Dad’s '70 T-Bird coupé had a 429 cubic inch V8. It would get up and go. Dad previously had a '66 Galaxie 500 7-Litre that was definitely a muscle car. 7 l = 429 cu.in.
When I was a kid Dad had a '66 T-Bird and later a '68 Olds Toronado. Both of the so-called “personal luxury car” or “executive luxury car” ilk. Not exactly muscle cars but with big V8s they could haul ass by the standards of the day. Much better at straight line speed than at curves though.
My mother’s cousin’s son got his father’s '61 Ford Falcon, 144 CI 6cyl automatic company car for a song when his father got a new company car. That gutless POS would not even spin the right rear tire in gravel.
My mom had a '57 VW beetle that I learned to drive with. 36 HP engine with a 4 sp trans. 72 MPH flat out.
My dad had a '64 Rambler, 194 CI 6cyl, 3spd std on the column. What a gutless POS and we actually pulled a small camper trailer through the mountains with it. Foot to the floor in 2nd gear on upgrades. Yikes! I loved my dad dearly but he was the eternal Scotsman. He could have bought a '64 Pontiac Strato Chief for only about $2-300 more which was a MUCH nicer car. However, it had a 283 V8 and he feared gas consumption.
Those were my personal experiences and I vowed to myself I would not have any “gutless” cars in my driving world and I’ve been true to my word these past 50+ years.
I should have explained myself better. The 2002-2005 T-Bird release referenced by the OP had the port windows like the 1956-57. Now I’m way too young to have been there. From what I remember from shows and magazines, the early T-Birds were aimed at soldiers returning from Europe after seeing all the fun little European sports cars. By the mid 60’s everything was a muscle car or had a muscle car option.
Yeah, the Thunderbird had muscular options but was classified as a personal luxury car. Similar to the Lincoln Continental Mark series.
Funny, the 73 T-Bird was replaced with a Mark Six (I think. ,maybe Mk V). That was a piece of shit!
I think a lot of you are forgetting just how bad malaise era cars were. All of them. I had an 82(?) Olds 88 with the 260 cid V8. I think it even had a 4-bbl. Getting on the highway was literally putting the pedal to the floor and hoping for the best. Measuring 0-60 was done with a calendar.
Back in the first half of the 90’s I rented the original Mazda Miata while on vacation in Northern California. It was the perfect car for blasting around Napa Valley but on roads with more than two lanes, it was an excruciatingly slow and pointless car.
I also owned a 1988 Jeep Wrangler, 4.2L 6-cyl, manual. Bought it used for the fun factor. Sold it because it couldn’t get out of it’s own way at any speed above 50mph.
Jalopnik fan?
(I just didn’t see it called “malaise era” anywhere else.)
I still have my 1999 Jeep Cherokee with the 6-cylinder engine. Even with 230,000+ miles on it, it’s quite capable.
Soon after I bought the Cherokee, a coworker bought a Wrangler. He opted for the 4-cylinder engine to save gas. It didn’t work. I guess he really didn’t think it through. See, on the 405 you often have to drive pretty fast. He was getting rubbish mileage in his four-banger. I was getting 20-25 mpg (more than he was getting) because while he was flogging his little engine to keep from being run over, my six was just loafing.
I already mentioned upthread how godawful those cars were. A friend had an early 80’s Chevy econobox, and after it was only four years old it looked and drove like a wreck. Rust on the body panels, all sorts of mechanical issues, squeaks and rattles everywhere, the plastic interior had split in places from the sun, etc.
I had a 1983 V6 Camaro Berlinetta with a 2.8L V6. It made 102 HP. Even the Z28 with the 5L V8 only made 145 HP. They were all gutless pigs on the road. The Berlinetta was comfortable and had a reasonable interior, though. Floated like a boat down the road, though. Not a sports car.
My wife had a 6cyl Wrangler of roughly that era. The challenge on the freeway is that the gearing is low and the (anti-)aerodynamic drag is high. So as a result at 75mph the RPM is way up and your foot is still deep in the throttle pushing that large flat plate through the air perpendicular. So highway mileage still wasn’t much to brag about.
It made a great city “sports car”. Highly maneuverable, good acceleration from 0 to 30, fun to bang the gears, good visibility, easy entrance/egress, and a dream to park. And you didn’t mind getting nasty city snow in the footwells.
When we moved from well down in the bowels of the city to the tippy edge of suburbia our driving mission changed; every trip had a couple, if not a few, miles of freeway. That car was a bad fit for that revised mission and was duly traded in.
Oh, how about the first generation Chrysler minivans, with the base 2.2L four cylinder and three speed automatic? My parents had one, and while I was too young to actually drive it I remember Dad complaining about it. And trips to the mountains stuck in the slow lane, unable to pass the trucks.
ETA: I don’t know if this is true or not, but I once read somewhere that Chrysler figured the equally slow VW Vanagon was their only real competition, so they could get away with using the K-Car engine. Well, and they were probably going for fuel economy since they were designed right after the fuel shortages of the 1970s.
A good proxy for vehicle quality is how old the vehicles on the road tend to be.
This table is very enightening:
https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Table3_11_01312021.xlsx
It shows the age of vehicles by percentage for 1970, 2000, and 2013. From there:
- in 1970 63% of all cars were under 5 years of age. Only 10.8% of vehicles were 10 years of age or older. By 2000, only 36.4% were five years of age or younger, and a whopping 41.6% were 10 years of age or older. By 2013, 5 and under was down to 32.1% and 10 and older, 45.5%. More people now drive cars more than 10 years old than they do cars they bought within the last five years.
We went from only 10% of the cars on the road making it to 10 years of life to just about half of them doing so. A huge jump in quality.
Or a huge decrease in the purchasing power of the middle class versus the median price of new cars.
For sure reliability is up. But affordability is down. Though the latter partially offset during the last few years by low interest rates.
As a matter of fact, no. I’m familiar with Jalopnik, of course, but I recall first hearing the term at The Truth About Cars, and I’ve seen it here and there. I think it’s caught on a bit.
I know you did- but I was referring to some of the other posts.
I just remembered a silver-colored Mustang Mrs. J. drove in the late 70s. It was highly unimpressive in the power department; I used to refer to it as the “no-go showboat”. I ran into a phrase online that fits: “a light visual tarting-up of an underpowered grocery-getter”.
A coworker/friend of mine had a Mustang convertible, probably about a 1991 with the 5.0l V8. She let me drive it pretty often when we hung our in the the 90s. It probably wasn’t exactly underpowered but it was quite disappointing, performance-wise. Vanilla Ice led me to believe it was a better car than it was.
My old 2007 Hyundai Sonata had about the same top speed and 0-60 speed as a 70s muscle car.