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Thanks, brbethke. Here's where I'm heading:

What I discovered from the first three articles is that politics do matter: the bad times don't exist unto themselves, they come from somewhere, and things affect them one way or another, good and bad. Coming out of WWI, for example, the Wilson economic policies were disastrous upon the automobile industry. Or, FDR set in place not only Big Labor but the Big Three, which prior to the 1930s had not existed, or was not a set deal. (This observation, btw, goes against much of the established history on entry/exit and the growth of the automobile industry; I do not believe that the Big Three came about as a pre-ordained affair, as most economists treat it.) Studying WWII I was stunned to find that in his hyperactive anti-inflation measures Truman really screwed the auto industry and furthered the supremacy of the Big Three and Big Labor.

My questions are simple: what happened during the 1970s, and why? ....lol! The period is complicated: politics, economics, social trends all converged upon the automobile in a period of turbulence and change. I've got 3,000 words to figure it out...! I'll be pouring through the contemporaneous publications. What I'm interested in from Freepers is some direction, what to look for and why.

Here are two questions, brbethke: Did the small car triumph in the 1970s, or did the government just want it to? And what did consumers really want, and did Detroit give it to them?

There's a recent big picture book about American automotive history. The chapter about the Seventies is entitled something like "Government Gets Involved" -- a reference to the Chrysler bail-out. And of course, government was more generally involved in the automotive industry in the 1970s -- what with smog and safety and fuel efficiency -- than it had been at any time in the postwar period.

The oil shocks had a lot to do with the downfall of the big cars, though. The big gas guzzlers looked like dinosaurs lined up at the pump.

The general decline in quality also helped. If big cars were really well-built -- as people believed Mercedes and BMWs were -- people would have remained loyal to them, but if the big whales were poorly engineered and unreliable, then smaller cars made sense.

Detroit was slow to adapt to the fuel economy or safety, so foreign companies which thought small, influenced the market more than people could have predicted before the oil shocks of the 1970s. Perhaps, a more responsive American industry could have retained control and weathered the storm better.

Maybe the two car family had something to do with it. If you bought a second car in the Seventies, chances are it would be something small and economical. It was probably more likely to be foreign as well. Add those second car sales to compact purchases by young people buying their first cheap car and it must have meant a big rise in compact sales.

People's hearts may have stayed with the big cars, but in an age of high gas prices it made sense to make their second car a little one. If they liked it enough, they'd eventually trade the whale in for a minnow.

You could look at the other end as well: Why did SUV's become so popular in the Nineties? Laxer government fuel standards had something to do with it. So did soccer moms wanting a bigger family vehicle. The supposed greater safety of SUV's also had something to do with it. But if you told people in the eighties what their family car would look like ten years later they wouldn't have believed you.

Let me comment only on government's role in creating the "Big Three": government had harassed and persecuted not only Preston Tucker but also (on unrelated matters) Henry Kaiser. Now, even though the attacks on Kaiser were not related to his Kaiser-Frazer, but his airplane work, still one has to wonder if the government wasn't undermining his company behind the scenes. On the other hand, there is no question K-F was vastly underfunded (as was Tucker). However, the Fair Labor Standards Act had become ensconced by then, making it almost impossible for a smaller manufacturer to compete with a company that had more flexibility in its overhead.

On the small car, it wasn't "smallness" per se: government's assault on the "muscle cars" drove them out of production---the combo of EPA that took away their power and the CAFE requirements, along with the EPA requirements, that penalized them vs. a smaller car.

However, Detroit played a part in its own demise: remember that the Thunderbird was a small two-seater . . . until Ford's engineers made it into a big luxury car. Compare a '68 Mustang with a 73-75 Mustang---there is no comparison. One is a small car, one is a boat. Ditto the GTO. Only the Camaro remained about the same size---the Chevelle got really big. I think Detroit's engineers got obsessed with bigness just as many Americans favored smaller cars, but that did not mean they opposed POWER, just size.