A 1971 Corvette engine rated 270 horsepower in one year and 200 the next, bumpers built to survive 5 mph knocks, and an oil price that nearly quadrupled.
The malaise era describes American cars of the 1970s and early 1980s, when emissions, fuel-economy and safety rules, together with the 1973 oil crisis, cut performance and forced downsizing. Engine output fell, bumpers grew heavier and imports took a growing share of sales.
A 1971 Chevrolet Corvette with the 350 cu in (5.7 L) L48 engine was rated at 270 horsepower. In 1972 the identical engine was rated at 200. The metal had not changed; the way American makers were allowed to quote power had.
That swing, part accounting and part genuine loss, sits at the heart of the malaise era. Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, government rules and an oil shock reshaped American cars, trimming their power, adding weight in unexpected places and sending buyers towards smaller imports.
What was the malaise era?
The malaise era was a stretch of US automotive history running from roughly the early 1970s to the early or mid 1980s, marked by poor products and a general sense of unease in the industry. In quick succession the federal government introduced a trio of ever stricter standards covering emissions, fuel efficiency and safety. The industry struggled to adapt. Money that might have gone into new cars went into compliance, and the result was a marked drop in performance, ambitious downsizing and styling that was often poorly resolved.
The same Corvette engine was rated 270 horsepower in 1971 and 200 in 1972, and only the way power was measured had changed.
Where does the term malaise era come from?
The phrase is now widely used by car magazines and general media, among them Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Road & Track, Hemmings, Hagerty, Forbes and the New York Times. One of its earliest known automotive uses was in The Wall Street Journal in December 1988, when Jacob M. Schlesinger wrote that in the malaise era virtually all cars wore the same simple, square, chromeless, earthtone look. The writer Murilee Martin used it often on Jalopnik in 2007.
It echoes President Jimmy Carter's 1979 Malaise Speech, delivered after the oil crisis that followed the Iranian Revolution and touching on a wider crisis of confidence in the United States. The term had political uses too: Senator Phil Gramm used it in 1986, and Vice President George H. W. Bush in May 1988.
Dates are fuzzy. Writing for Jalopnik, Phil Greden argued the era ran from 1975, when US bumper regulations arrived, to 1983, when the Ford Mustang finally gained a significant performance increase after almost a decade of weak output.
Before the rules: horsepower without limits
For decades American car makers had been almost completely free of government mandates and could chase horsepower, size and styling without restraint. The picture began to shift with the Clean Air Act of 1963, which started to codify a legislative response to air pollution from cars, and with Ralph Nader's 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which drew attention to safety and called for measures ranging from better occupant protection to bumpers that could take low-speed impacts without damage.
Fuel was cheap. Throughout the 1960s oil stayed at US$1.80 a barrel, so in real terms Americans paid less for it in 1969 than in 1959, and the price was only US$2.00 in 1971. Passenger cars averaged 17.4 L/100 km (13.5 mpg-US) from 1969 to 1974, and the industry relied on inexpensive foreign oil. American production of crude peaked in 1970, after which imports climbed, rising 52 percent between 1969 and 1972.
How emissions rules cut horsepower
At the close of 1970 President Richard Nixon signed amendments to the Clean Air Act that set national air-quality and emissions standards and strengthened federal enforcement. They required a 90 percent cut in hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides by 1975, measured against the 1970 standards, and told the newly founded Environmental Protection Agency to carry out the rules.
The technology to meet those targets without losing power did not exist. The simplest answer for manufacturers was to give up power, and from 1971 horsepower ratings for many American cars began to fall markedly. Some of the fall was cosmetic. Power was now quoted as net rather than gross horsepower, which brought the US into line with the rest of the world and produced lower numbers for the same engine. The Corvette L48, rated 270 gross in 1971 and 200 net in 1972, is the textbook example.
Real cuts: unleaded fuel and emissions hardware
The detuning was nonetheless real. It began with lower compression ratios, so that engines could run on lower-octane unleaded petrol rather than fuel containing polluting lead additives. General Motors moved first, and every other major American maker followed. Many dropped horsepower figures from their advertising and quoted cubic inches instead.
Larger cuts came from emissions hardware: air-injection pumps nicknamed smog pumps, exhaust gas recirculation, retarded ignition timing and thermal reactors. Pontiac's 455 cu in V8 peaked at 310 net horsepower in 1973 and was down to 200 net in its last year, 1976. Because the rules were imposed rather than developed voluntarily, with a tight deadline, the hastily applied hardware caused stalling and reliability problems and cost fuel economy as well as power.
From the 1975 model year, almost all new cars carried a catalytic converter, which only works on unleaded fuel, so its arrival pushed the market towards unleaded. Honda took another route: its CVCC technology let its cars meet the standards without a converter.
| Engine | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Corvette 350 cu in L48 | 270 gross hp (1971) | 200 net hp (1972) |
| Pontiac 455 cu in V8 | 310 net hp (1973) | 200 net hp (1976) |
| Ford Mustang | 266 net hp, previous maximum | 105 net hp, Mustang II |
Five-mile-an-hour bumpers
Safety law left its mark on the outside of the car. From 1971 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued bumper rules requiring passenger cars, though not light trucks or motorcycles, to meet set performance standards in low-speed collisions. Specifically, a car had to sustain no damage at 8 km/h (5 mph) at a precise bumper height. Apart from Canada, no other country adopted the rule.
The rules began to bite with the 1973 model year, and were tightened for 1974. They specified how the bumper must perform, not how it must look. As with emissions, makers often took the easiest route and fitted bulky, unsightly, protruding bumpers, which added length and weight. In 1982 the US relaxed the standard to 4.8 km/h (3 mph), where it remains. Bumpers today are made largely of foam, which avoids carrying steel bars at the extremities of the car and favours crumple zones for occupants over insurance claims.
The 1973 oil crisis and the cars buyers dropped
In October 1973 the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced an embargo on countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, led by Faisal of Saudi Arabia. The first targets were the US, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands and the UK, and Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa joined the list later. The embargo was lifted in March 1974, but by then the price of oil had risen by nearly 300 percent, from US$3 a barrel to nearly US$12 worldwide, with US prices significantly higher.
Buyers reacted at once, switching from traditional domestic cars with high fuel consumption to efficient compacts. Insurers added to the pressure: State Farm announced a 25 percent annual premium surcharge for performance cars rated above 300 horsepower. Foreign makers benefited, since they built more of the smaller cars. By 1975 imports took 18.3 percent of US sales, and American brands sold just 7,050,120 cars, their slowest year since 1962 and well down from 9.6 million in 1973.
Japanese brands gained from a wider choice of compacts and from technology that improved efficiency. Sales of larger American cars recovered in 1977 and 1978, but the 1979 oil crisis doubled oil and gas prices within 12 months and moved customers towards smaller cars again.
CAFE, the gas-guzzler tax and the numbers
Fuel economy now became law. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, passed in 1975, averaged the fuel economy of a maker's whole output of passenger cars and light trucks and became the basis for later legislation. In 1978 Congress set fleet averages of 18 mpg for 1978, 19 mpg for 1979 and 20 mpg for 1980, rising to 27.5 mpg by 1985. The Energy Tax Act of the same year added a "gas-guzzler" tax on new vehicles that missed the CAFE standards.
By the approximate end of the malaise era, in 1983, average fuel efficiency of passenger cars had not met those targets but had improved to 13.8 L/100 km (17.1 mpg-US), against 17.4 L/100 km (13.5 mpg-US) in 1969 to 1974.
How Detroit responded
The effect on American line-ups was a run of redesigns and discontinued engines and models, and lower performance overall. Safety rules also moved styling away from the ornate shapes of the postwar years towards sleeker, simpler, sharper-edged bodies that became a staple of the era. Manufacturers often leaned on badge engineering and quick styling tricks.
Ford, General Motors and Chrysler also turned to their European divisions, which knew how to design smaller, more economical cars. Ford imported the 1970 Mercury Capri and, in 1978, its first-generation Fiesta. General Motors used Opel to design the T-body and J-body small-car platforms. Chrysler brought over complete models from Rootes and Simca: the 1972 Plymouth Cricket and the jointly developed Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon.
Muscle cars reshaped or cancelled
Ford ended the original Mustang after the 1973 model year and replaced it with the Mustang II, which was over a foot shorter and some 800 pounds lighter in its first year. Its power peaked at 105 net horsepower, against 266 net for the previous year's already reduced top engine.
Other cars changed class. The Mercury Cougar became a personal luxury car for 1974 and the Dodge Charger for 1975, and the Chevrolet Nova turned into a luxury-oriented compact. Chevrolet kept the Chevelle but dropped its SS performance option after 1973. By the end of the 1974 model year the AMC Javelin, Dodge Challenger, Plymouth Barracuda and Pontiac GTO had gone for good.
The Ford Granada of 1975 captures the mood. Its advertising stressed padded vinyl roofing, opera windows, tufted velour with imitation wood, and stand-up hood ornaments. Underneath sat the austere 1961 Falcon platform, and the car managed a power-to-weight ratio of 48.46 lb per hp and a 0-60 mph time of 23.15 seconds.
What happened to sales
The smaller, less powerful models did not stop imports from rising. General Motors sold over 5 million cars in 1978 but about 3.5 million in 1982, a fall of 34.2 percent. Ford's sales dropped 47 percent and Chrysler's 27 percent over the same years, while Toyota's rose from 441,800 to 527,128, an increase of 19.3 percent.
The era also exposed how vulnerable the American industry was to foreign makers skilled in building more spacious, fuel-efficient designs.
Where the malaise era ended
There was no clean finish line. By the approximate close in 1983 fuel economy had improved, though not to target. Rules were softened in places, as when the bumper standard eased in 1982, while the CAFE targets climbed towards 27.5 mpg by 1985. One writer marks the end with the Mustang's performance increase in 1983, the first significant gain after almost a decade of low output.
