The 1970s began with muscle cars and ended with gas lines. Two oil shocks, new clean-air and safety rules, and the arrival of the catalytic converter reshaped the cars on American roads, while Japanese imports climbed to the top of the sales charts. These stories follow the machines, the inventions, the people and the moments of a decade that changed what Americans drove and why.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1970s game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makes and Models
nine stories
1The Range Rover that went to the Louvre in miniature
On the tile: Range Rover1970-1971
The Range Rover was launched in 1970, and in April 1971 it starred in an exhibition of innovative British design at the Museum of Decorative Arts, in the Pavillon de Marsan wing of the Louvre Palace in Paris. Princess Margaret opened the show. There was one problem: a real Range Rover could not be brought into the 17th-century building. So the Range Rover inside was a red quarter-scale model more than 1.2 meters long, with working doors and folding seats. That model is now in the collection of the British Motor Museum.
On a flight in 1966, American Motors design chief Richard Teague reportedly sketched a small car on an airsickness bag. AMC could not afford an all-new design, so it shortened its compact Hornet and chopped off the tail, which let it beat the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega to showrooms by several months. Named for a mythical creature said to wreck machines, the Gremlin was introduced on April 1, 1970, April Fools' Day. The cheapest version, at $1,879, had only two seats. AMC built 671,475 Gremlins through 1978.
American Motors called its 1975 Pacer the first wide small car. It was shorter than a Chevrolet Vega but almost a foot wider, with so much glass that the door windows could not roll all the way down. Its stubby hood was designed for a Wankel rotary engine that AMC planned to buy from General Motors. When GM canceled its rotary program, AMC squeezed in its own six-cylinder engine by pushing it back into the firewall. The passenger door was four inches longer than the driver's, to ease entry to the back seat.
The Lamborghini Countach made its debut as a yellow prototype at the Geneva Motor Show on March 11, 1971. Its designer, Marcello Gandini of Bertone, later explained the name. On late nights building show cars, his team worked beside a very tall lock maker who spoke almost only Piedmontese and often exclaimed countach, to express amazement. Gandini suggested the word as a joke, tried it on Bob Wallace, who assembled the mechanical parts, and it stuck, though Gandini allowed that a young co-worker may really have proposed it. The production car arrived in 1974.
Subaru's BRAT, which reached America in 1978, took its name from Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter. Its oddest feature sat in the cargo bed: two rear-facing jump seats. They let Subaru class the BRAT as a passenger car, with an import tariff under 3 percent, instead of a light truck, which paid 25 percent. That truck tariff was known as the chicken tax, because it began as retaliation for European tariffs on American poultry. Many owners cut the seats out to make room for cargo, and Subaru dropped them after the 1985 model year.
By 1978, emissions rules had choked most American performance cars. But the rules that effectively required catalytic converters were written for passenger cars, and light trucks above a certain rated weight were exempt. Chrysler engineer Tom Hoover saw the opening. The result was the Dodge Li'l Red Express, a red pickup with oak trim, a hopped-up 360 V8 and two chrome exhaust stacks behind the cab. In a Car and Driver test, it reached 100 mph faster than the Corvette, Trans Am and Porsche 924 it faced. For 1979 it needed a converter too.
Hyundai's first car of its own was styled in Italy and engineered with British help. In 1974 it signed George Turnbull, a former British Leyland executive, who brought in five more British engineers and designers, while Giorgetto Giugiaro's Italdesign drew the body. The Pony, with a Mitsubishi engine, debuted at the Turin Motor Show that year. It was not strictly the first Korean-made car, but it was the first to enjoy massive commercial success, and in 1976 five went to Ecuador as the first Korean passenger cars exported. It was never sold in the United States.
The Soviet Zhiguli began as an Italian car. In 1966 Fiat agreed to help build a giant factory on the Volga, in a city named for the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti, and its first model, the VAZ-2101, was a strengthened Fiat 124. Officials wanted production started in time for the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth in April 1970, but the assembly line was not ready. So on the night of April 19, workers assembled the first six cars by hand from Italian parts. The name came from the nearby Zhiguli Mountains; exports were called Lada.
The Volkswagen Golf GTI began as a secret. By 1974 a small group of Volkswagen staff, including press chief Anton Konrad, was working on a sporty Golf without any official mandate. In 1975 the project won approval and a tight deadline, the Frankfurt motor show that September. The finished car had tartan seats, a red stripe in the grille and a gear knob shaped like a golf ball. Volkswagen planned to build only 5,000, enough to recover its costs. By the time first-generation production ended in 1983, it had built 461,690.
Catalytic converters arrived on most new American cars for 1975, and lead in gasoline could ruin them. The EPA's defense came down to fractions of an inch. Leaded pumps needed a nozzle spout at least 0.930 inch across, while unleaded spouts could be no wider than 0.840 inch. Cars with converters got a narrow filler opening with a spring-loaded flap that only the slimmer nozzle could push open. With a leaded nozzle, gas pooled at the opening and tripped the pump's automatic shut-off. Leaded gas for cars was banned after 1995, but the size rule stayed.
In December 1972, Honda brought its new CVCC engine to the EPA laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be tested against the strict emissions limits set for 1975. Using a small prechamber, the engine burned a lean fuel mixture cleanly enough to need no catalytic converter. Honda had no car of its own big enough for the test, so the engine went into a Nissan Sunny, and the team added sandbags for weight. It passed, the first vehicle to meet the 1975 standards. The Civic CVCC reached America as a 1975 model.
In 1976 Volvo introduced a three-way catalytic converter controlled by an oxygen sensor. The Lambda sensor, a probe about the size of a finger, sat in the exhaust between the engine and the converter and measured the leftover oxygen. The engine's controls then held the fuel-air mixture in a narrow window where the converter could remove more than 90 percent of three harmful gases. Tom Quinn, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, called it "the most significant breakthrough ever made in the control of vehicle exhaust emissions."
Mercedes-Benz's anti-lock brakes took about 15 years to reach the showroom. Daimler-Benz began serious work in 1963 and in 1966 teamed up with the electronics firm Teldix. Their analog system worked in a 1970 demonstration, but engineers decided a digital controller would be more reliable. Bosch built it, and in August 1978 the partners unveiled the result at Untertürkheim. By the end of 1978 it was an S-Class option for 2,217.60 marks. It watched each wheel and eased the brake pressure when one began to lock, so the driver could still steer. Chrysler had offered an earlier four-wheel system, built by Bendix, on the 1971 Imperial.
Dual front airbags were on sale in American showrooms in the mid-1970s. General Motors first put them in 1,000 1973 Chevrolet Impalas for fleet customers. Its Air Cushion Restraint System then became an option on big 1974 Oldsmobiles, Buicks and Cadillacs, and the first production car built with it was an Oldsmobile Toronado. It cost $225 in 1974. But GM's divisions did little to promote it, some early brochures left it out entirely, and many buyers thought it cost too much. Only about 10,000 cars got the option before it ended after the 1976 model year.
In 1978 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began the New Car Assessment Program to give shoppers crash results they could compare. New cars were towed head-on into a rigid barrier at 35 mph. The first official test, on May 21, 1979, used a small 1979 Plymouth Champ, built by Mitsubishi and sold by Chrysler, which hit the wall at 35.27 mph. Judged later by the star ratings introduced afterward, only one 1979 model tested would have earned five stars for the driver. For 2003 models, 65 did.
Aston Martin's wedge-shaped Lagonda stunned the London motor show in October 1976 with a dashboard from science fiction: digital readouts and about 40 touch-sensitive buttons. Engineer Mike Loasby had fallen for the touch switches in the elevators at National Semiconductor's California headquarters. The show car could not even run under its own power, but buyers placed deposits anyway. Real working electronics proved far harder. At a planned handover to the first customer in 1978, the car had to be pushed out to waiting journalists. Deliveries finally began in 1979, by which time the price had climbed to about £50,000.
Chevrolet wanted its 1971 Vega to be cheap, but shipping a car by rail to distant customers could cost about $300. So General Motors and the Southern Pacific railroad designed the Vert-A-Pac, a rail car that carried Vegas standing on their noses, 30 to a car instead of the usual 18. Each Vega rode on its own door, which a forklift folded up into the rail car's side. Since the cars shipped with fluids topped off, engineers moved the battery filler caps, added an oil baffle to protect the No. 1 cylinder and tilted the washer bottle to 45 degrees. Shipping costs fell about 40 percent.
9The year cars would not start until you buckled up
On the tile: Interlock1973-1974
For one model year, many new cars would not start until the front-seat riders buckled up. From August 15, 1973, federal rules required an ignition interlock on new cars without automatic protection, as a stopgap until automatic restraints such as air bags were ready. At first it worked: one study found belt use in 1974 cars more than double that in 1973 cars. But many drivers found it intrusive and disconnected it. In October 1974 Congress scrapped the requirement and barred any rule demanding an interlock or a buzzer lasting more than 8 seconds. The brief seat belt chime that replaced it stayed the rule for decades.
Shirley Muldowney was the first woman licensed to drive a Top Fuel dragster, and in 1976 she became the first woman to win a professional-class NHRA national event. In 1977 she went further. After three straight summer victories, in Columbus, Englishtown and Montreal, she won the Top Fuel world championship in a runaway, the first woman to take an NHRA world title. The U.S. House of Representatives gave her an Outstanding Achievement Award. She won again in 1980 and 1982, the first Top Fuel racer with three championships.
On December 6, 1976, Kitty O'Neil, a Hollywood stuntwoman deaf since infancy, drove a three-wheeled rocket car called the SMI Motivator across Oregon's Alvord Desert at an average of 512.710 mph. She beat the women's record by roughly 200 mph using only about 60 percent of the car's capacity. But her contract covered only the women's record. A Chicago toy design firm had signed stuntman Hal Needham, whom she credited with training her, to try for the men's record, and had built a toy line around him. She never got another run in the desert.
3A movie star came within a wheel nut of winning Le Mans
On the tile: Paul Newman1979
In 1979 the actor Paul Newman, then 54, raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the first time. Sharing a Porsche 935 with team owner Dick Barbour and Rolf Stommelen, he finished second overall and won his class. Motor Sport magazine judged that they probably would have won outright but for a jammed wheel nut. The race had other oddities: the winning car spent an hour parked on the Mulsanne Straight while one of its drivers repaired it. In 2016 Newman's 935 sold at auction for $4,840,000.
In the mid-1970s, Chrysler's new Cordoba was sold on television by the actor Ricardo Montalbán, who purred about its "soft Corinthian leather" in his deep, accented voice. The phrase conjured ancient Greece, but it came from Chrysler's advertising, and the ads made Montalbán a pop culture icon, for a time as well known for them as for his acting. In the 1980s, David Letterman pressed him on it. Montalbán explained that Chrysler had found a durable, pliable leather. "But does it mean anything?" Letterman asked. "Nothing," Montalbán conceded.
Lee Iacocca had championed the Ford Mustang and been Ford's president since 1970, but he clashed with chairman Henry Ford II. Shortly before 3 p.m. on July 13, 1978, Ford called him in and fired him. In his bestselling autobiography, Iacocca wrote that Ford told him, "Sometimes you just don't like somebody." By November Iacocca was president of Chrysler, which was sliding toward bankruptcy. He went to Congress for help, and $1.5 billion in federal loan guarantees followed. Chrysler repaid the loans in 1983, seven years early.
In 1977 the Boston radio station WBUR invited a panel of mechanics to talk about car repair on the air. Only one showed up: Tom Magliozzi, who ran a garage in Cambridge with his younger brother Ray. By the show's own account, he gave out many wrong answers, but with such finesse that he was invited back. The next week he brought Ray, and the brothers, calling themselves Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, soon had their own show, Car Talk. After years of working for free, they asked for $25 a week, and WBUR agreed on the spot.
The trucker who sang Convoy began as a bread commercial. Metz Baking Company wanted ads for its Old Home Bread, and Bill Fries, creative director at the Omaha ad agency Bozell & Jacobs, invented a trucker named C.W. McCall and voiced him himself, with music by his colleague Chip Davis. Viewers called TV stations asking for replays. Fries was not a trucker at all, but he kept recording as McCall, and Convoy, a tale of truckers dodging police over their CB radios, hit No. 1 in January 1976. By then Davis had founded his own band, Mannheim Steamroller.
In March 1973, Takeo Fujisawa, Soichiro Honda's longtime partner in running Honda, decided to retire and sent word through a colleague while Honda was away in China. Honda heard the news on his return and, after a moment's thought, answered, "I can't be the president without Takeo Fujisawa." He retired too. The new president, Kiyoshi Kawashima, was 45 and related to neither founder, which showed Japan that Honda was not a typical family-owned company. The two founders formally stepped down in October 1973, on Honda's 25th anniversary.
In 1970 the first Stutz Blackhawk, a black 1971 model, was flown to the United States to show to wealthy buyers. Elvis Presley saw it and paid $26,500 for it that October. By 1974 he had bought three more, including a black 1973 Blackhawk III with a Pontiac V8, red leather and 18-karat gold trim, which he made clear only he would drive. Shortly after midnight on August 16, 1977, he drove it through the gates of Graceland as a fan took his photo. It was the last car he drove in public.
In October 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Arab oil-exporting countries proclaimed an embargo against the United States and other allies of Israel. Oil prices jumped from about $3 a barrel to $12, and gas stations began running dry. Drivers lined up around the block, some before dawn. Oregon's governor, Tom McCall, asked stations statewide to adopt odd-even rationing: cars with license plates ending in an odd number could fill up on certain days, even numbers on the next. Some stations flew flags, and a red one meant no gas.
Before 1974, each state set its own highway speed limits, and Montana's highways had no numerical daytime limit at all, only a rule to drive at a reasonable and prudent speed. On January 2, 1974, responding to the Arab oil embargo, President Richard Nixon signed a law making 55 mph the national maximum, to save fuel. States that refused risked losing federal highway money, and Western states, with their long, empty highways, complied grudgingly. Drivers pushed back: hundreds of thousands bought radar detectors, and millions bought citizens band radios to warn one another of speed traps. Congress finally repealed the national limit in 1995.
On February 17, 1972, Volkswagen Beetle number 15,007,034 left the assembly line, and the Beetle passed the Ford Model T as the most-produced car in history. The Model T had set its record in 19 years of production; the Beetle took 34, though serious production began only after World War II. Volkswagen honored the car it had beaten, featuring the Model T in its celebrations and advertising. The Beetle was far from finished. The last German-built Beetle sedan left the Emden plant in 1978, but Mexico kept building it until July 2003, for a final total of 21,529,464.
Pontiac found a movie star in 1977. For Smokey and the Bandit, director Hal Needham chose the Trans Am for Burt Reynolds's Bandit, and General Motors supplied Trans Ams plus Pontiac LeMans sedans for Jackie Gleason's sheriff. The film wore them out. Needham himself drove the leap over a broken bridge, in a car given a more powerful engine by a NASCAR garage, and he said the jump destroyed it. For the final scene, the last surviving Trans Am had to be pushed onto the set. Hagerty credits the film with 25,000 extra Trans Am sales in 1978.
In the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, a white Lotus Esprit drives off a pier and becomes a submarine. For the underwater scenes, a marine engineering firm converted a 1976 Esprit for more than $100,000. Nicknamed Wet Nellie, it truly worked underwater, with ballast tanks and four propellers, but it had fins instead of wheels. In 1989 a Long Island couple paid about $100 for an unclaimed storage unit and found it inside, under old blankets. In 2013 it sold at auction for nearly $1 million, to Elon Musk.
6Coast to coast in a Ferrari, and 12 speeding tickets
On the tile: CannonballNovember 1971
Just after midnight on November 15, 1971, eight teams left Manhattan for the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, California. Car and Driver editor Brock Yates had dreamed up the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash as a whimsical gesture of defiance against traffic laws. He and racing driver Dan Gurney won in a Ferrari Daytona in 35 hours and 54 minutes, just 53 minutes ahead of a Chevrolet van. Four teams collected 12 speeding tickets. A motor home took over 57 hours, and its worst mishap was hot lasagna spilled on the shag rug.
For more than 15 years, Volkswagen had been the top-selling import brand in the United States. In 1975 that ended. Toyota's early count of the year's import sales put Toyota at 283,909 cars, Volkswagen at 267,718 and Datsun at 263,192. Toyota had first sold cars in America in 1958 with the Crown, but its all-out push began in 1965 with the Corona, followed by the Corolla and the Celica. To keep cars flowing, it built its own fleet of ships designed to carry vehicles. Honda more than doubled its import sales that year.
Two months before the first Earth Day, San Jose State College students held a funeral for a brand-new car. In February 1970, to cap a weeklong Survival Faire, they pushed a never-started Ford Maverick, bought with about $2,500 they had raised, through downtown San Jose in a slow parade led by ministers and the college band. They lowered it into a pit on campus and planted a lawn over it, as a protest against smog and the gasoline engine. That October the car was dug up again, this time to promote a local public transit measure.
The world's fastest car of 1970 was a sales pitch for natural gas. The American Gas Association sponsored the Blue Flame, a rocket car about 37 feet long, built in Milwaukee, whose motor burned liquefied natural gas with hydrogen peroxide. On October 23, 1970, at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, driver Gary Gabelich set official world land speed records of 622.407 mph for the mile and 630.388 mph for the kilometer. The mile record stood until 1983. Overlooked by American museums, the car went to a European collector and now sits in the Technik Museum Sinsheim, in Germany.