The Chevy Corvair, an iconic model at the peak of America’s muscle car generation was a swift rear-engine compact that encapsulated America’s stylishness. In its simplicity was its dedication to freedom and modification. Its design was undoubtably American. Its creative engineering committed to brisk speeds on long, wide-open roads. Even though it was a smaller vehicle, it was American and made no concessions. The new era of performance cars meant to drive fast on unending, straight highways was upon us.
America was renowned for its giant, comfy, and fast cars that looked more like spaceships than anything else. Starting with the Oldsmobile 88 in 1949 - going faster than 50 mph was not only possible, but a comfortable pace in which to cruise. Speed limits increased. America’s love for NASCAR grew.
One thing was becoming a slight concern for us, however - car manufacturers hadn’t properly approached the issue of fast steel tubes barreling down the road without any safety mechanisms or intuitive handling. The cars weren’t particularly safe. In fact, they were quite stripped, and up-and-coming lawyer, Ralph Nader (and the “Nader’s Raiders” law student activists), had a few bones to pick with those big greedy car manufacturers. Nader would publish his book Unsafe At Any Speed in 1965 which swept the nation, and got people, and subsequently legislators, clamoring for the Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, and GM) to make safer vehicles. Regulations would tighten in 1971, and by then, the Chevy Corvair had been discontinued.
Along with this clamoring came brouhaha for gas efficient vehicles in light of the energy crises of the great inflationary 70s. OPEC was disgruntled about Nixon pulling America out of the Breton Woods Accord (effectively shutting the gold window), tensions were flaring between nations within the Middle East and North Africa, but most of all, and yet least talked about, a one-of-a-kind book (at the time) was released in 1972 called Limits to Growth covering what seemed to be an uncovered subject pertaining to our limits to global production of oil. Alongside many of the first eco movements, this book would go on to impact the way the general zeitgeist perceived the potential for resource depletion and environmental destruction. And because of this newfound worldview held by many people, especially as their pocketbooks were being emptied by an over decade-long inflationary period, the necessity for safe, fuel-efficient, cheap cars was rising quickly.
This is what brought a huge paradigmatic shift in American automobile manufacturing. We would go from the boats of the 50s and 60s that were stylized as what we envisioned as spaceships rocketing off to our faraway destinations, to yet another boring, mechanical object there to provide a convenient means to our ends. Surely there was still traffic in those days, but with less optimism and aesthetic, the traffic jam would turn into an ugly representation of a burgeoning new form of slavery. Wage slavery. The American car would change forever, especially in light of Europe, and especially Japan, creating fuel-efficient, reliable cars that knocked us out of the park.
We were shifting from an aesthetic of beauty and speed to safety and efficiency.
The American Motors Corporation (AMC) would have its decade after it had spent the 50s and 60s in the shadow of the Big Three not being able to sell its small, efficient, quirky automobiles to the then well-off American public. Even AMC, which saw relative success with its somewhat stylish little American Rambler:
Would find its real success in the laughably ugly, powerless Gremlin:
The Big Three found themselves in the same regulatory hell, demonization by the public, and vote-needy congress. In 1975, the first Chevrolet Chevette rolled off the factory floor into the realm of the public, trying to superimpose in people’s minds that it was just as badass as the Chevelle. Ironic, it was trying to be a badass American muscle car, and yet was just a rebadged Vauxhall (a British car manufacturer, then-owned by GM).
The effects of the safety-efficiency paradigm were drastic and noticeable. Within just a few years, cars had changed. Seat belts became required by 1968. The same year, padded dashboards and other such safety equipment became mandatory to protect people from direct impact with the metal of their vehicle. The horsepower race was over, and catalytic converters, a big filter made up of different metals meant to capture carbon emissions before they went out the exhaust were made mandatory and fitted to every vehicle by 1975. Even then, by 1973, muscle cars would see a long retirement until the 90s and 00s, as absurd drops in horsepower culminated in a Malaise Era for vehicles. An example of the drastic horsepower decrease we saw was in the Checker Marathon, a car that saw upwards of 300 horsepower, falling well under 200 horsepower in just the span of a couple years.
A father of a friend of mine, who was a mechanic and car enthusiast in the golden age of vehicles remarked how bad cars were in the 70s - how noticeable a change it was for him. How it was such a loss. He said that, of the first new economical American cars made, the Ford Pinto was the most reliable, but it came with a curse.
The Pinto was notorious for exploding in the event it was impacted in the rear. Even just a minor fender-bender culminated in fatal explosions.
Ford was the first of the Big Three to jump on the new demand for cheap, fuel-efficient cars. At the time, the legendary (or notorious, depending on who you ask) Lee Iacocca presided over the development of a small, economical car. Ford could have reached over to its European market where it already had subcompact vehicles, but decided it needed one tailored specifically to the American people based on a few requirements:
It had to cost less than $2,000 (about $14,000 today)
Weigh less than 2,000 lbs
It needed to be on the market as soon as possible: Cut. Corners.
The Pinto was out on the market just 25 months after the project started, taking the shortest development time of any car in automotive production history. Obviously, this meant there’d probably be a few design flaws, but one in particular would leave a scar on Ford and Iacocca’s reputation for the rest of history.
The Pinto’s gas tank was located at the very back on the undercarriage with no structural protection in the event of an accident.
The fat cats at Ford realized this in testing, before the Pinto had even left the factory, but after having accountants and lawyers crunch numbers, found it would be too expensive to go back to the drawing board. It would have costed them $11 per car to modify the fuel system. A total expense of $137,000,000. In contrast, it would have only costed them $49,500,000 in payouts to grieving families or those Americans unfortunate enough to survive being burnt in flames after a minor fender-bender.
The story of the Pinto is a gruesome one. A conservative estimate finds that, had Iacocca and gang instead opted to modify the Pinto, they could have saved 500-900 Americans from being burnt to death. It seems somewhat moronic looking back. Did Ford really think they were able to get away with mass reckless homicide (reckless genocide?) and that their legacy wouldn’t be tainted? I guess it was worth it in the long-run, being the only one of the Big Three to never be bailed out by the federal government. Along with that reputation, though, Ford became the first corporation to be charged with homicide because of the Pinto. Ironically, after being fired from Ford, Iacocca would go on to become famous for procuring federal loans for Chrysler as its President.
No doubt, Ralph Nader had a lot to say about the disaster, calling for more regulations, and eventually Ford would recall the Pinto in 1978 due to mounting pressures, and discontinue it altogether in 1980. Nader, in a cosmically acerbic way, was responsible for the subsequent deaths attributed to Ford and its Pintos. Who is to say how many else would have died from the evil Corvair if it had still been in production, though? It’s hard to not attribute these deaths to a shoddy and rushed development of what would end up being death traps that were just as dangerous as their speedy predecessors. Who’s to say we wouldn’t have organically developed better safety systems in Nader and his raiders absence? It might have been worth it, considering the horrid cultural aesthetics we got afterwards. Seems to be a case of a manufactured scandal on the part of Nader, that not just a fourteen years afterwards, the great Milton Friedman would remark on Nader’s fallaciousness in an interview on Phil Donahue.
America was adapting to a new era that it just couldn’t get right, and in doing so, the results were reflective of negligence, laziness, hurriedness, and impatience. It took, arguably, another couple decades before it would start perfecting the economy car, but even at that, its best attempts were just rebadged Japanese cars like in the case of the Geo Metro and Pontiac Vibe in the 90s and 00s.
The American zeitgeist was ruled by the mayhem of scandal and uproar. The shift from Challengers to Chevettes was not reflective of an organic cultural shift, but a violent reposition into a separate paradigm. A paradigm of cheapness, bureaucracy, corporate corner-cutting, and an air of femininity and uniformity throughout the car market.
What is expected in the age of the machine is the cold violence that can be represented in the fatalities of car crashes. Well, if you have common sense. 40,000 Americans die in car crashes every year. Nader didn’t do anything to stop that, nor did his activists, or the USG do anything to prevent the totalization of the machine in our lives. Jevons Paradox played its hand, as well, and even though travel became cheaper due to higher mpg, the average American simply started to travel a lot more. We said a reluctant goodbye to the quick end of the muscle and spaceship generation, and slowly but surely, became ingratiated to an era of computerized cars. By the early 90s, every car sported primitive computers after the phasing out of carburetors, and digitality only became an omnipresent fact of life.
No one wants to admit that there is inherent peril in the industrial age, yet we want to pretend cutting down on accidental deaths due to car crashes is an improvement. It is, but in doing so, we have destroyed the few ways people had the opportunity to interact with the machines that ran their lives. No longer will a father and son work on a car together. That is becoming a distant memory that only boomers have with their gen x sons. Interactivity is limited to a UI, and any modification is only done by certified technicians. Sigh.
I think the moral of Nader’s story in his fight against vehicles, and the sudden shift that transposed a tough, explorative America for a safe, efficient one was a sign of what the machine wanted, ultimately.
There is a poetic rhyme throughout history. Abundance and riches bring about ages of artistic revolution and beauty. In restriction and regulation, however, the many spouts for artistic exploration to flow out of are blocked off, and sent through valves of scrutiny and standardization, to end their journey all at the same spout. This brings us to the malaise era of the 2020s, where every car is the same, is even made up of the same electronic parts from the same companies, every experience is ultimately the same, every “car” (computer on wheels) is not only put through the governmental wringer of bureaucracy, but the corporate one too, and ends up no different than any other car from around the planet, save for variance in quality. More than anything, everything feels cheap and ephemeral. There’s nothing to look forward to.
We are in the age of uniformity. No more patrician Packards or rapid Plymouth Barracudas. You are made to appreciate premium mediocre; beiges, blacks, and dark blues; user interfaces that connect to every device you have; the inability to work on any part of your vehicle, and necessity (soon by law) to take it to proprietarily-sponsored mechanics and dealerships; gay electric motors; and beyond all of that, a complete vacancy in personality and sense of ownership.
The Big Three have lost any legitimacy as representatives of culture. Corporations, just like Disney or GE, that are supposed to be bastions of Americana, are all now relegated to bureaucracy, ESG scores, and uniformity. They represent everyone, and at the same time, represent no one. They know what the consumer wants because they tell the consumer what to want. As GM hops on the bandwagon of becoming an all-electric company, both GM and Ford release their electric trucks, and Chrysler, nothing more than zombified brand owned by a monster corporation called Stellantis, fades away into obscurity until Stellantis can find way of rebadging it into something more marketable. The future of American cars looks bleak - totalitarian even. It is entirely about uniformity, kowtowing to political rituals, and singing praises to efficiency. No more sedans (not aerodynamic), no more muscle cars in the same edgy way they used to be, but above all, no sense of quality, sturdiness, nor opportunity for modification. All cars are simply computers you borrow from state capitalist entities to accomplish mandated tasks. This is the bed we made, and Nader tucked us in.
America sold its soul for efficiency, and in the words of the great Lee Iacocca:
“People want economy and they will pay any price to get it.”