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.
. . .
Hey, it is other peoples money, who cares. /sarc.
Drunk Driving was much more prevalent back then, the days before MADD. I don’t blame the cars for that.
I said the same thing.
:D
Oddly, the Magnum was geared towards men but I fell stupid-faced in love with them.
Couldn’t afford one new but got a used one as soon as I could.
I can haul groceries, haul lumber, haul dogs and haul ass.
It’s perfect.
:)
You would love the Velocity Channel (Motor Trend) featuring ‘Grave Yard Cars’. Exclusively MOPAR muscle. Watching it now instead of Fox.
Amen to that.
In the time I’ve had it, all the suspension has been replaced, new cat, new exhaust, new windshield, a rebuilt motor dropped in and a low mileage tranny.
I need new headlights because the little clip thing fell off inside the sealed assembly and the right headlight shines up crazy in the fog.
They’re kinda pricey though so will have to wait.
I like that show
You can get very low priced Chinese knock offs from Amazon.
Ducking out now....
“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.”
Ditto for the 2nd generation Chrysler Hemi engine. 426 cubic inches of dual quad, hemispherical combustion chambered goodness! Rated at 425 HP and 490 ft. lbs. of torque when it debuted in 1966, it was improved each and every year until it died in 1971...with not a single extra HP being added to its rating.
BTW, Pontiac engineers who were a bit ticked off that their invention, the GTO, was no longer top of the heap in performance devised the Ram Air V engine. Due to the equivalent of RINOs in GM management, it never saw a sale to the general public for use on the road, but was incredibly effective in drag racing. It was to be rated at 375 HP but, in reality, had over 500 gross HP! Note that the patents are all expired on this engine, and several companies make improved versions of this magnificent engine right now - and it is one of my bucket list items to buy a ‘69 GTO and do a resto-mod with a Ram Air V engine under the hood.
They don’t write songs about Volvos.
That’s about right.
Ford and Chevy are like McCain and Romney. Dodge is Trump.
Off-the-line performance......it’s not even close.....
Try some of the high-performance Tesla’s...The fastest production car in the world with 620 miles on a single charge...0-50 in 1.9s, 0-100 in 4.2 and 250+mph top speed.....
https://www.tesla.com/roadster
That’s the high-end performance Tesla but the sedans are damn fast as well...
Charging time has improved as well plus you can charge at home anytime you like.....Many gas stations, business parks, and retail locations have charging stations as well.....Charging time has shortened as well, to 1/2 charge is under an hour.....
Haha, love it!
Pardon, dual feed. It gets called a double pumper so often I just call it that myself.
The 390ci replaced the original 352 back in 2005-2006 and visually it’s identical to the original as it’s an FE block.
Wow, so sad......
I’ll pass this along! Thank you!
Myself, I never paid attention to the Magnum until my friend bought one late last year.
In a small northern Michigan town, that was pretty much the only night time entertainment on weekends.......
Find someone old enough to buy us alcohol then go party out in the woods someplace or the beach or just drive around.....
Okay, Volvos don’t deserve to have songs written about them. :>)
It was awful.
The less drunk one killed the drunker one.
I never knew what happened to the survivor.
None of us knew them.
It’s all about the “woo”.
[I’m not allowed to “woo” very often because you can watch the gas gauge drop like a rock...but it’s so much fun]
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