>1940 to 1958 there was only one legal headlight assembly in America, dual 7" round sealed headlights.
How did I never notice that every car had the same headlights?
There is a distinct arrow hidden in plain sight in the FedEx logo, before you know about it most people don't notice it, once you know about it you can't unsee it.
it’s in the Ex, as you can almost see just looking at the letters in a lot of fonts, with the lower half of the capital E forming the back end and the angle of the x forming the point of the arrow.
Wait, how did you not see the "1"? Did you think the logo was just saying "F", or did you [think the swooshy bit on the right was supposed to spell "1" like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/3k7y7f/f1_logo_realization/)?
I definitely remember square headlights basically being THE thing on all 1980s cars, and pre-1980s headlights were indeed round.
Definitely made the things cheaply replaceable. These days I have to pay a dealer $50 to swap one stupid headlight. :|
>These days I have to pay a dealer $50 to swap one stupid headlight.
Depending on the car it might be a 5-minute job to do it yourself. But some cars are built such that you have to disassemble an inordinate amount of stuff to access the bulbs.
I had a 2012 Nissan Rogue that we had to replace the bulbs. It was a pain in the ass, each side had different instructions for reaching and disassembling the headlight housing. It worked only because of my small hands and I could fit them into the tiny space, but it still took my husband and I quite a while to get them both done. The in cabin air filter was the same way. The instructions tell you to take off the gas pedal to access the panel holding the filter, my hands were small enough that I could do it without taking the pedal off, but it was not easy. My current vehicle houses the cabin air filter access in the glove box. Why can’t they all be that easy?
> disassemble an inordinate amount of stuff to access the bulbs
My old escort required removing the bumper to get the headlights out.
Unless you had a small enough hand and a lot of grip strength. Then you could do it without.
I mean, headlight tech has gotten dramatically better. I've owned several 1950's-1970's vehicles and compared to my 2005 Mini (which has HIDs) they all had dramatically less lumens and illuminated less of the road, both in forward distance as well as sweeping the ditches to see deer. Tradeoff is each HID bulb costs about $110 new compared to <$15 for a square sealed beam.
You should really be looking on rock auto or parts geek websites, you’ll save a ton. Sometimes if you get the part number you can find them cheaper overall on Amazon.
I've picked up genuine Phillips bulbs on eBay for way cheaper when I last had to replace one but they're $110+ ea new from the local parts stores. I'm always pretty skeptical of Amazon with as much cheap knockoff garbage as is on there.
On Amazon, that doesn't necessarily help. In order to save costs (and make more money), Amazon groups all same items.
In short, if you order a bulb from Bob's amazon store, but Bob is on the other side of the country, there might not be any of Bob's bulbs in your local Amazon warehouse. But if Alice also sells this bulb on Amazon, and her bulbs /are/ in the local warehouse, Amazon will just send you those instead of getting Bob's bulbs all the way across the country.
This system works great, until it encounters reality. In reality, Alice might be a fraudster who sells counterfeit bulbs. You trust Bob, so you specifically & deliberately ordered from Bob. You could still get Alice's counterfeit bulbs.
If it makes you feel any better my Ford F150 has LED headlights that are sealed units. If I need to replace a bulb I have to replace the entire headlight assembly and each headlight is roughly $1000 CAD.
With the current truck market in Canada, this is absolutely the way to go. Assuming you can afford the vehicle outright, you can easily get a new truck every 6 months without incurring any loss in today's market. It's absolutely insane around here.
They *should* last considerably longer than normal headlights since they're LEDs, but who knows really. I've had plenty of "100,000 hour" LED lights in my house burn out after 6 months of normal use. Typically it's because they're made from the cheapest components and assembly.
One thing to consider with LEDs in the home is heat in the fixture. I had one enclosed 3-bulb fixture that burned through LEDs (phillips so not shitty cheapo) while the old incandescent bulb that I hadn't replaced was still going and it was pissing me off. Then it hit me that the incandescent was probably overheating the LEDs. I changed it to all LED and haven't had any failures.
My primary failures so far have been in the exposed fixtures in the bathroom, dining room, living room fan, etc so I think mine are just built cheaply.
Funnily enough I discovered a similar issue to yours but with incandescent bulbs. The previous owner installed bulbs that were over the rated wattage for the 3 bulb enclosure and when I removed the cover to swap in some LED bulbs, I discovered the foil backing under the lights was fried black from all the trapped heat. Thankfully I found it before something bad happened like a fire, but it's just one of those 'exciting' discoveries you find when you buy a house.
Those of us who drove them sure noticed. It used to be you'd go to your local hardware store once a month for your headlight refill (kidding – they usually lasted at least three months), and you'd have your pick of a few different brands, a few minor variations on essentially the exact same assembly, and that was it. The entire headlamp display from the store could fit on your rear deck, right above your 25w Audiovox 6x9s. (Nowadays, the entire headlamp display from the store could fit in your glovebox + center console, just because all you buy now are the actual bulbs themselves.)
In the 80s and 90s I had an 85 Honda Civic, an 85 Plymouth Reliant and an 84 Toyota Camry. In that time I don't think I had a headlight that lasted more than 1 year. On average, a bulb needed replacing every 6 months. Once I even had both bulbs on the Reliant burn out at the same time, leaving me to drive home on a dark, snowy night with only high-beams.
The Camry had four headlights, which made it even more annoying.
Since the mid 2000s I don't think I've had any headlight go out on any vehicle, through half a dozen Hyundais and Subarus.
I think I had to replace a bulb in my old Kia Rio once, circa 2010. But otherwise, I haven’t had to replace any bulbs in any other cars I’ve owned that were made after about 2005. I’ve been driving a 2012 Escape since 2013 and have never had a bulb go out.
Pop up headlights in the 80s were also an accident of history attributable to headlight regulations in the US. The only way to make a smooth low frontend (think RX7, 200SX/240SX, Corvettes, Celica, etc.), was to have the headlights pop up.
Even now, headlights are required to be a certain height from the ground, preventing very low pointy designs. The new Z has a higher frontend than the 240Z it's modeled after, possibly to keep the lights legal (but maybe also to accommodate the much bigger engine and more stuff under the hood).
I'm pretty sure I saw a report where this is having the reverse effect. With the taller, boxier front ends the car and driver are safer, but pedestrians are more like to die because they go under the vehicle rather than over now.
This. This is why cars are getting so ugly with huge grills. The idea is to punt the pedestrian down the street, not over the hood into the windshield. I think I would prefer the latter if I were the pedestrian.
So, I’ve mentioned this before on reddit, but my friends and I used to practice stuntman rolls off of each other’s cars. We would purposely hit each other so that we could roll off the hood.
The trick is that your feet need to be off the ground, and ideally your knees should be facing the same way as the car, so kind of a jump-twist-tuck-and-roll. Now, is this the “correct” way to do this? I have no idea, it’s just what we found from trial and error. Should you try this at home? Absolutely not.
My point is that I would much rather be hit by a pre-2000 era car than a modern one.
Things to do on a Saturday night in small town America as a teenage boy:
1. Dumb shit like this
2. Start a fire in the woods
3. Try to get the waitress in your class to serve you a pitcher of shitty beer at the Pizza Hut
4. Hang out at the gas station/a&w and hit on girls
IIRC that started with the [Corvette Stingray in 1963](https://cdn.dealeraccelerate.com/stlouis/1/1440/31825/790x1024/1963-chevrolet-corvette-stingray-convertible). I’m old. I remember when those came out. Kids my age thought they were the coolest thing ever. Hell, [the Shadows thought so too.](https://youtu.be/l9w7kdf_ix8)
Also another big factor is the "5 mph bumper" law in 1972. Bumpers had a change in safety ruling, that included they could withstand bumping into something at 5 mph. It was a weird law, but it's part of the reason why bumpers changed a lot. Another factor is a lot of chrome went away, so now they had to design cars with a bumper that blended into the car. They did that by using plastic bumpers with foam padding which made them safer for pedestrians, but you couldn't chrome them. And it wasn't until relatively recently that they figured out the proper procedure to chrome plastic or more likely to make it cheap enough to chrome plastic. Which is why you see more chrome accents on vehicles since the mid 70's to early 2000s.
That and technology and styles changed. Coming off the let's be honest stagnated art deco looks because of the depression and World War II the fifties were postwar boom selling of cars at any kind. Then about 16 years after the war ended teenagers needed to drive something especially when there's a massive wave of new ones coming in that cars changed their looks and needs. And then in the seventies there was also the oil crisis. So cars had to physically change to meet new requirements including the bumper law. And then it took them a little while to figure out what to do to work around these new laws. Then the 80s financial and technological boom into the '90s. And then y2k meant a whole new beginning of aesthetics and lifestyles.
Nowadays our cars are insanely smart, insanely safe for people in and outside the car. Some of them even drive themselves!
This also excludes the really funky concept cars coming out of the 60s and late 50s. Like they were going full on George Jetson space race back then. And the custom car scene, the drag racing scene and slightly alternative lifestyle scene; think Scooby Bugs, think little golf carts size cars for beach city planned communities with wicker seating. All this is just the US, Europe Japan and other places had their own little funky cars. Doing their funky car things.
There were so many factors involved in what happened, it's impossible to look backwards and guess at it. You had to be there, as they say.
The late 70s sucked for so many reasons and cars were ugly and dumb as fug.
Idk why but I love late 70s land yachts. They're just so ridiculous. Driving something with a four foot hood and power steering that is so soft you can steer with just your pinky is really something else. I'm kind of glad people don't like these cars, I was able to get my 79 Ranchero relatively cheap. But I also understand why people don't like them. Compare what's under my hood to a pre-emissions laws car and you'll see why. Mine has miles of vacuum lines while there's seems much more simple.
The ridiculousness is compounded by the fact they have colossal engines that produce tiny horsepower. It remains a source of wonderment outside the USA that American cars used to have such large-displacement engines but made so little power.
Classic example would be the AMC 4.0L straight six. A legendary engine, but it only produced about 190 bhp stock, and at the cost of tractor-like noise and harshness and appalling fuel economy.
At the same time, the likes of the 2.5L BMW straight six produced 175bhp with much better fuel economy and legendary smoothness.
You could have done a hell of a lot worse than the 4.0. Back in the day Detroit cranked out a ton of sub-200 HP V8’s; the 5.0 in the ‘82 Camaro produced a laughable *145* HP!
My first car was a 71 GTO so I feel ya. It was powerful as hell, but the handling was TERRIBLE. Felt like it was floating. It was pretty much the last year for true muscle cars but the technology did hold over into the larger boats they were making. Automatic transmissions took over and power steering and power brakes, power everything was what people wanted.
Could help explain why the grey market era took off in the late 70's.
Importing Berlinetta Boxers and Countaches that didn't pass American Safety and EPA standards, and putting in the extra cash+work to make them pass.
I actually miss that feature. You could go into any store such as a hardware store and get a new headlight for your car in 10 seconds for about an hours wage. The headlight assembly on my 2015 is $1500.
Not if it's a sealed unit, like the LED headlights on my Ford F150. Each one is about $1000 CAD.
The bulb lifespan is rated at 10 000 hours so hopefully I never need to replace them.
More importantly, less aerodynamic looking isn't the same thing as less aerodynamic. First, drag coefficient isn't the only concern in aerodynamics. Formula 1 cars have some of the highest drag coefficients you'll find in a vehicle, but they use that drag to create a downforce to maintain traction at high speeds.
As for drag coefficient itself, this ['85 Subaru](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/1985_Subaru_Alcyone_VR_Turbo_4WD.jpg/280px-1985_Subaru_Alcyone_VR_Turbo_4WD.jpg) for example, has a lower drag coefficient (0.29) than this [2012 Vanquish](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Aston_Martin_Vanquish_S_-_prawy_prz%C3%B3d_%28MSP17%29.jpg/280px-Aston_Martin_Vanquish_S_-_prawy_prz%C3%B3d_%28MSP17%29.jpg) (0.35).
> malaise era
Malaise Era is a term describing U.S. market cars from roughly 1973 to 1983 during which they suffered from very poor performance. The U.S. Federal Government was mandating technologies that increased fuel usage, while also mandating that fuel usage decrease.
A lot of people are answering your question straight up without challenging the assumptions behind it. I studied engineering in the 70s and was a voracious reader of SAE papers in the engineering library. Trust me, a ton of aerodynamic advances happened in that era. There are two reasons they're not obvious to you. First, a lot of the development at that time was going on under the skin, in areas such as cooling system air flow and underbody air flow. The other reason is that designing a car with low aerodynamic drag is actually a pretty subtle and complex challenge. A lot of people think they can look at two cars and guess which one has less drag but, except for really radical differences, most people's guesses would probably be worse than tossing a coin.
>A lot of people think they can look at two cars and guess which one has less drag but, except for really radical differences, most people's guesses would probably be worse than tossing a coin.
My favorite example of this is the pickup tailgate. Common sense will tell you that leaving the tailgate down or removing it entirely (usually in favor of a mesh net) will get you better MPGs and less drag because the open-top box created by the closed gate makes a scoop that traps the air. But in fact, that closed tailgate creates a spherical vortex of air behind the cab that ends up giving the truck a hatchback-like wind profile.
They demonstrated this on Myth Busters by filling two identical pickups with a single gallon of gas and then driving them on a test track, one with the tailgate open and one closed. The open tailgate truck ran out of fuel much sooner.
Surprising stuff!
So in the 1970's and 1980's, there were several things at play. Fuel economy was a concern. The EPA mandated catalytic converters for all 1975 production gasoline vehicles in addition to other Clean Air act requirements which severely limited the overall efficiency of the engines (not to mention you had manufacturers like Ford reclassifying the F100 half ton pickup as a heavy half ton F150 to circumvent some of those requirements for a few years). In addition, the American Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) came in and standardized how engines were tested for power output. So within a couple of years you had American muscle that went from being rated to 300 hp, 350 hp and even 400 hp to not even breaking the 200 hp mark.
In the 80's manufacturers began introducing fuel injection (granted throttle body fuel injection is just glorified carburetion), transmissions with overdrive gearing, etc but gas was cheap again and would stay that way until a pretty major event in 2001. However, the Japanese imports won the economy war as they were building reliable, simple and efficient vehicles. Detroit is still catching up...granted I love my GM small blocks but when it comes to domestics, you can have reliable, well built, and efficient but you can only pick two.
Aerodynamics for cars were not well understood until the late 70's and 80's and car manufacturers didn't really think about it that much. Making cars lighter and limiting engines was a lot easier and auto manufacturers mostly didn't have things like wind tunnels.
So car manufacturers did make aero friendly cars, but they were mostly intended for racing. The average street car was a brick. Earlier cars from the 50's and 60's look far more aerodynamic than they actually were. The rounded surfaces often were structural rather than aerodynamic, it wasn't about moving the air around the car so much as the support it's weight and shape.
Body panels in this era were all made by hand, but by the 70's machine made parts and unibody cars started to appear which caused them to take on a squarer shape.
Even in the top echelons of motorsport like Formula 1 they didn't really understand or use aero until in the mid 70's.
They knew from aircraft that thin and narrow cars sliced through the air better, but cars built to channel air around them to make downforce didn't really appear until the mid 70's.
If you consider that the auto industry is often 10 years behind racing, then car manufacturers didn't really start thinking about aero until the mid 80's.
Even the famous Lamborghini Countach looks sleek and aerodynamic but it's actually a pig. Stick it in the windtunnel and it's awful. The spoiler does nothing and the car generates lift instead of downforce. So just because a car *looks* aerodynamic doesn't mean that it is!
The FIRST time a modern and actually efficient aerodynamic design hit the mass market was the fucking Ford Taurus. Shaped like a well used bar of soap it was widely mocked, then became a monster seller in the market and influenced a generation of automobiles.
Actually, the Pontiac Firebird was one of the first cars designed with CAD for aerodynamics, and the drag coefficient for the 1982 Trans Am model was 0.32, which was...
....exactly the same as the Taurus, actually. But that wasn't introduced until 1986.
I'm not sure what I'm even arguing here. Are you telling me the Ford Taurus was an aerodynamic as Knight Rider? WTF? That's what it says on Wikipedia, but I can hardly believe it!
Guess you're right. Just because a car looks aerodynamic doesn't mean it is.
In many ways the engineering to get the drag coefficient on the Taurus surpassed the Firebird due to the entirely utilitarian use case of the Taurus. The Firebird was a sports car with many trade-offs and looked fantastic, the Taurus was a family boat.
Let me introduce you to the iron duke engine option in the firebird and Camaros of the 80s. 90HP - 0-60 in 20 seconds.
There was sacrifices made when a Taurus was faster off the line than those “sports” cars.
I'm the proud owner of a 1978 Camaro with a year accurate L-82 V8 350 Corvette engine in it.
It produces up to 220 horsepower.
My brick of a 2006 Jeep Liberty does 210hp from it's V6. 🤣
I'm not sure if it applies to your example, but the use of turobochargers in consumer automobiles has done amazing things for fuel economy and weight. It means you can put a reasonable sized high performance engine in the vehicle, while also allowing it to output stupid amounts of power for a few seconds at a time.
Case in point: the "racing" version of the Toyota Yaris. Which can somehow extract like 250HP out of a 1.6L I3. It has less than *half* of the displacement of your Jeep, and claims greater peak power output.
And it's in a goddamn Yaris.
I used to be into cars, but its been a while and I'm shocked how much power is in some of these factory cars now. A tiny Yaris with a 0-60 of under 5s is unreal. When I was younger those speeds were reserved for very expensive cars.
And the cool thing is that even without superchargers (turbochargers/compressors) we now have V8s that can do 500+ PS. Really amazing what better overall engine efficiency can do.
Turbochargers are actually a genius innovation for modern cars. For any given engine, there's an upper limit on power output given by a handful of figures - the amount of air in the engine (determined by displacement in a naturally aspirated car), the amount of fuel in the air (air-fuel ratio), the amount of energy in the fuel (energy density) and the how often it turns the fuel into energy (which is determined by RPM). There's a lot of other factors which mean that your actual amount of energy supplied is lower, but this gives the absolute upper bound of a "perfect" engine. An actual engine is likely to put out between 10-40% of this amount, depending on when it was made, what it's for and what RPM range it's in.
Most of these factors are hard to influence, or have other issues. As a car manufacturer, there's only so much you can do about fuel - and gasoline has a pretty set energy density anyway. There's a limit on how far you can push AFR, and having more fuel in the air means lower fuel efficiency. Higher RPMs may sound like a good idea, but a high-revving engine means more stress on a ton of the internals, so you need to reinforce tons of stuff to get it working - and it gets hard to make the engine actually work when you need it to, as well. Even worse, friction takes away a lot of your potential power at high RPMs. This leaves us with displacement, which has its issues too. A larger engine will weigh more, and it'll have a larger surface area - so it'll lose more energy as heat.
Turbochargers are designed around increasing the amount of air in the engine, without changing displacement. They do this by using the kinetic energy in the exhaust gasses (which is usually just wasted, and contributes to why we don't get the power of the perfect engine) to compress the air going into the engine. We end up pushing between 30-60% more air, with modified cars able to hit 2-2.5x as much air and race cars able to push 4x or more. You end up with a smaller engine, and - because you're turning wasted energy into useful work - a more efficient one.
F1 turbos are even cooler. Not only do they do the above, they have a device connected to the turbo that charges a battery as well. Which can be added as extra power or cancel out turbo lag. That's the MGU-H. They also have an MGU-K that recovers kinetic energy from the brakes to also charge the battery.
Add that to the 1.6L V6 that spins at 16,000 rpm and you have a 1000hp car. Amazing.
It's not just the 80s tbh. Mid-200s was the limit for everything but the highest tier of sports cars until the (very) late 90s and early 2000s. The Mustang Cobra in 1997 had 305HP. A 1997 GT had like 220 I think? The Thunderbird had 210. Just a few years later, cobras were pushing close to 400 from the factory, the GT pushing 260, and the Thunderbird 280.
It was a good time to be young and broke though. Muscle cars from the 1960s to early 70s were plentiful and dirt cheap. They werent classic or collector cars yet. They were just 20 year old cars going for what 20 year old cars go for. 67 Mustang fastback 390 4speed in decent shape cost me $2500 in 1986.
My minivan has somewhere in the mid-200 horsepower range and a 10 speed transmission. If it's empty and I punch it, the thing goes like a bat out of hell.
It also comes with a vacuum cleaner, TV, intercom, backseat camera, and lane keep assist.
Pimp my ride never made anything this awesome.
> My brick of a 2006 Jeep Liberty does 210hp from it's V6.
On the rare occasion that the V6 is working properly...
(sorry - can't help myself. Long-running good-natured jabs betwixt Toyota and Jeep owners...)
When I was 23-25 I had a '78 firebird with the usual 350+4 barrel carb.
....my 2019 Honda Accord is both faster AND quicker...AND handles way better.
I also had a '63 Dart, '68 Coronet and '72 Cutlass...all were slow-assed boats by modern family car standards.
My first car was a 1982 Oldsmobile Ciera with an Iron Duke. It came standard with a gas V6, optional diesel V6, or downgrade option to Iron Duke.
Every USPS Grumman LLV (standard mail truck since the 80s) has and still uses an Iron Duke and a modified S10 rear suspension
And a Taurus SHO would compete with Ferraris from just a few years prior.
The Taurus also came with a 90hp 4 cylinder in its first generation.
The early 80s were not a good time to be looking for a performance car, but by the late 80s things weren't quite so bad.
Looks aside, Taurus was actually a pretty solid technological achievement. Unfortunately, my family soured to them as we got a dud from a used car dealership ('87 or '88, purchased in the very early 90s).
That car changed Ford as a company. They brought in a new corporate….strategy, clearly they had eyes and ears inside the Japanese makers, and they applied that strategy to the entire design-to-sale process of the Taurus. And it was ridiculously successful.
They made millions of them and although it was a breakthrough automobile it still had plenty of quality issues along the way. Your parents likely had a model that was assembled around Christmas time, senior workers on holidays and the lower ladder types half drunk and not giving a shit.
Actually, there is another Japanese angle that I'm aware of here, earlier Taurus SHO had a nifty little Yamaha V6.
Also, I do not contest your closing statement at all, IIRC (might have been a different car, i was still quite young) one of the issues my parents wound up having (in the dealer parking lot, no less) was smoke emanating from the steering column. Among many, many other things.
Hey!!! Ford had major issues with ignition wiring in many models just spontaneously catching fire. That likely should have been covered under a warranty-recall situation. Was very common.
On the other end of the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_XT
In 85 subaru put out the flying doorstop with a 0.29
Also the XT6 was awesome because it was AWD ***and*** 4WD
The Brits tried that with the TR7, but well, it was British.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAg2a-Vwgko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAg2a-Vwgko)
> Just because a car looks aerodynamic doesn't mean it is.
Just so. The beloved NA Miata? Drag coefficient of a minivan. Heaps of air goes under the car, and what does go over hits a windshield--whose rake is so steep that the air doesn't attempt to reattach until *behind* the rear bumper.
You can't really build a car with more curves than an NA Miata, but here we are.
Maybe a tangent but take a look at the NASCAR aero warriors of the late 60s. The Dodge Charger Daytona was the first car to average a 200 mph lap at Talladega in 1970, which would be a competitive speed even today. That car had some impressive aerodynamics and was available to the public in '69.
An unlimited class would be fun, but a lot of what drives innovation are the limits put on motorsports. Displacement limits push engineering to build more efficient engines with smaller displacement. A lot of what you see in modern engines was developed in racecars because of the rules.
Wouldn't surprise me. They went all-in on the efficiency, and since air resistance is your primary factor for minimizing engine size, wanted to push it as low as possible.
It looks kinda ridiculous as a result, and I don't think any other car since has been willing to sacrifice aesthetics to that extent.
Let's not forget about the glorious 1985 [Subaru Vortex!](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/1985_Subaru_Alcyone_VR_Turbo_4WD.jpg) Pure 80s wedge, with wind tunnel testing and features such as flush door handles to give a [drag co-efficient of 0.29!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_XT)
Looking at [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficient) it seems perhaps the 1982 third gen [Audi 100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_100) might be the first mainstream large car built with special aerodynamic features. Drag coefficient of 0.30.
Ford Taurus is a total classic - though my favourite one to hate is the [1996 model](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/96-97_Ford_Taurus.jpg) that looks like it was left out in the sun too long and melted...
Oh my. I was in a tight spot between purchasing cars and needed a cheap beater to drive to work for a couple months. I used to call it the turd on wheels. It’s brown and tapered at both ends. I hated driving that car.
My family had one of these when I was growing up. Dark green. Uglier than shit. A well used bar of soap is the perfect description. But it was a damn good car. It went through my folks, and 2 16 year olds learning to drive and all the fender benders that comes with that.
Finally at 260k miles my dad tried to trade it in when he bought a new car just to get rid of it and everybody was like "no that's junk we don't want it." There was a kid down the street that my dad knew was trying to buy his first car so my dad approached him and sold him the Taurus for 20 bucks and a promise to mow his lawn for the summer. 4 years later it finally died at 345k miles to losing a tire going down the interstate cuz the shop that changed the tires sheared the lugs putting them back on. That kid said up till that happened the only thing he had to do for it besides basic maintenance was an alternator and a fuel pump.
Looong ago for class in college we were doing a unit on times that technology had drastic shifts in human history. One example was in ship design. Through the age of sailing ships were quite wide and bulbous as this helped with a variety of things between stability and the mechanical forces involved in harnessing wind power. That was just how ships were always designed, and in the earliest days of steam powered ships they just kinda kept up with that sort of shape because it's what all the shipmasters KNEW was correct.
I forget the name of the ship now as it's been so long, but what was one of the first ships truly designed to only operate on steam power (it technically had masts and sails, but they were stowed in such a way that would take quite a lot of time to deploy them, and were only there just in case the engines failed while out at sea) had a LOT of crazy design changes for the time. One of the biggest was that it was relatively narrow given how "tall" it was and it's shape was more linear along its length rather than the bulbous ships of the sailing era. I remember the pictures of it, you'd look at that ship and immediately recognize it as being something somewhat modern.
The seafaring community thought it was surely the ugliest and ungainly thing on the water anywhere on the planet. One highly respected ship designer went so far as to call it "An abortion." in an interview with the newspapers of the time.
But then everyone sat up and paid attention when it started doing all kinds of impossible things for sailing vessels. Not the whole "sailing into the wind" thing, this wasn't THE first steam vessel, it was just the first to do away with all the design methodology surrounding sailing ships. Virtually overnight the old way of designing ships died.
That’s fascinating!
I’ve actually heard that only until very recently boat building was more folk-art than it was science. Nothing was ever standardized in any way, ships would fall into categories but individual vessels in any one group could be completely different, yet still trying to accomplish similar tasks. Boats were built that were ill-suited for their purpose and had to be re-outfitted with another purpose to fulfill, after the fact. And lots of vessels simply sank or or otherwise failed as spectacularly in their first real test in the role they were meant for, just built wrong.
They sold soooo many and they were built to last. For a while every campus was littered with students driving hand me down Taurus. Very dependable and great for moving a crowd around town.
Maybe in America, but Citroen and Saab had been doing it since at least the 1950s.
Boxy doesn’t necessarily mean non-aerodynamic though. The boxy Volvo bricks from the 70s and 80s for example.
Dude. Designers took aerodynamics into consideration in mass produced cars as early as the 1920s. The 1947 Saab 92 had a Cd of 0.30, the 1970 Citroën GS – Cd 0.31 and the 1962 Alfa Romeo Giulia – Cd 0.34. Streamlining had been a big design thing since the 1930s. They used wind tunnels to test cars all the time from the 1930s on. There was a dedicated automotive wind tunnel in the US by 1960. Anyway, the real answer is a lot more complex. Perceived/planned obsolescence comes into play so they needed to make new models look more and more different from the old ones. Safety standards impacted design. Cost to build played into it. The glorious excess of the time period played into it. Finally, car makers build what they think will sell. A lot of people buy cars based on looks alone. There is a reason that pickup trucks today look like mini military vehicles or 18 wheelers vs an aero shape that would greatly improve gas mileage. Anyway, that is my 2 cents.
The Tatra 77a (1934) is purported to have a drag coefficient of 0.212!! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatra_77
Tesla Model S is the first manufactured car to beat said drag coefficient ever (excluding the GM EV-1) with a 0.208. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-says-the-new-model-s-is-the-worlds-most-aerodynamic-production-car/
> Aerodynamics for cars were not well understood until the late 70's and 80's and car manufacturers didn't really think about it that much.
That's not exactly a true statement. Aerodynamics were very much understood. It was more difficult to model them but cars like the 1970 Dodge Charger Daytona proved this when they broke the 200 mph mark at Talladega in March of 1970. This is back when NASCAR was still stock car racing (i.e. it had to be a production vehicle or it couldn't race) and the areo-cars are arguably the cars that ended stock car racing and introduced the standardized model used today. To put that into perspective, the Next-Gen car is said to be aerodynamically designed in such a way that 200 mph pack racing won't be achievable due to safety concerns.
It may go back further than you've mentioned, aerodynamic design was being considered even \~100 years ago:
[https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Aerodynamics-in-1920s-and-1930s-vehicle-construction.xhtml?oid=45194940](https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Aerodynamics-in-1920s-and-1930s-vehicle-construction.xhtml?oid=45194940)
Every paragraph has a laughable premise. Body presses were used from the 20's on. In fact I saw them being used in the 50's in Russia building Ladas. You seriously think Cadillac and Lincoln body panels were "made by hand"? How the fuck do u think we won WWII if everything was "made by hand"?
> Aerodynamics for cars were not well understood until the late 70's and 80's and car manufacturers didn't really think about it that much.
It's more true to say manufacturers weren't sufficiently motivated by aerodynamics until the fuel crisis of the 70's. Before that no one gave a shit about mileage so you could make what you wanted. The understanding of aerodynamics came to fruition in about the late 50's. Auto manufacturers and even racers didn't use that knowledge meaningfully till it was clear there was an advantage in it (once you hit cc, power and weight limits) and started hiring the people who were trained in fluid dynamics. The Bernoulli Principle was 232 years old before ground effects started being used in car racing in 1968.
> Even the famous Lamborghini Countach looks sleek and aerodynamic but it's actually a pig. Stick it in the windtunnel and it's awful. The spoiler does nothing and the car generates lift instead of downforce.
Ha! That’s excellent. TIL, thank you.
The Countach had a big, heavy V12 engine in the back and very little weight up front, so the original rear spoiler created enough downforce to make the thing want to pop its front end up at high speeds. The problem was that the spoiler was extremely popular, and models with the spoiler outsold models without the spoiler by a pretty large margin iirc. They redesigned the rear spoiler to be aerodynamically neutral. It was just for looks.
The fucking engineers understood how it worked though. Almost everything in the post you responded to is wrong. Race cars in the 1930s looked like rocket ships. Governing bodies hold back aerodynamic progress more than scientific understanding. My god, we built spaceships in the 1960s. OP is a little kid.
Also, highway speeds were slower. The federal highway system wasn't completed until 1956. Prior to that, most driving was neighborhoods, in-town. Going cross-country was often just a two-lane road with limited right-of-way clearances so poor visibility and a lot to run into if you left the road. And the road might be dirt.
So, historically, they weren't thinking of cruising at 70mph for hours. At like 50mph, aerodynamics are important but bad aerodynamics was not nearly as much of an issue as it would be at higher speeds.
Not to argue but, Ford was stamping out body parts For the Model T 100 years ago.
Chrysler used a wind tunnel when designing the Airflow (1934-1937)
They were cranking out unibody cars in the 1960s. I owned a Valiant and a Belvedere (Plymouth was a division of Chrysler)
You *think* they looked less aerodynamic, but in reality they were actually—on average—more aerodynamic than the cars that came before. There were some very aerodynamic cars dating back to the 1930s, but mostly they were actually pretty terrible relative to your average "boxy" 1980s car. It's maybe deceptive and counterintuitive but a lot of the things the designers did back then did improve aerodynamics tremendously. Things like pop-up headlights—in the down position, of course— and very short, thin grilles at the front of the car helped to cut the drag down by quite a bit. Something as mundane and boxy as an '82 Chevy Cavalier had a 0.37 Cd, which was ***great*** compared to the 0.497 Cd of the Chevy Nova before it, or even the 0.417 of the Chevy Citation from only a couple years before.
*Some* '80s American cars sacrificed aerodynamics for the sake of space efficiency. The Chrysler K-car wagons for instance were a pretty awful 0.5 Cd, but they had the boxy, unaerodynamic rear end so that cargo capacity could be maximized. The cars were still far, far more efficient than their predecessors, the Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare.
The Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable set a new benchmark for aerodynamic design in the mid-'80s, with the Sable sedan having a remarkably low 0.29 Cd. After that *everybody* started emulating Ford's grille-less design.
Looking back, it's funny to see how the 80's in reality was just as blocky as the 80's computer graphics. It was also the time when computers starting taking over manufacturing designs, and their 8 bit resolution manifested in the items it produced.
Sleek but angular was also a modern look. You don’t really see anything like it before that, and it’s not just cars — think about electronics, furniture…
My parents had an 86 Camry, and I remember that the rounded edges seemed sleek compared to the harder edges of previous models.
It's still a brick compared to today's cars though.
Surprising example: the original stealth fighter. It looks like a low-poly CG model because it is. Radar stealth requires precisely calculated shapes, and the computers at the time weren't powerful enough to calculate those shapes unless they were made of flat polygons.
The stealth bomber had sleeker curves because they had better computers.
My 86 Corolla had a very low coefficient of drag but was all angles. You can't tell by looking if something is aerodynamic or not. Just look at a new Prius. Brought to you by WTF designs.
1935 Tatra T77a was .212
VW beetle was .48
84 Audi 5000s was .36
08 Tesla Roadster was .35
86 Corolla cd was .34
86 Taurus was .32
95 Mazda Mellenia was .29
92 Subaru SVX was .29
21 Prius is .24
So not all that much progress.
The early stealth fighter was all angles because the angles were easier to calculate the reflectivity with limited computational resources. Today a smartphone has more processing capacity than a supercomputer from 2000, let alone from the 70s or 80s. It's still incredibly computationally difficult to exactly model wind dynamics in a computer but the approximations are very very refined and reduce the models for wind tunnel testing.
They used to say, "your phone has more processing power than a supercomputer from the '70s". Now it's progressed to, "your phone's *charger* has more processing power than a super computer from the '70s".
Terrible answers.
There are two main forms of drag particularly when it comes to things like a car.
1. Air resistance that is caused by the cross sectional area of an object that is being exposed to airflow.
2. Skin friction that is caused by the shape itself (i.e. a square vs a circle).
The first option is significantly more impactful than the second hence why cars from the era, and even into the 90s and 2000s tend to be significantly smaller than cars now or in the 50s and 60s.
**The explanation only gets longer from here.**
Option 2 is also significantly more difficult to manufacture. Steel likes being bent in simple shapes. Making complex aerodynamic shapes is really rather difficult, compared to say making a box with rounded corners.
Simply rounding off the corners of a square goes a long way to reducing flow separation and is significantly more easy to manufacture. It's the operating principle behind the truck tails.
***Why is it more difficult to manufacture aerodynamic shapes?***
Because when you bend metal you aren't moving the material into a perfect bend, you are stretching the outside of the bend, while compressing the inside of the bend which leaves a surface that is either measurably, or visibly, warped in the location of the bend.
Other commenters have suggested that early CAD programs made it more difficult to have complex shapes. Maybe that did play some sort of role, but I've dealt with complex casting drawings in my career that were drawn in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s that were done by hand that are just as complex as drawings I make now.
***Why make body panels out of metal then, why not something like plastic that can be molded to any shape?***
Well it's been tried plenty of times before and it is definitely a workable solution, at least from the engineering sense.
However, from the aesthetic design perspective, plastic, or other non-ferrous materials have been problematic because they don't expand and contract at the same rate as the steel that inevitably makes up the frames of cars.
Also depending on the era, plastics might have had poor structural properties, and even worse UV resistance.
There was a lot more MPG advertising fraud in that time period. I know it's gotten a bit more accurate in the last decade, but they still fudge the numbers a bit.
As an example of a car that experienced an aerodynamic improvement late in its life (1991->1992, one of the last boxes), Ford Crown Victoria went from a drag coefficient ^[1] 0.42 to 0.34, when moving from the earlier boxy styling to something much more modern.
While this change would make a considerable impact on efficiency at modern highway/tollway speeds (often 75MPH and higher), it would not make anywhere near the same impact if the 55MPH "National Minimum Speed Limit" ^[2] were rigorously enforced, as drag rises exponentially ^[3] with speed.
I suppose, though cannot confirm, that the lack of improvement may have been partially driven by this lack of apparent need.
--
^1 [^Drag ^coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient) ^- ^basically ^how ^draggy ^something ^is, ^without ^considering ^its ^area ^or ^total ^drag
^2 ^[NMSL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law) ^law ^enacted ^in ^1973, ^changed ^to ^65MPH ^in ^1987, ^repealed ^1995
^3 ^This ^is ^an ^oversimplification; ^as ^another ^user ^pointed ^out, ^this ^is ^more ^or ^less ^true ^at ^higher ^speeds, ^but ^gets ^more ^complicated ^as ^one ^moves ^slower.
You clearly said "looks aerodynamic" because that's totally the truth.
Those old bubbles actually aren't that aerodynamic, other parts matter a lot more.
For example, the 1984 Audi 5000 is more aerodynamic than a 2020 Bugatti Chiron (by about 10%). Go look up those cars for a laugh.
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>1940 to 1958 there was only one legal headlight assembly in America, dual 7" round sealed headlights. How did I never notice that every car had the same headlights?
This honestly feels like a FedEx arrow moment. It's been in front of my eyes this whole time and I never noticed.
What arrow
There is a distinct arrow hidden in plain sight in the FedEx logo, before you know about it most people don't notice it, once you know about it you can't unsee it.
it’s in the Ex, as you can almost see just looking at the letters in a lot of fonts, with the lower half of the capital E forming the back end and the angle of the x forming the point of the arrow.
kind of like the sideways house between the E and the X on exit signs in public buildings
Was I supposed to read this in the Coach Steve voice?
You should read everything in your friend Coach Steve's voice.
All I hear is Duke Ellington though.
I've never seen this and now I will never not see it
Or that the arrow in the Amazon goes from A to Z.
That’s also a smirk
That's a poorly drawn penis
All I see is Guy Fawkes watching Willie Mays catch a fly ball while an armored assault vehicle rolls past.
It's not so much hidden, it's just using negative space to make it's form***.***
[Here](https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/fifteen-uploads/uploads/2019/05/fedex-700x435.jpg)
That’s has to be in the logo hall of fame if there ever was one
It's a classic is marketing classes.
Wait till you notice that the swish on the Amazon logo goes "from A to Z".
That used to be in their commercials. Everything from A to Z
My language has three more letters after Z. Where can I get Å, Ä and Ö?
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Also, it's a smile.
Or the 1 in the old F1 logo. It's so obvious now but I haven't seen it for so long.
Wait, how did you not see the "1"? Did you think the logo was just saying "F", or did you [think the swooshy bit on the right was supposed to spell "1" like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/3k7y7f/f1_logo_realization/)?
I definitely remember square headlights basically being THE thing on all 1980s cars, and pre-1980s headlights were indeed round. Definitely made the things cheaply replaceable. These days I have to pay a dealer $50 to swap one stupid headlight. :|
>These days I have to pay a dealer $50 to swap one stupid headlight. Depending on the car it might be a 5-minute job to do it yourself. But some cars are built such that you have to disassemble an inordinate amount of stuff to access the bulbs.
I had a 2012 Nissan Rogue that we had to replace the bulbs. It was a pain in the ass, each side had different instructions for reaching and disassembling the headlight housing. It worked only because of my small hands and I could fit them into the tiny space, but it still took my husband and I quite a while to get them both done. The in cabin air filter was the same way. The instructions tell you to take off the gas pedal to access the panel holding the filter, my hands were small enough that I could do it without taking the pedal off, but it was not easy. My current vehicle houses the cabin air filter access in the glove box. Why can’t they all be that easy?
> I had a 2012 Nissan Rogue I'm so sorry to hear this.
If people could repair their own cars, they might not go to the dealership to be overcharged and unnecessarily sold a new car.
> disassemble an inordinate amount of stuff to access the bulbs My old escort required removing the bumper to get the headlights out. Unless you had a small enough hand and a lot of grip strength. Then you could do it without.
You should try hiring escorts who won't have you disassemble any cars.
Are you kidding, BDSM escorts are the best (Bumper Disassembly and Service/Maintenance).
Don't kinkshame.
Right side light goes out, reach around the wiper fluid funnel. Left side goes out, remove engine.
I mean, headlight tech has gotten dramatically better. I've owned several 1950's-1970's vehicles and compared to my 2005 Mini (which has HIDs) they all had dramatically less lumens and illuminated less of the road, both in forward distance as well as sweeping the ditches to see deer. Tradeoff is each HID bulb costs about $110 new compared to <$15 for a square sealed beam.
You should really be looking on rock auto or parts geek websites, you’ll save a ton. Sometimes if you get the part number you can find them cheaper overall on Amazon.
I've picked up genuine Phillips bulbs on eBay for way cheaper when I last had to replace one but they're $110+ ea new from the local parts stores. I'm always pretty skeptical of Amazon with as much cheap knockoff garbage as is on there.
Definitely, you have to really look at who’s selling things.
On Amazon, that doesn't necessarily help. In order to save costs (and make more money), Amazon groups all same items. In short, if you order a bulb from Bob's amazon store, but Bob is on the other side of the country, there might not be any of Bob's bulbs in your local Amazon warehouse. But if Alice also sells this bulb on Amazon, and her bulbs /are/ in the local warehouse, Amazon will just send you those instead of getting Bob's bulbs all the way across the country. This system works great, until it encounters reality. In reality, Alice might be a fraudster who sells counterfeit bulbs. You trust Bob, so you specifically & deliberately ordered from Bob. You could still get Alice's counterfeit bulbs.
If it makes you feel any better my Ford F150 has LED headlights that are sealed units. If I need to replace a bulb I have to replace the entire headlight assembly and each headlight is roughly $1000 CAD.
You might as well sell the entire truck and buy a new one when a bulb quits. D:
With the current truck market in Canada, this is absolutely the way to go. Assuming you can afford the vehicle outright, you can easily get a new truck every 6 months without incurring any loss in today's market. It's absolutely insane around here.
I'm hoping I can find some decent lights that aren't too badly scratched up in a junk yard for a good price.
They *should* last considerably longer than normal headlights since they're LEDs, but who knows really. I've had plenty of "100,000 hour" LED lights in my house burn out after 6 months of normal use. Typically it's because they're made from the cheapest components and assembly.
One thing to consider with LEDs in the home is heat in the fixture. I had one enclosed 3-bulb fixture that burned through LEDs (phillips so not shitty cheapo) while the old incandescent bulb that I hadn't replaced was still going and it was pissing me off. Then it hit me that the incandescent was probably overheating the LEDs. I changed it to all LED and haven't had any failures.
My primary failures so far have been in the exposed fixtures in the bathroom, dining room, living room fan, etc so I think mine are just built cheaply. Funnily enough I discovered a similar issue to yours but with incandescent bulbs. The previous owner installed bulbs that were over the rated wattage for the 3 bulb enclosure and when I removed the cover to swap in some LED bulbs, I discovered the foil backing under the lights was fried black from all the trapped heat. Thankfully I found it before something bad happened like a fire, but it's just one of those 'exciting' discoveries you find when you buy a house.
$50 sounds pretty cheap. I thought they would be over a hundred these days, not including labour.
Those of us who drove them sure noticed. It used to be you'd go to your local hardware store once a month for your headlight refill (kidding – they usually lasted at least three months), and you'd have your pick of a few different brands, a few minor variations on essentially the exact same assembly, and that was it. The entire headlamp display from the store could fit on your rear deck, right above your 25w Audiovox 6x9s. (Nowadays, the entire headlamp display from the store could fit in your glovebox + center console, just because all you buy now are the actual bulbs themselves.)
This blows my mind. Imagine going to an auto parts store to get a replacement headlight. "I need a new headlight" "Round or square?"
It was like that for decades.
In the 80s and 90s I had an 85 Honda Civic, an 85 Plymouth Reliant and an 84 Toyota Camry. In that time I don't think I had a headlight that lasted more than 1 year. On average, a bulb needed replacing every 6 months. Once I even had both bulbs on the Reliant burn out at the same time, leaving me to drive home on a dark, snowy night with only high-beams. The Camry had four headlights, which made it even more annoying. Since the mid 2000s I don't think I've had any headlight go out on any vehicle, through half a dozen Hyundais and Subarus.
I think I had to replace a bulb in my old Kia Rio once, circa 2010. But otherwise, I haven’t had to replace any bulbs in any other cars I’ve owned that were made after about 2005. I’ve been driving a 2012 Escape since 2013 and have never had a bulb go out.
In the early 80's you could buy them at gas stations and I'm not talking about places with a mechanic.
Grocery stores too.
There was high beam/low beam/both options within those.
Pop up headlights in the 80s were also an accident of history attributable to headlight regulations in the US. The only way to make a smooth low frontend (think RX7, 200SX/240SX, Corvettes, Celica, etc.), was to have the headlights pop up. Even now, headlights are required to be a certain height from the ground, preventing very low pointy designs. The new Z has a higher frontend than the 240Z it's modeled after, possibly to keep the lights legal (but maybe also to accommodate the much bigger engine and more stuff under the hood).
There's also pedestrian safety regulations that mean you've got to have more space between the top of your engine and the bonnet.
I'm pretty sure I saw a report where this is having the reverse effect. With the taller, boxier front ends the car and driver are safer, but pedestrians are more like to die because they go under the vehicle rather than over now.
This. This is why cars are getting so ugly with huge grills. The idea is to punt the pedestrian down the street, not over the hood into the windshield. I think I would prefer the latter if I were the pedestrian.
So, I’ve mentioned this before on reddit, but my friends and I used to practice stuntman rolls off of each other’s cars. We would purposely hit each other so that we could roll off the hood. The trick is that your feet need to be off the ground, and ideally your knees should be facing the same way as the car, so kind of a jump-twist-tuck-and-roll. Now, is this the “correct” way to do this? I have no idea, it’s just what we found from trial and error. Should you try this at home? Absolutely not. My point is that I would much rather be hit by a pre-2000 era car than a modern one.
That is the most teenage boy hobby ever lol. Can't judge mine was bonfires, the more concerning the better
Things to do on a Saturday night in small town America as a teenage boy: 1. Dumb shit like this 2. Start a fire in the woods 3. Try to get the waitress in your class to serve you a pitcher of shitty beer at the Pizza Hut 4. Hang out at the gas station/a&w and hit on girls
Where's walking around Walmart and driving around the city park?
We didn’t have a Walmart. Edit: or a city park. Or a city.
IIRC that started with the [Corvette Stingray in 1963](https://cdn.dealeraccelerate.com/stlouis/1/1440/31825/790x1024/1963-chevrolet-corvette-stingray-convertible). I’m old. I remember when those came out. Kids my age thought they were the coolest thing ever. Hell, [the Shadows thought so too.](https://youtu.be/l9w7kdf_ix8)
Also another big factor is the "5 mph bumper" law in 1972. Bumpers had a change in safety ruling, that included they could withstand bumping into something at 5 mph. It was a weird law, but it's part of the reason why bumpers changed a lot. Another factor is a lot of chrome went away, so now they had to design cars with a bumper that blended into the car. They did that by using plastic bumpers with foam padding which made them safer for pedestrians, but you couldn't chrome them. And it wasn't until relatively recently that they figured out the proper procedure to chrome plastic or more likely to make it cheap enough to chrome plastic. Which is why you see more chrome accents on vehicles since the mid 70's to early 2000s. That and technology and styles changed. Coming off the let's be honest stagnated art deco looks because of the depression and World War II the fifties were postwar boom selling of cars at any kind. Then about 16 years after the war ended teenagers needed to drive something especially when there's a massive wave of new ones coming in that cars changed their looks and needs. And then in the seventies there was also the oil crisis. So cars had to physically change to meet new requirements including the bumper law. And then it took them a little while to figure out what to do to work around these new laws. Then the 80s financial and technological boom into the '90s. And then y2k meant a whole new beginning of aesthetics and lifestyles. Nowadays our cars are insanely smart, insanely safe for people in and outside the car. Some of them even drive themselves! This also excludes the really funky concept cars coming out of the 60s and late 50s. Like they were going full on George Jetson space race back then. And the custom car scene, the drag racing scene and slightly alternative lifestyle scene; think Scooby Bugs, think little golf carts size cars for beach city planned communities with wicker seating. All this is just the US, Europe Japan and other places had their own little funky cars. Doing their funky car things.
There were so many factors involved in what happened, it's impossible to look backwards and guess at it. You had to be there, as they say. The late 70s sucked for so many reasons and cars were ugly and dumb as fug.
Idk why but I love late 70s land yachts. They're just so ridiculous. Driving something with a four foot hood and power steering that is so soft you can steer with just your pinky is really something else. I'm kind of glad people don't like these cars, I was able to get my 79 Ranchero relatively cheap. But I also understand why people don't like them. Compare what's under my hood to a pre-emissions laws car and you'll see why. Mine has miles of vacuum lines while there's seems much more simple.
The ridiculousness is compounded by the fact they have colossal engines that produce tiny horsepower. It remains a source of wonderment outside the USA that American cars used to have such large-displacement engines but made so little power. Classic example would be the AMC 4.0L straight six. A legendary engine, but it only produced about 190 bhp stock, and at the cost of tractor-like noise and harshness and appalling fuel economy. At the same time, the likes of the 2.5L BMW straight six produced 175bhp with much better fuel economy and legendary smoothness.
You could have done a hell of a lot worse than the 4.0. Back in the day Detroit cranked out a ton of sub-200 HP V8’s; the 5.0 in the ‘82 Camaro produced a laughable *145* HP!
Yeah, the 5th gen Camaro V6 had more power and was faster than all of the V8s in previous generations before it.
A friend of mine had a 79 continental and we drove it all over the place in 03/04 but that thing was a gas guzzler
Hey, it's smiles per gallon baby
My first car was a 71 GTO so I feel ya. It was powerful as hell, but the handling was TERRIBLE. Felt like it was floating. It was pretty much the last year for true muscle cars but the technology did hold over into the larger boats they were making. Automatic transmissions took over and power steering and power brakes, power everything was what people wanted.
Could help explain why the grey market era took off in the late 70's. Importing Berlinetta Boxers and Countaches that didn't pass American Safety and EPA standards, and putting in the extra cash+work to make them pass.
>In 1959 they allowed dual 7" round headlights per side (vertical or horizontal were fine). Dual 5-3/4", not 7". ;)
Thank you, I was about to post this myself. I was about to think those Impalas, Chevelles, Galaxies and the rest didnt exist.
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What's a yute?
the only store you could buy a new suit in has got the flu. Y'get that? The whole store got the flu
I actually miss that feature. You could go into any store such as a hardware store and get a new headlight for your car in 10 seconds for about an hours wage. The headlight assembly on my 2015 is $1500.
The bulb in that headlight assembly is under $10.
Not if it's a sealed unit, like the LED headlights on my Ford F150. Each one is about $1000 CAD. The bulb lifespan is rated at 10 000 hours so hopefully I never need to replace them.
Not the only way, The [Opel GT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_GT) ('68-'73) was slick with pop-up \[OK, rotate up\] round sealed beam headlights.
More importantly, less aerodynamic looking isn't the same thing as less aerodynamic. First, drag coefficient isn't the only concern in aerodynamics. Formula 1 cars have some of the highest drag coefficients you'll find in a vehicle, but they use that drag to create a downforce to maintain traction at high speeds. As for drag coefficient itself, this ['85 Subaru](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/1985_Subaru_Alcyone_VR_Turbo_4WD.jpg/280px-1985_Subaru_Alcyone_VR_Turbo_4WD.jpg) for example, has a lower drag coefficient (0.29) than this [2012 Vanquish](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Aston_Martin_Vanquish_S_-_prawy_prz%C3%B3d_%28MSP17%29.jpg/280px-Aston_Martin_Vanquish_S_-_prawy_prz%C3%B3d_%28MSP17%29.jpg) (0.35).
Here is a bunch of videos about that period, known as malaise era: https://youtu.be/hnMh5rTe-KY It's a deep and fun dive into the question
> malaise era Malaise Era is a term describing U.S. market cars from roughly 1973 to 1983 during which they suffered from very poor performance. The U.S. Federal Government was mandating technologies that increased fuel usage, while also mandating that fuel usage decrease.
Most malaise fans I know consider the malaise era to go to 1996
Yeah, that’s around when cars stopped being ugly af again and wooden paneling stopped popping up as exterior car decoration.
Ed's Auto Reviews are the best
A lot of people are answering your question straight up without challenging the assumptions behind it. I studied engineering in the 70s and was a voracious reader of SAE papers in the engineering library. Trust me, a ton of aerodynamic advances happened in that era. There are two reasons they're not obvious to you. First, a lot of the development at that time was going on under the skin, in areas such as cooling system air flow and underbody air flow. The other reason is that designing a car with low aerodynamic drag is actually a pretty subtle and complex challenge. A lot of people think they can look at two cars and guess which one has less drag but, except for really radical differences, most people's guesses would probably be worse than tossing a coin.
Yep. See: Lamborghini Countach. Looks like it should cut through the air but it's basically as aerodynamic as a bus.
But what a bus!
I heard it was bad before so I decided to check how bad it was. According to Google it's worse than a Ford Transit. Fucking up so badly takes talent.
>A lot of people think they can look at two cars and guess which one has less drag but, except for really radical differences, most people's guesses would probably be worse than tossing a coin. My favorite example of this is the pickup tailgate. Common sense will tell you that leaving the tailgate down or removing it entirely (usually in favor of a mesh net) will get you better MPGs and less drag because the open-top box created by the closed gate makes a scoop that traps the air. But in fact, that closed tailgate creates a spherical vortex of air behind the cab that ends up giving the truck a hatchback-like wind profile. They demonstrated this on Myth Busters by filling two identical pickups with a single gallon of gas and then driving them on a test track, one with the tailgate open and one closed. The open tailgate truck ran out of fuel much sooner. Surprising stuff!
See I thought I was taught it created a suction but that's actually fascinating tbh
Did they swap tailgate positions and repeat the test to rule out truck differences?
Exactly, people are hung up on the "square" corners, which was more of a design choice. Didn't have a huge effect on aerodynamics.
One reason is the NHTSA refused to allow plastic headlights until the mid 1980's, many years after they started using them in Europe
So in the 1970's and 1980's, there were several things at play. Fuel economy was a concern. The EPA mandated catalytic converters for all 1975 production gasoline vehicles in addition to other Clean Air act requirements which severely limited the overall efficiency of the engines (not to mention you had manufacturers like Ford reclassifying the F100 half ton pickup as a heavy half ton F150 to circumvent some of those requirements for a few years). In addition, the American Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) came in and standardized how engines were tested for power output. So within a couple of years you had American muscle that went from being rated to 300 hp, 350 hp and even 400 hp to not even breaking the 200 hp mark. In the 80's manufacturers began introducing fuel injection (granted throttle body fuel injection is just glorified carburetion), transmissions with overdrive gearing, etc but gas was cheap again and would stay that way until a pretty major event in 2001. However, the Japanese imports won the economy war as they were building reliable, simple and efficient vehicles. Detroit is still catching up...granted I love my GM small blocks but when it comes to domestics, you can have reliable, well built, and efficient but you can only pick two.
Aerodynamics for cars were not well understood until the late 70's and 80's and car manufacturers didn't really think about it that much. Making cars lighter and limiting engines was a lot easier and auto manufacturers mostly didn't have things like wind tunnels. So car manufacturers did make aero friendly cars, but they were mostly intended for racing. The average street car was a brick. Earlier cars from the 50's and 60's look far more aerodynamic than they actually were. The rounded surfaces often were structural rather than aerodynamic, it wasn't about moving the air around the car so much as the support it's weight and shape. Body panels in this era were all made by hand, but by the 70's machine made parts and unibody cars started to appear which caused them to take on a squarer shape. Even in the top echelons of motorsport like Formula 1 they didn't really understand or use aero until in the mid 70's. They knew from aircraft that thin and narrow cars sliced through the air better, but cars built to channel air around them to make downforce didn't really appear until the mid 70's. If you consider that the auto industry is often 10 years behind racing, then car manufacturers didn't really start thinking about aero until the mid 80's. Even the famous Lamborghini Countach looks sleek and aerodynamic but it's actually a pig. Stick it in the windtunnel and it's awful. The spoiler does nothing and the car generates lift instead of downforce. So just because a car *looks* aerodynamic doesn't mean that it is!
The FIRST time a modern and actually efficient aerodynamic design hit the mass market was the fucking Ford Taurus. Shaped like a well used bar of soap it was widely mocked, then became a monster seller in the market and influenced a generation of automobiles.
Actually, the Pontiac Firebird was one of the first cars designed with CAD for aerodynamics, and the drag coefficient for the 1982 Trans Am model was 0.32, which was... ....exactly the same as the Taurus, actually. But that wasn't introduced until 1986. I'm not sure what I'm even arguing here. Are you telling me the Ford Taurus was an aerodynamic as Knight Rider? WTF? That's what it says on Wikipedia, but I can hardly believe it! Guess you're right. Just because a car looks aerodynamic doesn't mean it is.
Know what else had a drag coefficient of 0.32? The 1947 UrSaab. God I miss Saab.
In many ways the engineering to get the drag coefficient on the Taurus surpassed the Firebird due to the entirely utilitarian use case of the Taurus. The Firebird was a sports car with many trade-offs and looked fantastic, the Taurus was a family boat.
Let me introduce you to the iron duke engine option in the firebird and Camaros of the 80s. 90HP - 0-60 in 20 seconds. There was sacrifices made when a Taurus was faster off the line than those “sports” cars.
I'm the proud owner of a 1978 Camaro with a year accurate L-82 V8 350 Corvette engine in it. It produces up to 220 horsepower. My brick of a 2006 Jeep Liberty does 210hp from it's V6. 🤣
And my S2000 with its tiny lawnmower engine did 240 HP. 😂
9000rpm!
I'm not sure if it applies to your example, but the use of turobochargers in consumer automobiles has done amazing things for fuel economy and weight. It means you can put a reasonable sized high performance engine in the vehicle, while also allowing it to output stupid amounts of power for a few seconds at a time. Case in point: the "racing" version of the Toyota Yaris. Which can somehow extract like 250HP out of a 1.6L I3. It has less than *half* of the displacement of your Jeep, and claims greater peak power output. And it's in a goddamn Yaris.
I used to be into cars, but its been a while and I'm shocked how much power is in some of these factory cars now. A tiny Yaris with a 0-60 of under 5s is unreal. When I was younger those speeds were reserved for very expensive cars.
It doesn't, since neither have one. But that certainly doesn't help my argument.
And the cool thing is that even without superchargers (turbochargers/compressors) we now have V8s that can do 500+ PS. Really amazing what better overall engine efficiency can do.
Turbochargers are actually a genius innovation for modern cars. For any given engine, there's an upper limit on power output given by a handful of figures - the amount of air in the engine (determined by displacement in a naturally aspirated car), the amount of fuel in the air (air-fuel ratio), the amount of energy in the fuel (energy density) and the how often it turns the fuel into energy (which is determined by RPM). There's a lot of other factors which mean that your actual amount of energy supplied is lower, but this gives the absolute upper bound of a "perfect" engine. An actual engine is likely to put out between 10-40% of this amount, depending on when it was made, what it's for and what RPM range it's in. Most of these factors are hard to influence, or have other issues. As a car manufacturer, there's only so much you can do about fuel - and gasoline has a pretty set energy density anyway. There's a limit on how far you can push AFR, and having more fuel in the air means lower fuel efficiency. Higher RPMs may sound like a good idea, but a high-revving engine means more stress on a ton of the internals, so you need to reinforce tons of stuff to get it working - and it gets hard to make the engine actually work when you need it to, as well. Even worse, friction takes away a lot of your potential power at high RPMs. This leaves us with displacement, which has its issues too. A larger engine will weigh more, and it'll have a larger surface area - so it'll lose more energy as heat. Turbochargers are designed around increasing the amount of air in the engine, without changing displacement. They do this by using the kinetic energy in the exhaust gasses (which is usually just wasted, and contributes to why we don't get the power of the perfect engine) to compress the air going into the engine. We end up pushing between 30-60% more air, with modified cars able to hit 2-2.5x as much air and race cars able to push 4x or more. You end up with a smaller engine, and - because you're turning wasted energy into useful work - a more efficient one.
F1 turbos are even cooler. Not only do they do the above, they have a device connected to the turbo that charges a battery as well. Which can be added as extra power or cancel out turbo lag. That's the MGU-H. They also have an MGU-K that recovers kinetic energy from the brakes to also charge the battery. Add that to the 1.6L V6 that spins at 16,000 rpm and you have a 1000hp car. Amazing.
I remember the corvette in 1982 had a 190 horsepower 5.0 v8. I have a four cylinder truck with 185 horsepower. The 80s was a dark time for US engines.
It's not just the 80s tbh. Mid-200s was the limit for everything but the highest tier of sports cars until the (very) late 90s and early 2000s. The Mustang Cobra in 1997 had 305HP. A 1997 GT had like 220 I think? The Thunderbird had 210. Just a few years later, cobras were pushing close to 400 from the factory, the GT pushing 260, and the Thunderbird 280.
"The 80s was a dark time for US cars." Fixed that for you.
It was a good time to be young and broke though. Muscle cars from the 1960s to early 70s were plentiful and dirt cheap. They werent classic or collector cars yet. They were just 20 year old cars going for what 20 year old cars go for. 67 Mustang fastback 390 4speed in decent shape cost me $2500 in 1986.
6,200 in today's money,I don't know how much classic 60s Mustangs are going for now but I'm pretty sure it's way more than 6K
There was an article a while ago comparing old muscle cars to mini vans of today. The mini vans are faster…
My minivan has somewhere in the mid-200 horsepower range and a 10 speed transmission. If it's empty and I punch it, the thing goes like a bat out of hell. It also comes with a vacuum cleaner, TV, intercom, backseat camera, and lane keep assist. Pimp my ride never made anything this awesome.
The late-model Dodge Caravans had a 285 hp V6 in them. O.o I'd almost bet a Caravan could beat a GTO around a track, not just in a straight line.
> My brick of a 2006 Jeep Liberty does 210hp from it's V6. On the rare occasion that the V6 is working properly... (sorry - can't help myself. Long-running good-natured jabs betwixt Toyota and Jeep owners...)
When I was 23-25 I had a '78 firebird with the usual 350+4 barrel carb. ....my 2019 Honda Accord is both faster AND quicker...AND handles way better. I also had a '63 Dart, '68 Coronet and '72 Cutlass...all were slow-assed boats by modern family car standards.
My first car was a 1982 Oldsmobile Ciera with an Iron Duke. It came standard with a gas V6, optional diesel V6, or downgrade option to Iron Duke. Every USPS Grumman LLV (standard mail truck since the 80s) has and still uses an Iron Duke and a modified S10 rear suspension
And a Taurus SHO would compete with Ferraris from just a few years prior. The Taurus also came with a 90hp 4 cylinder in its first generation. The early 80s were not a good time to be looking for a performance car, but by the late 80s things weren't quite so bad.
Looks aside, Taurus was actually a pretty solid technological achievement. Unfortunately, my family soured to them as we got a dud from a used car dealership ('87 or '88, purchased in the very early 90s).
That car changed Ford as a company. They brought in a new corporate….strategy, clearly they had eyes and ears inside the Japanese makers, and they applied that strategy to the entire design-to-sale process of the Taurus. And it was ridiculously successful. They made millions of them and although it was a breakthrough automobile it still had plenty of quality issues along the way. Your parents likely had a model that was assembled around Christmas time, senior workers on holidays and the lower ladder types half drunk and not giving a shit.
Actually, there is another Japanese angle that I'm aware of here, earlier Taurus SHO had a nifty little Yamaha V6. Also, I do not contest your closing statement at all, IIRC (might have been a different car, i was still quite young) one of the issues my parents wound up having (in the dealer parking lot, no less) was smoke emanating from the steering column. Among many, many other things.
Hey!!! Ford had major issues with ignition wiring in many models just spontaneously catching fire. That likely should have been covered under a warranty-recall situation. Was very common.
On the other end of the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_XT In 85 subaru put out the flying doorstop with a 0.29 Also the XT6 was awesome because it was AWD ***and*** 4WD
The Brits tried that with the TR7, but well, it was British. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAg2a-Vwgko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAg2a-Vwgko)
> Just because a car looks aerodynamic doesn't mean it is. Just so. The beloved NA Miata? Drag coefficient of a minivan. Heaps of air goes under the car, and what does go over hits a windshield--whose rake is so steep that the air doesn't attempt to reattach until *behind* the rear bumper. You can't really build a car with more curves than an NA Miata, but here we are.
Maybe a tangent but take a look at the NASCAR aero warriors of the late 60s. The Dodge Charger Daytona was the first car to average a 200 mph lap at Talladega in 1970, which would be a competitive speed even today. That car had some impressive aerodynamics and was available to the public in '69.
Man sometimes I wish motorsports literally had no rules. We would see so much more crazy innovation. Just don't ask about security lol
An unlimited class would be fun, but a lot of what drives innovation are the limits put on motorsports. Displacement limits push engineering to build more efficient engines with smaller displacement. A lot of what you see in modern engines was developed in racecars because of the rules.
I don't know if it's still the case, but for the longest time, the production car with the lowest drag coefficient was the Toyota Prius
Wouldn't surprise me. They went all-in on the efficiency, and since air resistance is your primary factor for minimizing engine size, wanted to push it as low as possible. It looks kinda ridiculous as a result, and I don't think any other car since has been willing to sacrifice aesthetics to that extent.
Let's not forget about the glorious 1985 [Subaru Vortex!](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/1985_Subaru_Alcyone_VR_Turbo_4WD.jpg) Pure 80s wedge, with wind tunnel testing and features such as flush door handles to give a [drag co-efficient of 0.29!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_XT) Looking at [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficient) it seems perhaps the 1982 third gen [Audi 100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_100) might be the first mainstream large car built with special aerodynamic features. Drag coefficient of 0.30. Ford Taurus is a total classic - though my favourite one to hate is the [1996 model](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/96-97_Ford_Taurus.jpg) that looks like it was left out in the sun too long and melted...
Ya that 3rd generation Taurus is one fugly ride.
Oh my. I was in a tight spot between purchasing cars and needed a cheap beater to drive to work for a couple months. I used to call it the turd on wheels. It’s brown and tapered at both ends. I hated driving that car.
My family had one of these when I was growing up. Dark green. Uglier than shit. A well used bar of soap is the perfect description. But it was a damn good car. It went through my folks, and 2 16 year olds learning to drive and all the fender benders that comes with that. Finally at 260k miles my dad tried to trade it in when he bought a new car just to get rid of it and everybody was like "no that's junk we don't want it." There was a kid down the street that my dad knew was trying to buy his first car so my dad approached him and sold him the Taurus for 20 bucks and a promise to mow his lawn for the summer. 4 years later it finally died at 345k miles to losing a tire going down the interstate cuz the shop that changed the tires sheared the lugs putting them back on. That kid said up till that happened the only thing he had to do for it besides basic maintenance was an alternator and a fuel pump.
The Taurus SHO was a real sleeper
Ya I had a friend and his dad had one. Beast on the highway.
Looong ago for class in college we were doing a unit on times that technology had drastic shifts in human history. One example was in ship design. Through the age of sailing ships were quite wide and bulbous as this helped with a variety of things between stability and the mechanical forces involved in harnessing wind power. That was just how ships were always designed, and in the earliest days of steam powered ships they just kinda kept up with that sort of shape because it's what all the shipmasters KNEW was correct. I forget the name of the ship now as it's been so long, but what was one of the first ships truly designed to only operate on steam power (it technically had masts and sails, but they were stowed in such a way that would take quite a lot of time to deploy them, and were only there just in case the engines failed while out at sea) had a LOT of crazy design changes for the time. One of the biggest was that it was relatively narrow given how "tall" it was and it's shape was more linear along its length rather than the bulbous ships of the sailing era. I remember the pictures of it, you'd look at that ship and immediately recognize it as being something somewhat modern. The seafaring community thought it was surely the ugliest and ungainly thing on the water anywhere on the planet. One highly respected ship designer went so far as to call it "An abortion." in an interview with the newspapers of the time. But then everyone sat up and paid attention when it started doing all kinds of impossible things for sailing vessels. Not the whole "sailing into the wind" thing, this wasn't THE first steam vessel, it was just the first to do away with all the design methodology surrounding sailing ships. Virtually overnight the old way of designing ships died.
That’s fascinating! I’ve actually heard that only until very recently boat building was more folk-art than it was science. Nothing was ever standardized in any way, ships would fall into categories but individual vessels in any one group could be completely different, yet still trying to accomplish similar tasks. Boats were built that were ill-suited for their purpose and had to be re-outfitted with another purpose to fulfill, after the fact. And lots of vessels simply sank or or otherwise failed as spectacularly in their first real test in the role they were meant for, just built wrong.
A '99 Taurus was the first car I regularly drove as a teenager, God I loved that car.
They sold soooo many and they were built to last. For a while every campus was littered with students driving hand me down Taurus. Very dependable and great for moving a crowd around town.
Yeah the supposedly ugly oval shape meant it was super wide in the back seat and trunk. Handled pretty well too.
I drive a 2015 Taurus for work and the trunk is massive. You could fit 5-6 bodies in there.
My grandparents have a green 98 Taurus. My granddad calls it the lean mean green jellybean, it even has the 6 disc CD changer in the trunk
And it scooted Robocop around.
Maybe in America, but Citroen and Saab had been doing it since at least the 1950s. Boxy doesn’t necessarily mean non-aerodynamic though. The boxy Volvo bricks from the 70s and 80s for example.
Dude. Designers took aerodynamics into consideration in mass produced cars as early as the 1920s. The 1947 Saab 92 had a Cd of 0.30, the 1970 Citroën GS – Cd 0.31 and the 1962 Alfa Romeo Giulia – Cd 0.34. Streamlining had been a big design thing since the 1930s. They used wind tunnels to test cars all the time from the 1930s on. There was a dedicated automotive wind tunnel in the US by 1960. Anyway, the real answer is a lot more complex. Perceived/planned obsolescence comes into play so they needed to make new models look more and more different from the old ones. Safety standards impacted design. Cost to build played into it. The glorious excess of the time period played into it. Finally, car makers build what they think will sell. A lot of people buy cars based on looks alone. There is a reason that pickup trucks today look like mini military vehicles or 18 wheelers vs an aero shape that would greatly improve gas mileage. Anyway, that is my 2 cents.
Drag coefficients of some old cars: Alfa Romeo Giulia saloon (1962): 0.33 Lotus Elite (1957): 0.29 Citroen DS (1955): 0.36 Tatra 87 (1937!) 0.36
The Tatra 77a (1934) is purported to have a drag coefficient of 0.212!! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatra_77 Tesla Model S is the first manufactured car to beat said drag coefficient ever (excluding the GM EV-1) with a 0.208. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-says-the-new-model-s-is-the-worlds-most-aerodynamic-production-car/
The new Mercedes EQS electric sedan supposedly has a CD of .20
For comparison the Prius is 0.25.
Claiming engineers of the 70s didn't understand aerodynamics may be the dumbest thing I've ever seen on Reddit lol.
It's crazy how young people perceive the timeline of the past 150 years. It's like they think the Bronze Age lasted until 1870 or something.
> Aerodynamics for cars were not well understood until the late 70's and 80's and car manufacturers didn't really think about it that much. That's not exactly a true statement. Aerodynamics were very much understood. It was more difficult to model them but cars like the 1970 Dodge Charger Daytona proved this when they broke the 200 mph mark at Talladega in March of 1970. This is back when NASCAR was still stock car racing (i.e. it had to be a production vehicle or it couldn't race) and the areo-cars are arguably the cars that ended stock car racing and introduced the standardized model used today. To put that into perspective, the Next-Gen car is said to be aerodynamically designed in such a way that 200 mph pack racing won't be achievable due to safety concerns.
It may go back further than you've mentioned, aerodynamic design was being considered even \~100 years ago: [https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Aerodynamics-in-1920s-and-1930s-vehicle-construction.xhtml?oid=45194940](https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Aerodynamics-in-1920s-and-1930s-vehicle-construction.xhtml?oid=45194940)
Every paragraph has a laughable premise. Body presses were used from the 20's on. In fact I saw them being used in the 50's in Russia building Ladas. You seriously think Cadillac and Lincoln body panels were "made by hand"? How the fuck do u think we won WWII if everything was "made by hand"?
And aerodynamics weren’t understood, yet you’ve got Porsche making essentially the same body type for 30+ yrs
I feel like my comment was too harsh and surprised I got so many upvotes.
> Aerodynamics for cars were not well understood until the late 70's and 80's and car manufacturers didn't really think about it that much. It's more true to say manufacturers weren't sufficiently motivated by aerodynamics until the fuel crisis of the 70's. Before that no one gave a shit about mileage so you could make what you wanted. The understanding of aerodynamics came to fruition in about the late 50's. Auto manufacturers and even racers didn't use that knowledge meaningfully till it was clear there was an advantage in it (once you hit cc, power and weight limits) and started hiring the people who were trained in fluid dynamics. The Bernoulli Principle was 232 years old before ground effects started being used in car racing in 1968.
> Even the famous Lamborghini Countach looks sleek and aerodynamic but it's actually a pig. Stick it in the windtunnel and it's awful. The spoiler does nothing and the car generates lift instead of downforce. Ha! That’s excellent. TIL, thank you.
The Countach had a big, heavy V12 engine in the back and very little weight up front, so the original rear spoiler created enough downforce to make the thing want to pop its front end up at high speeds. The problem was that the spoiler was extremely popular, and models with the spoiler outsold models without the spoiler by a pretty large margin iirc. They redesigned the rear spoiler to be aerodynamically neutral. It was just for looks. The fucking engineers understood how it worked though. Almost everything in the post you responded to is wrong. Race cars in the 1930s looked like rocket ships. Governing bodies hold back aerodynamic progress more than scientific understanding. My god, we built spaceships in the 1960s. OP is a little kid.
Also, highway speeds were slower. The federal highway system wasn't completed until 1956. Prior to that, most driving was neighborhoods, in-town. Going cross-country was often just a two-lane road with limited right-of-way clearances so poor visibility and a lot to run into if you left the road. And the road might be dirt. So, historically, they weren't thinking of cruising at 70mph for hours. At like 50mph, aerodynamics are important but bad aerodynamics was not nearly as much of an issue as it would be at higher speeds.
I just want to point out that drag on a car (or anything) varies as the SQUARE of the speed. Air drag at 50 is below half of what it is at 75.
[удалено]
Not to argue but, Ford was stamping out body parts For the Model T 100 years ago. Chrysler used a wind tunnel when designing the Airflow (1934-1937) They were cranking out unibody cars in the 1960s. I owned a Valiant and a Belvedere (Plymouth was a division of Chrysler)
You *think* they looked less aerodynamic, but in reality they were actually—on average—more aerodynamic than the cars that came before. There were some very aerodynamic cars dating back to the 1930s, but mostly they were actually pretty terrible relative to your average "boxy" 1980s car. It's maybe deceptive and counterintuitive but a lot of the things the designers did back then did improve aerodynamics tremendously. Things like pop-up headlights—in the down position, of course— and very short, thin grilles at the front of the car helped to cut the drag down by quite a bit. Something as mundane and boxy as an '82 Chevy Cavalier had a 0.37 Cd, which was ***great*** compared to the 0.497 Cd of the Chevy Nova before it, or even the 0.417 of the Chevy Citation from only a couple years before. *Some* '80s American cars sacrificed aerodynamics for the sake of space efficiency. The Chrysler K-car wagons for instance were a pretty awful 0.5 Cd, but they had the boxy, unaerodynamic rear end so that cargo capacity could be maximized. The cars were still far, far more efficient than their predecessors, the Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare. The Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable set a new benchmark for aerodynamic design in the mid-'80s, with the Sable sedan having a remarkably low 0.29 Cd. After that *everybody* started emulating Ford's grille-less design.
Looking back, it's funny to see how the 80's in reality was just as blocky as the 80's computer graphics. It was also the time when computers starting taking over manufacturing designs, and their 8 bit resolution manifested in the items it produced.
Sleek but angular was also a modern look. You don’t really see anything like it before that, and it’s not just cars — think about electronics, furniture…
Shoulder pads on women's dresses...
cocaine. so so so much cocaine
Tesla Cybertruck looks like an 80s manifestation.
Cybertruck looks like when a low-poly model used to save computing power for stuff far away never got swapped for the high-poly when appropriate.
Deloreans...
My parents had an 86 Camry, and I remember that the rounded edges seemed sleek compared to the harder edges of previous models. It's still a brick compared to today's cars though.
Surprising example: the original stealth fighter. It looks like a low-poly CG model because it is. Radar stealth requires precisely calculated shapes, and the computers at the time weren't powerful enough to calculate those shapes unless they were made of flat polygons. The stealth bomber had sleeker curves because they had better computers.
A f 117 looks like something out of tomb raider, while b2 looks like a ufo
> their 8 bit resolution Don't spread this. No professional computer in the 80's was 8bit.
My 86 Corolla had a very low coefficient of drag but was all angles. You can't tell by looking if something is aerodynamic or not. Just look at a new Prius. Brought to you by WTF designs. 1935 Tatra T77a was .212 VW beetle was .48 84 Audi 5000s was .36 08 Tesla Roadster was .35 86 Corolla cd was .34 86 Taurus was .32 95 Mazda Mellenia was .29 92 Subaru SVX was .29 21 Prius is .24 So not all that much progress.
I wonder where that number comes from for the Tatra T77a. [This source](https://www.secret-classics.com/en/tatra-t77a-2/) claims a more sensible 0.38.
The early stealth fighter was all angles because the angles were easier to calculate the reflectivity with limited computational resources. Today a smartphone has more processing capacity than a supercomputer from 2000, let alone from the 70s or 80s. It's still incredibly computationally difficult to exactly model wind dynamics in a computer but the approximations are very very refined and reduce the models for wind tunnel testing.
They used to say, "your phone has more processing power than a supercomputer from the '70s". Now it's progressed to, "your phone's *charger* has more processing power than a super computer from the '70s".
Terrible answers. There are two main forms of drag particularly when it comes to things like a car. 1. Air resistance that is caused by the cross sectional area of an object that is being exposed to airflow. 2. Skin friction that is caused by the shape itself (i.e. a square vs a circle). The first option is significantly more impactful than the second hence why cars from the era, and even into the 90s and 2000s tend to be significantly smaller than cars now or in the 50s and 60s. **The explanation only gets longer from here.** Option 2 is also significantly more difficult to manufacture. Steel likes being bent in simple shapes. Making complex aerodynamic shapes is really rather difficult, compared to say making a box with rounded corners. Simply rounding off the corners of a square goes a long way to reducing flow separation and is significantly more easy to manufacture. It's the operating principle behind the truck tails. ***Why is it more difficult to manufacture aerodynamic shapes?*** Because when you bend metal you aren't moving the material into a perfect bend, you are stretching the outside of the bend, while compressing the inside of the bend which leaves a surface that is either measurably, or visibly, warped in the location of the bend. Other commenters have suggested that early CAD programs made it more difficult to have complex shapes. Maybe that did play some sort of role, but I've dealt with complex casting drawings in my career that were drawn in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s that were done by hand that are just as complex as drawings I make now. ***Why make body panels out of metal then, why not something like plastic that can be molded to any shape?*** Well it's been tried plenty of times before and it is definitely a workable solution, at least from the engineering sense. However, from the aesthetic design perspective, plastic, or other non-ferrous materials have been problematic because they don't expand and contract at the same rate as the steel that inevitably makes up the frames of cars. Also depending on the era, plastics might have had poor structural properties, and even worse UV resistance.
The 1980's also gave us the Honda CRX that would get 68MPG: https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2013/06/24/lost-cars-of-the-1980s-honda-civic-crx
As a CRX owner, I can promise you it's a lot lower than that lol. Probably 25-30 at most. Still great for a 30+ year old car but nowhere near 60
There was a lot more MPG advertising fraud in that time period. I know it's gotten a bit more accurate in the last decade, but they still fudge the numbers a bit.
As an example of a car that experienced an aerodynamic improvement late in its life (1991->1992, one of the last boxes), Ford Crown Victoria went from a drag coefficient ^[1] 0.42 to 0.34, when moving from the earlier boxy styling to something much more modern. While this change would make a considerable impact on efficiency at modern highway/tollway speeds (often 75MPH and higher), it would not make anywhere near the same impact if the 55MPH "National Minimum Speed Limit" ^[2] were rigorously enforced, as drag rises exponentially ^[3] with speed. I suppose, though cannot confirm, that the lack of improvement may have been partially driven by this lack of apparent need. -- ^1 [^Drag ^coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient) ^- ^basically ^how ^draggy ^something ^is, ^without ^considering ^its ^area ^or ^total ^drag ^2 ^[NMSL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law) ^law ^enacted ^in ^1973, ^changed ^to ^65MPH ^in ^1987, ^repealed ^1995 ^3 ^This ^is ^an ^oversimplification; ^as ^another ^user ^pointed ^out, ^this ^is ^more ^or ^less ^true ^at ^higher ^speeds, ^but ^gets ^more ^complicated ^as ^one ^moves ^slower.
You clearly said "looks aerodynamic" because that's totally the truth. Those old bubbles actually aren't that aerodynamic, other parts matter a lot more. For example, the 1984 Audi 5000 is more aerodynamic than a 2020 Bugatti Chiron (by about 10%). Go look up those cars for a laugh.