I thought this was relevant:
Is this a really old car? That seems like a very small output for something that has 8 cylinders.
So car fuel economy has apparently improved as much as TV technology. Did all TVs look as bad as this one in the 1977?
Late 1970s. After the clampdown on emissions and the switch to rating in SAE net horsepower. In this era there were some appallingly weak engines on the market. My favorite was the big Cadillac V8, 500 c.i. (8.2 liters) and 190 hp.
Ha, OK. You could basically just burn 8.2 litres of petrol in a big bucket and derive more motive force than that. Well, maybe
When I was a kid I often spent weekends at Scout Camp. On the way home we had to go up a hill. Not a mountain, a hill. Probably less than 500 feet. But there were many times we really wondered whether our car - an older used Chevy - could make it.
Today I can accelerate all the way up that hill if I wanted to. It’s no more than a bump in the road.
Muscle cars meant something then because the separation between them and the ordinary family sedan was oceanic. Today any average sport sedan yields 250-350 horses.
Take a small engine, put it into a small car, and expect 0-60 in 60 seconds and of course your gas mileage will be good. Expect 0-60 in 5 seconds and everything changes.
Ah, the good old days of MPG-
I had a 1983 Datsun Nissan Sentra diesel that did an honest 42 MPG in town and 50-51 on the highway. It would do 0-70 mph eventually (exaggerating a bit here- It would do 70-75 mph easy on the highway and I drove it well above 80). Next best was a 1988 Ford Festiva that got 38 in town and 48 highway. Neither car had electric windows, locks, or airbags. The Festiva weighed around 1600 pounds, the Sentra about 1900. I replaced it with a Yaris which is about the same size. It weighs 2300 pounds and won’t quite get 40 MPG. Excess weight in today’s cars keep the MPG down compared to some of the older ones, but the much of the weight does come from safety features like airbags, crumple zones, and door beams.
OP must keep in mind that the '77 mentioned was rated at the national 55 mph speed limit. Many new cars would match that if they were tested the same way.
My '85 Honda Prelude was fairly zippy, looked good and got 40+ MPG on the first highway road trip I took it on. It was a 5 speed manual and had 2 carburetors.
I used to get 50 mpg in a 1984 Chevy Sprint. It was actually fairly zippy on the flat. The long hill up the 14 going to the Antelope Valley, though… If you kept it at 70 it would make it OK. Drop to 65, and you’d struggle to be dog 55 at the summit.
I used to get 50 mpg (highway) with my 1978 Honda Accord hatchback all the time. City driving was in the high 30s to low 40s. Five-speed manual with fifth gear overdrive.
1977 TA with the 200 h.p. engine: 0-60 = 9.3 sec 1/4 mile = 16.30
2010 Ford Taurus Limited (the first and easiest taurus I found) 0-60 = 6.9 sec 1/4 mile 15.2
Even the 1996 Ford Taurus LX Wagon did 0-60 in 8.8 seconds and the 1/4 in 16.7
So yes, a 2010 Ford Taurus smokes Smokey. By a lot.
Yeah, my car in graduate school (late 1980s) was a 1981 Plymouth Reliant coupe. Itty-bitty 4 cylinder engine, 4-speed stick, no A/C, no power anything (and, in that era, of course, none of the airbags or other newer safety equipment which, as mentioned upthread, has added considerably to the weight of a modern car). MPG was in the low 40s on the highway, low 30s in town. 65 or 70 was probably its top speed.
Although they cheated a bit in the movie. The T/A that did all the performance driving had a different drive train, specifically a '73 455 Super Duty engine with a 4-speed manual transmission. Even with that performance wouldn’t have been stellar. I’m guessing 0-60 around 6 seconds or so.
I once had a '87 Peugeot 205 with a 1.4 liter 55hp engine. Got 36 mpg around town every time I checked. But it weighed 870 kg (1900 lbs) with driver. 0-60 in 16 seconds.
I don’t disbelieve you or your cites. I still find this astounding (maybe because I watched Smokey too many times 
) Maybe it’s because of the rear wheel drive and smoking tires, and Burt Reynolds being cool and banging Sally Field in the back of it.
So, you are telling me that in a drag race, a '77 6.6L TA would lose to a modern Ford Taurus? My world has been turned upside down…
I remember a Honda car with a 600cc motorcycle engine that got some pretty awesome MPG figures.
Wiki reports this; One car magazine recording 136 mpg-imp (2.08 L/100 km; 113 mpg-US) when they didn’t exceed 30 mph (48 km/h),[3] which came at almost the perfect time with a gasoline shortage looming.
A lot of illusion of power and speed was because old muscle cars had rear wheel drive and inferior tires compared to today. Smoking the tires puts on a good show but it isn’t the way to make a car get from Point A to Point B the quickest.
You might like this old thread: Muscle Car Shootout: Would today’s fastest cars shut down the '60s-'70s muscle cars? It is surprising just how slow the vast majority of them were compared to even regular sedans today.
I’m thinking that the rear wheel drive may have been it. You get the sensation of the car “pushing” you up the road instead of “pulling” you.
Plus the noise. When you wind out the engine it just feels like more power. Sort of the “washed car runs better” fallacy. I’m still amazed.
Deleted Duplicate Post
It seems to me that the car companies are missing a golden marketing opportunity. Build a car with, say, 210 HP and the highest gas milage you can manage. Then, sell it with ads that emphasize that it has higher performance than the car in Smoky and the Bandit, and that it gets 60 MPG or whatever. Yeah, that’s terrible performance by modern standards, but you don’t have to mention that.