In the 1980s, the computer moved under the hood. Microprocessors, fuel injection and turbochargers changed how engines worked, while navigation systems, touchscreens and even a self-driving van hinted at what was coming. The decade also brought the minivan, hot hatches and record-setting supercars, Japanese cars built in America and a Korean newcomer setting sales records. These stories follow the machines, the inventions, the people and the moments of the 1980s on the road.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1980s 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 family van that Ford turned down
On the tile: Minivan1983
At Ford, Hal Sperlich kept urging Henry Ford II to build a new kind of family vehicle, a small van. By his own account, Ford fired him for pushing too hard. Sperlich took the idea to Chrysler, where Lee Iacocca, also fired by Ford, gave it the green light. On November 2, 1983, Iacocca drove the first minivan off the line at Chrysler's Windsor Assembly Plant. The 1984 Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager used Chrysler's front-drive K platform for a low, flat floor, and they fit in the family garage.
American Express put a DeLorean on the cover of its 1980 Christmas catalog, offering up to 100 DeLoreans plated in 24-karat gold for $85,000 each. Only two sold. One is now at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada. The other spent years in a glass case in a bank lobby in Snyder, Texas. A spare set of gold panels had been made in case either car was damaged. After the DeLorean factory closed in late 1982, those spares went onto a third car, later raffled off to promote Big Lots stores.
Officially, there was no 1983 Corvette. The all-new fourth-generation car kept slipping, first to a fall 1982 debut and then to spring 1983, so Chevrolet sold it as a 1984 model. But 43 pilot cars had already been built to test the production process. Such cars can't be sold to the public, so they are normally crushed, and 42 of them were. One slipped through. In 1984 a new plant manager found the plain white car parked outside, neglected. Today it is on display at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Ferrari unveiled the F40 at the civic center in Maranello on July 21, 1987, marking 40 years since the first Ferrari approved for road use. It was the last new car unveiled with Enzo Ferrari present; he died in August 1988. Its twin-turbocharged V8 gave a claimed top speed of 324 km/h, about 201 mph, and it was the first Ferrari production car with body panels made mainly of composites. Some 900 orders arrived at the unveiling. The list price was 380 million lire, but F40s soon sold for 1.6 billion.
To design a new small car based on its March hatchback, Nissan held a contest. Proposal A came from a conventional in-house team, the B proposals borrowed know-how from the apparel industry, and C came from an Italian design firm. Proposal B-1, nicknamed "Nostalgic Modern," won and gave the car its name. Crowds mobbed the Be-1 at the 1985 Tokyo Motor Show. When orders opened in January 1987, production was capped at 10,000, more than 10,000 people ordered, and buyers were chosen by lottery. Used ones later sold for about triple the original price.
Lamborghini's giant off-roader began as a military project. At the 1977 Geneva show it unveiled the Cheetah, developed with an American company, Mobility Technology International, in hopes of interesting the U.S. armed forces. The U.S. military contract went to AM General's Humvee instead. Lamborghini kept going, moved the engine to the front and, in January 1986 at the Brussels show, unveiled the LM002, powered by the Countach's V12 and riding on Pirelli tires developed just for it. Mostly private buyers took them home, and only 301 were built.
Porsche first took four-wheel-drive 911s to the Paris-Dakar Rally in 1984 and won at its first attempt. In 1985 all three of its new 959s dropped out. In 1986 it returned with three 959s, whose electro-hydraulically controlled center differential shifted power between the front and rear axles. This time all three finished. René Metge and Dominique Lemoyne won, and Jacky Ickx and Claude Brasseur were second in an identical car. The third 959 was a service car, driven by project manager Roland Kussmaul and Wolf-Hendrik Unger. It finished sixth.
Morris Markin, a Russian-born tailor who ran taxicabs in Chicago, formed the Checker Cab Manufacturing Company in 1922. Its cabs became so familiar that they later starred in the TV series Taxi. Checker production peaked in 1962 at 8,173 cars, most of them taxis, and New York City was once home to as many as 8,000 Checkers. But as the country turned to smaller, more economical cars, a 4,000-pound cab made less sense. The last Checker rolled off the line in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on July 12, 1982. It was painted apple green.
The Yugo came from Zastava, an arms maker since the 1850s, which built cars based on older Fiat designs at its factory in Kragujevac, south of Belgrade, and introduced the small Jugo 45 in 1980. The importer was Malcolm Bricklin, who years earlier had brought the tiny Subaru 360 to America with the tagline "Cheap and Ugly does it." In 1985 he began selling the Yugo GV in the United States for $3,990. In all, 141,651 Americans bought Yugos.
Honda's car navigation began with a tank. Tadashi Kume, a senior Honda research executive, noticed that a tank's gun barrel stayed aimed while the tank bounced over rough ground, and learned that a gyroscope did it. Honda's gyro blew helium over two heated wires and sensed turns from the difference in their temperatures. Drivers laid transparent map sheets over a screen that traced the car's path. In a final test, it guided Kume from Suzuka to his house in Tokyo. The Electro Gyrocator became an Accord dealer option in August 1981.
2A 1986 Buick you controlled by touching the screen
On the tile: Touchscreen1986
Decades before touchscreens were everywhere, the 1986 Buick Riviera had one. Its Graphic Control Center was a cathode-ray tube showing green text on black, covered by a clear switch panel whose buttons changed from page to page. It ran the radio and climate control and offered a trip computer, diagnostics, a calendar and maintenance reminders. Because a picture tube takes a few seconds to warm up, engineers had it start warming when the driver touched the door handle. Buick first tested the system in 100 1984 Rivieras given to key dealers.
Every new passenger car sold in the United States since the 1986 model year has a third brake light, and the idea was proved on taxis. In the early 1970s, California psychologist John Voevodsky mounted an extra warning light between the usual two on 343 San Francisco cabs and compared them with 160 cabs without one. Over 12.3 million miles, the test cabs had 60.6 percent fewer rear-end collisions. Later fleet tests helped persuade federal regulators. On real roads the benefit proved smaller: about 4.3 percent over the long run.
A Munich-born inventor, Walter Linderer, filed a patent for an inflatable crash cushion in 1951, but the tough materials needed to make one work did not yet exist. Mercedes-Benz returned to the idea in 1966. After about 250 crash tests and more than 2,500 sled tests, it showed a driver's airbag with a seat belt tensioner at the Geneva show in March 1981. In a severe crash, sensors fire a propellant charge that inflates the bag within milliseconds. The system went on sale that July as an S-Class option costing 1,525.50 marks.
For 1981, Cadillac offered a V-8 that could run on eight, six or four cylinders, shutting some off to save fuel when cruising didn't need them. A microprocessor decided when. In practice, the electronics couldn't keep up: as conditions changed, the system scrambled to switch cylinders on and off, and cars hesitated, bucked and stalled. GM issued 13 updates, none of which worked, and dealers disabled the system, leaving plain V-8s. After one year Cadillac dropped it from its regular cars, though limousines kept it through 1984. The idea was old: the first known car with cylinder shutoff was a 1905 Sturtevant.
In the winter of 1976-77, Audi ran test drives on snowy roads in Scandinavia, and a humble military off-roader came along: the Volkswagen Iltis, developed at Audi. Its four-wheel drive showed what was possible on snow. From February 1977, project manager Walter Treser and 12 engineers worked on a fast road car with permanent all-wheel drive. The Audi quattro was presented at the Geneva show on March 3, 1980. In 1986 Audi filmed a famous commercial in which an Audi 100 quattro drove up a snow-covered ski jump in Finland.
7Honda's research chief asked for 100 hp per liter
On the tile: Honda VTEC1989
Honda engineer Ikuo Kajitani led development of a new 1.6-liter engine for the 1989 Integra, built around VTEC, which switched the valves between cam profiles for low and high engine speeds. The target was 140 horsepower, about 90 per liter, and Kajitani felt it was not ambitious enough. Then Nobuhiko Kawamoto, president of Honda R&D, asked why not aim for 100 horsepower per liter. The team took up the challenge. The Integra, announced April 19, 1989, reached 100 horsepower per liter without a turbocharger and still had strong low-end manners.
In the early 1980s, Bosch engineers looked for a way to link the electronic systems in a car and found that no existing network met automotive needs. So in 1983, Uwe Kiencke began developing a new one. In February 1986, at the Society of Automotive Engineers congress in Detroit, Bosch introduced it as the Controller Area Network, or CAN. Cutting down on bulky wiring was only a by-product; the real aim was adding new functions. Mercedes-Benz began using CAN in its upper-class cars in 1991, starting with the engine management units.
9Ford's door keypad has ten digits and five buttons
On the tile: Door Keypad1980
Ford drivers have been unlocking cars without a key since the redesigned 1980 Thunderbird, which introduced a keypad on the driver's door. Punch in a five-digit code and the driver's door unlocks. Owners can choose their own code, and other buttons unlock the passenger doors or the trunk, or lock everything at once. There is a quirk: the keypad shows ten numbers, but they share just five buttons, two digits to a button. That limits the possible codes to 3,125.
Michèle Mouton joined Audi's rally team for 1981 with Fabrizia Pons as co-driver, an all-woman crew. That year she won the Rallye Sanremo, and she remains the only woman to win a round of the World Rally Championship. In 1982 she finished second in the championship. In 1985 she took an Audi Sport Quattro up Colorado's Pikes Peak, a 12-mile gravel course, in 11 minutes, 25.39 seconds, a new overall record. She became the first and only woman to earn the hill climb's title of "King of the Mountain."
At Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama in 1985, Lyn St. James drove a Ford Mustang Probe GTP prototype at more than 204 mph, becoming the first woman to top 200 mph on a closed course. Three years later she returned to the 2.66-mile track in a Ford Thunderbird prepared by Bill Elliott's family team and built to only look stock. On October 11, 1988, she raised her own women's closed-course record to 212.577 mph. In all, she and her team set or broke 21 speed records, 16 of them open to men or women.
Mimi Vandermolen joined Ford in 1970 designing snowblowers and TVs for its Philco division, then moved to cars. In 1980 she became lead interior designer for the future 1986 Taurus. Her team angled the dashboard toward the driver, replaced push-pull switches with rotary knobs and put bumps on switch ends so drivers could find them without looking away from the road. Fake woodgrain was banished. The seats alone took two and a half years. The Taurus was Motor Trend's Car of the Year, and in 1987 Vandermolen became Ford's design executive for small cars, a first for a woman in the industry.
Bob Hall learned Japanese partly from movie dialogue and comic books, and joined Motor Trend at 20. On a trip to Japan he met Kenichi Yamamoto, Mazda's head of research and development. In the late 1970s, Yamamoto asked him what kind of cars Mazda should build, and Hall suggested reviving the simple, classically British two-seat sports car. Yamamoto kept a poker face. By 1981 Hall was a product planner at Mazda, and Yamamoto told him to study his lightweight sports car idea. It debuted as the Miata at the 1989 Chicago Auto Show.
Ernst Dickmanns, a professor at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, set out to teach a vehicle to drive by sight. His team fitted a 5-ton Mercedes-Benz van with cameras and let computers work its steering, throttle and brakes, based on what the cameras saw. The van, called VaMoRs, drove itself in 1986. In 1987 it ran on the autobahn at 96 km/h, about 60 mph, its top speed. Dickmanns recalled that American research vehicles of the time were crawling along at a few kilometers per hour.
Stan Honey was an engineer and yacht navigator when Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell hired him for the 1983 Transpac race from Los Angeles to Honolulu. Their boat finished first. With Bushnell's backing, Honey founded Etak, named for a Pacific Islander navigation idea. Its Navigator, sold from 1985, tracked a car with wheel sensors and a compass, matched its path to a digital map and turned the map so the car always pointed up. The maps came on rugged cassettes. Honey later co-founded Sportvision, which put the 1st & Ten line on TV football.
7The Indy 500 winner that started in a hotel lobby
On the tile: Al UnserMay 1987
Al Unser began May 1987 without a ride in the Indianapolis 500 and went home to New Mexico. Then Penske driver Danny Ongais was injured in practice, and Unser got the call. His car was a year-old March-Cosworth that had been retired and put on display in a hotel lobby in Reading, Pennsylvania, where the team was based. He started 20th. Late in the race, leaders Mario Andretti and Roberto Guerrero ran into trouble, and Unser took the lead on lap 183. It was his fourth Indy 500 win, tying A.J. Foyt's record.
Lee Iacocca's plea to Congress helped win the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act, which President Jimmy Carter signed on January 7, 1980. Chrysler's chairman, who also became the company's TV pitchman, was famous for cutting his own salary to $1 while the company fought to survive. The dollar was real, but it was not his whole pay: Forbes later reported that Iacocca earned $868,000 in 1980, ranking 100th on its list of best-paid chief executives. In 1986, thanks largely to stock options, his $20.5 million ranked first.
For 1985, the Winston Million offered a $1 million bonus to any driver who won three of NASCAR's four biggest races in one season. Bill Elliott of Dawsonville, Georgia, won the Daytona 500, the Winston 500 at Talladega and the Southern 500 at Darlington, and became "Million Dollar Bill." He won the series championship in 1988 and a record 16 Most Popular Driver awards. In 1987 at Talladega he ran a lap at 212.809 mph, the fastest lap in NASCAR history.
Honda came to Marysville, Ohio, to build motorcycles in 1979, and that success led it to decide the same year to add a car plant. On November 1, 1982, Accord sedans began rolling off the new line, making Honda the first Japanese automaker to build cars in the United States. Workers took it slowly at first, building fewer than 1,000 Accords in the last two months of 1982. By 1988 the plant built an Accord coupe that became the first American-assembled Japanese-brand vehicle exported to Japan.
Hyundai launched its subcompact Excel in the United States in February 1986, aiming at first-time buyers such as college students and young families who struggled to find affordable, well-equipped cars. Customers responded immediately. Hyundai Motor America sold its 100,000th Excel in just seven months, and its 1986 sales reached 168,882, an industry record for an import car distributor's first year. Its dealers averaged 1,431 sales each, another record. All of this came with dealers in only 31 of the 50 states.
In 1985 the Ad Council and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a seat belt campaign starring Vince and Larry, two crash test dummies dreamed up at the Leo Burnett agency in Chicago. The ads used humor to show what happens to people who don't buckle up. The ads weren't the only factor, since states were also passing belt laws. In the first half of 1986, a Department of Transportation survey in 19 cities found 39 percent of drivers saying they used seat belts, up from 23 percent a year earlier. From 1982 to 1988, belt use nationwide rose from 11 to 47 percent.
In February 1984, rivals General Motors and Toyota each put up half of $200 million to create New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI. It took over a plant in Fremont, California, that GM had recently closed. Toyota would run it and appoint its president, and it would build a small front-wheel-drive car based on the Corolla. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system. The result, as the radio program This American Life later put it, was one of the worst auto plants in America producing some of its best cars.
Toyota's Flagship One project had a simple goal: build the world's greatest car. When its researchers went out to study luxury buyers in May 1985, a new brand wasn't part of the plan, but the team came to conclude it would need one. The Lexus LS 400 premiered at the Detroit auto show in January 1989 and went on sale that September. Its launch commercial showed the sedan revving on rollers with a pyramid of champagne glasses stacked on its hood. As the speedometer climbed, champagne poured into the top glass flowed down through the rest without a spill.
In the mid-1980s, with Mustang sales lagging, Ford planned to replace its rear-wheel-drive pony car with a front-wheel-drive coupe built on a platform from Mazda, the Japanese carmaker Ford partly owned. In April 1987 AutoWeek revealed the plan with a drawing of the car on its cover, and the secret was out. Thousands of irate Mustang fans wrote letters of complaint to Ford. Falling fuel prices, the fans' reaction and a surge in Mustang sales changed Ford's mind. The Mustang carried on, and the new coupe went on sale beside it as the 1989 Ford Probe.
On November 1, 1987, solar-powered cars set off from Darwin on a race of nearly 2,000 miles across Australia to Adelaide. The field of about two dozen entries ranged from high school projects to a German car that arrived in three suitcases. General Motors brought the Sunraycer, shaped by Paul MacCready, who had won the Kremer Prize for the first successful human-powered aircraft, and covered with 7,200 gallium arsenide solar cells made for satellites. It averaged just over 40 mph and reached Adelaide five days after leaving Darwin, far ahead of the field. Australia's news media dubbed it "the Kitty Hawk of Solar Cars."
Jaguar went to the 1988 24 Hours of Le Mans with five XJR-9s, powered by V12 engines. The car that won, driven by Jan Lammers, Johnny Dumfries and Andy Wallace, was an unlikely hero. Earlier that year the same car had failed to finish at Jerez, Jarama and Monza, and it didn't start at Silverstone. At Le Mans it covered 394 laps, about 3,313 miles, despite being stuck in fourth gear for the last 40 minutes. It was Jaguar's first Le Mans win since 1957, and the only race that car ever finished.
By 1984, Western European nations and Canada had laws requiring seat belts, but no American state did, and the National Safety Council estimated that only 10 to 15 percent of passengers regularly buckled up. On June 21, 1984, the New York State Assembly approved a bill requiring motorists to wear belts or face fines of as much as $50. That July, New York became the first state to require seat belts, for drivers, front-seat passengers and children under 10.