that it wasn’t happening. Today you can watch endless hours of people crashing muscle cars and exotic supercars on YouTube. Just more power than the driver knew how to handle.
I think those of us that find cars that work for us will be repairing and upgrading them.
You used to see teenage boys working on their cars all the time.
Now?
That’s horrible and I can relate but in a different way.
We were fixing to leave the local biker bar near closing time when a commotion started in the parking lot.
Two girls in separate cars had pulled into the parking lot and one girl was too drunk to park her car.
So her friend [also drunk] parked her car for her and ended up backing into her, crushing her against the grill of my little Dodge truck.
I sold the truck the next week.
Grandpa: It's the stuff we used to light our house.
10 year old: What did you keep it in?
Grandpa: Quit asking stupid questions and go light the candles.
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