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.
They’ll get my 327, 4 speed, 1957 Chevy, when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
There’s a heavily modded Dodge Challenger that lives at a house in my neighborhood, sharing the driveway with a full size pickup.
During the “election”, the house was plastered with Byedung signs.
I wonder if the owner of those vehicles has a clue as to what the dems are going to do? Does he really think the “election” was only about getting rid of Trump?
How fast are e-cars when plugged in?
About the same speed as a gas car at the pump.....
From "Men in Black"
Edgar: "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
Alien: "Your proposal is acceptable."
I’m racing to get my Mustang back on the road so I can enjoy it before the fascists outlaw it.
You missed the point. Your VW runs on gas, so say goodbye to it!
This starts as just the muscle cars, then to the gas cars, and then to the self-driven cars. Maybe its what you want, . . .
What year?
Mine is 2014..................................
I saw an article where some guys Cannonballed a Tesla about a year ago. The time was similar to the guys that drove a giant Travco Motorhome in the first Cannonball when the speed limits were 55. LOL
‘69 - fastback of course!
I was just sure you were gonna say ‘Bullitt’...........................
I looked for an affordable ‘67 - ‘68 fastback for several years without much luck. I even bid on a few on ebay but struck out. Then I found this ‘69 a couple of towns over that had been sitting on the side of a guys house for a dozen years and snatched it up.
The PO drag-raced it for several years and it shows. The interior was stripped and it came with a temperamental 351W motor that is wicked fast. I’m almost done with the powertrain and suspension/steering/brakes and going to attack the sheet metal next.
“In terms of performance, the new electric cars can blow them away.....”
Once.
I've got a '61 VW two door truck..with no gas gauge. Ha!!
Was my daily driver in SoCal...when I bot it. That was like..1978-9 or so...Drove it to K-55 Baja to surf at least 3-4 times...Got a 1835 in it..dual carbs...Goes 60-65 up the hills...
Damn thing now worth $50k....or more
“You used to see teenage boys working on their cars all the time.”
Hell, the cannot tell time on an analog clock, you want them to learn to use tools?
I don’t think this will happen for a long time. Despite what liberals want the power grid cannot handle too many cars in a neighborhood charging at the same time. Battery technology is inadequate to handle replacing all gas powered cars. Cobalt is an essential component in lithium ion batteries and cobalt is in short supply with no relief in site. Selling more electric cars will worsen the shortage and drive the price up making electric cars more and more affordably. Graphite batteries are a promising technology but it could be decades before they become affordable.
Similarly there are major problems with self-driving cars. Maybe in 30 years...
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