In 1977 I had a 1966 MG Midget. I still have it. It routinely got 40mpg in town, 50 on the highway.
That’s a 1.1 liter engine and a 140 pound driver. Despite an engine rebuild, it’s not as peppy as it was in high school. I can’t quite put my finger on it…
Yeah, one reason people give for driving tank-like SUVs is that it makes them feel safe. And even if individual American consumers would be willing to, maditory safety equipment is manditory. How many of those lightweight 70s cars would pass modern safety standards?
In 1980 I had a 1973 MG Midget that got about 40mpg. I remember it took five bucks to fill the tank and then I could ride around for at least a couple of weeks. That was a fun car. Sadly, I don’t have it now.
Yea geo metros were high mpg.
the lower your emissions standards and the lighter weight the car the easier it is to get high mpg, doesn’t mean much.
smart cars are a joke, they get you a lot less car for essentially the same price. basically a green badge at that point.
Oh Lord have mercy. I drove a 1979 Ford Fiesta for more than 20 years, and safety standards? The car didn’t even have a door on the glove compartment. It had a glove shelf. In the summer, if you were wearing shorts you could feel the breeze blowing through the cardboard firewall between you and the engine. Air bags? Ha! On the other hand, I always thought that driving that car clearly indicated to others that I didn’t give a damn, that today was a good day to die. It helped changing lanes on freeways in the DC area.
But no fooling, when it was new it did get 40+ miles a gallon on the highway.
I can’t find it now, but I read an article in I think Slate a few years ago that explained that old cars got better MPG largely because 1) cars tended to be flimsier in general then and 2) they did not have the weight-adding luxuries (e.g. air conditioning, power windows) or safety features that people expect today. It said most of these old cars would be totally unmarketable today because they didn’t have good crash test ratings.
Except that there are tons of low-powered subcompacts sold in the rest of the world that perform quite well in crash tests, still have all the fancy gizmos (as options anyways), and still get stupendous gas mileage. The only real trade off is that they’re small and slow. Like the VW Polo, which has high marks from NCAP, most of the same options that are avaliable on bigger VW’s and gets over 50 MPG with a gas engine and nearly 70 with a diesel.
Safety has also done the same thing as horsepower. Even cars that are at the very bottom of the market now are vastly safer than bigger fancier cars were even 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe the perception that very small cars can’t be safe works against them, but certainly not the reality.
Those aren’t the kinds of cars Americans were driving in the '70s, though. I didn’t say dangerous cars with no fancy features were the only ones that could possibly get good MPG.
not just small and slow, emission standards were lower for diesels.
things like leaded gas were phased out later in the uk as well, they aren’t that advanced. the main reason they have to settle for such low mpg cars is their taxes are pretty extreme, in all areas. doesnt matter how nice the safety cage is if you are hitting a heavier vehicle physics kicks in and you will take a bigger hit. they tend to show a smart car hitting a concrete barrier, but well, an suv hitting up higher and not using all of the smarts crumple zone as optimally is going to change the result.
Sure they are. They’re vastly nicer than they were in the 70’s, but those are essentially the same class of car as the original wave of subcompact imports that hit the US in the 70’s. I’m not talking about microcars like the SmartCar-- these are more like a Geo Metro, which were also approximately the same size as the Mazda GLC or the original Honda Civic or any of the other first-wave import subcompacts. Those cars were primitive deathtraps compared to their modern equivelents, but so was any car from the 70’s compared to it’s present-day equivelent. But for whatever reason the whole subcompact class of car has largely disappeared from the US market. Cars like the Fiesta and the Yaris are technically subcompacts, but they’re on the large end of that class and we only get them with the biggest engine options.
“class” is based on interior volume, so the increase in external size has come from how much “thicker” things like the doors, pillars, and dash have become.
Right, what I’m saying is that the only cars we get in the US that are classed as subcompacts are on the cusp of being either large subcompacts or small compacts. Both the Yaris and the Fiesta are at exactly 85 cu/ft, which is the cut-off. They’re veritable cathedrals compared to the subcompacts of old or the smaller subcompacts sold in Europe and Asia.
Hah! I had a Chevy Sprint as well, but a 1985. It only had 3 cylinders, but it got 52 mpg! It had no power windows, no power steering, a manual sunroof, inadequate heat, and no passing power at all, but I could park it almost anywhere. It was $6400 brand new, and I loved it!
The problem has pretty much been summed up in the discussion. it is two fold.
1: The American consumer doesn’t want anemic low powered death traps, so car manufacturers aren’t going to make what they can’t sell. Quite frankly, I don’t blame the average consumer. I, like most like a moderately quick car that won’t kill me in a fender bender. Perhaps if cars cost $10k I could change my tune, but they don’t. 20k isn’t a lot to spend on a car these days and if you are going to ask someone to plunk down that much coin, you can’t really expect them to settle for mediocrity.
2: The Government wants too much from car makers, ignoring what is reasonably possible. You demand that they make safer cars and cars which produce less emissions, but then want them to be get high MPG. Those making the requirements seems oblivious to basic facts, that we don’t yet have affordable technology that allows all three of those things to happen in the same machine. Safety equals weight. Weight works in direct opposition to good MPG. Low emmisions require things like catalytic converters which choke an engines performance, increasing the amount of fuel it must burn to make the same amount of energy, thus lowering MPG. And that brings us full circle back to safety. Safety requires more steel, more components (such as airbags, anti lock brakes and such). More weight. More weight requires more horsepower to move around which is difficult to archive when you are strangling an engine with smog controls. There is no easy answer and if a car company had the technology to do it, you can bet that we would have seen it in the showrooms by now. There is too much money to be made by the first to develop a safe, affordable car that gets 75 MPG. We have to be realistic in what we set as goals and requirements for car makers. I it is novelfor a President to say he wants all car makers average fleet MPG to be doubled in ten years, but wanting it to happen and having the technology to make it happen are two different things.
As far as those shocked at the sorry performance of the muscle cars of the '50s and '60s, it is an eye opener but it is true. Hell, the 1979 Corvette was a dog, a current KIA would probably embarass it on the track today. Even the so called super cars of the '80s pale in comparison to today’s average sports cars. I remember when the 1984 Lamborghini Countach came out. You just knew vy looking at it that it was the fastest thing on the planet. And for it’s time it was. It cost $100,000 then which was mind boggling huge money for a car. Today’s mid level sports cars meet or exceed the Countach in almost every area at a fraction of the cost. However, I would still kill for one to be in my driveway, for one thing the new cars can’t match is the looks and jaw dropping strares a Countach wold still get rolling down the street.
Once again, sorry for the typos. I am still getting used to my new tablets virtual keybaord an there seems to be some display mistakes in what I type in the text box and what displays when posted. My apologies for any mistakes, I am aware of them and trying to correct them.
1: Again, there are small efficient cars sold elsewhere that aren’t “deathtraps” by any reasonable standard, so obviously it IS perfectly possible to make a safe small car. The idea that the only way to be safe in a car is to pile more steel around you is hopelessly out of date. Airbags and crumple zones and such don’t weigh nothing, but safety features alone won’t significantly reduce mileage.
2: This was basically the Big 3’s stance in the 60’s through 90’s and it’s still not true. Properly designed pollution controls shouldn’t reduce performance one bit. The reason for the poor performance of American cars in the 70’s and 80’s wasn’t emissions rules, it was the big 3’s stubborn refusal to invest in ground-up designed emissions control schemes instead of trying to basically jerry-rig and detune 1950’s technology to meet the standards. The Japanese didn’t make this mistake and stole half of Detroit’s market share for their troubles.
Bringing it back to the present, making a more efficient car is no great technological mystery-- you just make them less powerful. The only reason why car makers can’t sell slower more efficient cars is that new car buyers don’t really care much about mileage (which makes sense given how much a new car costs and how little fuel does) and so they’re always going to for the more powerful of any two cars they’re presented with. If the government waved its magic wand and said everyone needs to increase their CAFE numbers 25%, they could easily do so by simply reducing the huge HP numbers cars have these days. If power goes down across the board, no one carmaker suffers. People didn’t stop buying new cars even in the darkest malaise years of the 70’s, and so it’s not like putting the brakes on the current HP arms race is going to put the industry out of buisness or ruin our standard of living or anything like that.
I have a feeling that in a very small car like a Smart car that the level of safety you experience in a crash does have something to do with the amount of steel around you, the length and width of a vehicle, etc. I mean, sure they’re safer than older larger cars, but if I had my druthers I’d rather be rear-ended by a semi-truck going 30mph in a modern SUV than in a Smart car.
The Smart has a very strong passenger cage, and an adequate crumple zone. The “problem” with the Smart’s relatively low mass is that in a collision with a heavier vehicle, the Smart is more likely to be sent skittering away from the crash. I suppose that would put the Smart occupants at a greater risk of a secondary collision.
Some of the most fuel-efficient compact cars sold abroad are the same car as the US model, with a smaller engine. I think for every compact car model available in the US, there is a more efficient (and less powerful) version that’s only available in Europe and Asia.
Obviously putting a smaller engine in a car does not make it less crashworthy. This is a safety issue only if you buy into the notion/myth that an underpowered car is inherently dangerous - e.g. if you can’t accelerate fast enough into onto the freeway you’ll get rear-ended.
You just said that consumers demand safety. But anyway, governments of Europe, Japan, etc have very strict standards for safety and emission as well, so it doesn’t explain why cars sold in the US are so much less fuel-efficient than those sold overseas.
the price of fuel explains that. even at $4/gal, fuel is cheap here.