Quote:
Originally Posted by Phogg
This thread is reminding me of the muscle car mentality of sixties and seventies American Auto manufacturers.
They and a portion of the car buying public insisted that the public wanted ONLY ever bigger and faster cars. That there would never be more than a tiny niche market at best for anything different.
Then Honda and Toyota managed to wedge a few fuel efficient cars with a 250,000 mile engine life into the market. After people saw their neighbors drive the same car for seven or eight years with little maintenance the absurd insistence that car buyers unilaterally desired huge guzzlers began to garnish the ridicule it had always deserved.
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Actually, the two major oil embargoes of the early 1970s that quadrupled our gasoline prices in just a few months ended the American muscle car era. Japanese automakers had introduced small, fuel efficient vehicles here and most people just turned up their noses at them. Then when gasoline shot up from $0.30 gal to $1.20 gal they started looking more seriously at those vehicles. Back then most Toyotas, Hondas, Subarus, etc. were very utility oriented with lackluster design and and few frills. Japanese automakers soon learned to make them more luxurious. After the embargoes, Detroit answered with the Chevy Vega, the Ford Pinto, and the AMC Gremlin! No competition at all for the Japanese cars! And as far as the muscle car went, well those big, heavy gasoline hogs cost a fortune to fuel after the embargoes, pumped huge amounts of pollution into the atmosphere, and quite frankly were the pits to drive. They were designed for the straight quarter mile drag race, not the curvy streets. Any decent European or Asian sports car made those Detroit muscle cars look terrible. They died out because they were dinosaurs that broke down constantly, were difficult to drive, and burned a house payment worth of gas every month.