What Happened To Muscle Cars In The 1970s?
What exactly happened to muscle cars in the 1970s? When you’re reading about the history of the American muscle car, there’s a very obvious demarcation. You have the raging hellbeasts that lumbered and roared their way down highways across the nation in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s. Then, suddenly, they just die off. Their extinction was as sudden as the dinosaurs’, but why? There’s quite a few factors that caused this lull in production, and in this article, we’re going to explore them all.
The first rumblings that something big was about to happen in the auto industry began in 1965. It was during this year that Ralph Nader, long before he attempted to run for the presidency, published Unsafe at Any Speed. This book was a groundbreaking study of the lax attitude towards safety measures taken by many vehicle manufacturers. The Chevrolet Corvair drew large amounts of fire in the study. Its lack of a anti-roll bar meant that tires had to be over pressurized, which led to a dangerous amount of oversteer. Other criticisms from Nader included ornate ornamentation that reflected sunlight into drivers’ eyes, non-standardized gear shift layouts that could lead to the driver shifting into reverse by mistake, door strength, pedestrians’ safety not being taken into account by cars’ exteriors, and air pollution. It would be the latter that eventually killed off muscle cars.
The auto industry, as you might imagine, did not respond well to this exposé. GM carried out a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Nader, for which they later apologized, and were forced to pay Nader $425,000. In response to the study, the federal government created the Department of Transportation.
Flash forward five years, and you come to the Clean Air Act. Though this act had been passed in 1963, sweeping amendments were made in 1970. These included, most notably for the contents of this article, new emissions regulations for both factories and automobiles. Prior to these regulations, muscle cars tended to feature high-compression engines that required both high-octane fuel and lead, as a valve lubricant. However, thanks to the new laws, the compression ratio had to be cut, and the cars required regular-grade fuel. Couple these with new safety standards requiring heavier bumpers and you end up with lower performance. Companies had also switched the numbers on their advertising from gross to net horsepower, which made the loss of power look even worse than it was. Consumers were now being offered cars that had around 100 horsepower less than the older models.
It was not these new regulations that would finally kill the muscle car, though. While they didn’t help, it would be a fuel crisis that finally ended their reign as the fast car du jour.
In October 1973, a war broke out in the Middle East between Israel and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and numerous other Arab countries. While Israel was victorious, political repercussions against the United States were taken by the Arab nations. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries declared an oil embargo against nations that it saw as supportive of Israel. These included the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan, alongside the United States. The embargo began in the first month of the war, and would not end until March 1974, by which time the price of a barrel of oil had gone from $3 pre-crisis to $12 by its end.
These American economic woes would not end with just higher oil prices, from 1973-75, there was a massive economic crisis in the west. The main effects of this were high inflation and high unemployment. Americans wanted smaller, more fuel efficient cars, which got lots of miles to the gallon. Previously, muscle cars had been marketed as a performance car for the everyman, but the everyman could no longer afford to run them, if they could afford the outlay to purchase one in the first place. Compact cars were the new in-thing, both those that were being made by Detroit, and those that were imported from other nations, most notably Japan.
In a cruel twist of fate, those who could still afford muscle cars found their performance lacking, driven down by the environmental regulations imposed on the industry earlier in the decade. The last true muscle cars died out by around 1974-75. While some cars still possessed big blocks, like the Plymouth Roadrunner, they weren’t built for speed. Deciding which car is the last “true muscle car” of the golden era is contentious, but for my money, I’d call that one for the Pontiac Firebird.
Many of the pony cars that helped to drive muscle cars forward still carried on after the 1970s, even if in name only. The Ford Mustang moved to the Fox platform for models produced 1979-1993, while AMC put out the Spirit. The Dodge Challenger name was given to a rebadging of the Mitsubishi Lambda coupe. The Charger name was given to a new compact, essentially, a Dodge Omni with a larger engine. The few cars that were able to survive through to the 1990s include the Mustang, the Camaro, and the Firebird. Finally, we began to see a resurgence of the muscle car spirit in the 2000s. This rebirth sprung not from Detroit, but Australia. The Pontiac GTO that launched in 2004 was a rebadge of the famous Holden Monaro, which had been tearing up Australian highways for several years. In 2005, we got the Ford Mustang redesign that we’d been waiting for since the 70s, which went back to the traditional Mustang look, and coupled it with high-power engines.
The end of the golden era of muscle cars is something of a cautionary tale for car manufacturers. The perfect storm of economic and political factors can easily spring up and smash your established models’ appeal within months. Luckily, we have since been able to reintroduce muscle cars to the world again, but there were quite a few years where it looked like the muscle car, and its appeal, had died for good.
