So I'd say that's a pretty crazy time for cars.

It's not like it's just been a steady climb.

I Love that act

not from a Cars angle though 😄

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not against the clean air act at all.

It put a barrier in just the right place, forcing companies to innovate

I'm more against the fact that engineers had such a hard time getting around it, so instead they just took the same big displacement engines and significantly lowered the performance.

At least initially.

yes

engineers move slower than pencil pushers

big fucking wow

so instead of making new engine in 10mins

they just took the same big displacement engines and significantly lowered the performance.

IMAGINE MY SHOCK

It's not like they had the technology readily available to do that

I'm not talking about 10 minutes, 14 years later the Corvette still had 205hp.

America's premier sports car.

Well I'm against the clean air act

The Countach was on sale here during that time and had about 375.

make a clean air act for ships and planes, leave cars alone

LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE

And that's also the era that Japanese sports cars were overtaking American ones

Same with the Daytona.

American manufacturers literally had to learn how to innovate

well I feel like it was regulation that made US companies complacent

Also yeah, targeting ships and having literally no emissions regulations on passenger cars we'd still be coming out ahead.

if there had been no regulation on cars at all, the US companies would have had to compete with foreign cars anyway, and properly, without any barriers

so they'd have innovated sooner

@LOGiK Right, but they only had to compete via making their engines bigger

The gas crisis wasn't a thing yet, and fuel was cheap

More cylinders = more power. No need to make things 'efficient' or w/e lol

well, not really, bigger displacement means more weight

means worse handling

means slower to an extent

that's why smol turbo engines do so well

We're debating the design philosophy of automobile regions at this point

I'm saying that without the US regulation, US cars would have ended up being outshon by foreign cars anyway and that would have pushed them to innovate

I'm not saying the big displacement wouldn't have also been a thing, just that they wouldn't have gone so big and might have done smaller stuff instead to compete

especially if with the deletion of regulation a lot of barriers to entering the US market were removed as well

it's all hypothetical though sadly

I want a window into parallel universes