very good post and correct points...but I'd add something to number 4.....as a result, the federal govt. created CAFE (Corp Average Fuel Economy) laws....and those laws combined with emissions sent the industry...esp. the domestics which built the large cars that America claimed they wanted......into a tailspin. Essentially, the Government said "Clean up your tailpipe emissions by (I recall) 70%.....improve your fuel economy by 75%.....and you have 5 years to do it....and, oh, by the way........you can't talk to each other 'cause that's Anti-Trust.

The Foreign cars, on the other hand...had been building fuel efficient cars forever because of the wants and needs of their home markets. Gasoline has always been substantially more expensive overseas.....further, Japan's government had no restrictions on working together.

 

That's really wierd. Its like a teacher telling a student that working on the school newspaper in a group is collusion. :blah:

The insurance problem was mentioned. A question I've been meaning to ask is, how do the insurance companies determine the rates for new vehicles, such as the SSR, HHR, and soon to be 5th gen?

Do the automanufacturers have to resort to underrating certain aspects of the car to get around this?
Maybe they should dyno the car with the A/C on full blast, the stereo turned up, and all the options/features of the car being used...I mean hey, that is reasonable right? Because that is how a car operates on the roads, with the a/c on, windows being rolled up and down, stereo on, etc. Lets be honest, its only fair to operate a vehicle on a dyno in the same manner that a consumer would be operating it legally on the street.
Heck, maybe the computer will allow the vehicle to have two settings, a street and strip mode. Street for better gas mileage and limits the HP of the car by a good amount. And a strip button. I mean, if your insurance won't cover you crashing at the race track, then they should not be able to cite the "strip mode" (car having worse emissions, more hp) to insurance policy pricing. How about the gov? Would they mind a bad emissions "strip mode" to be on the car?

edit: Also, are there any stock guys in here? Will the 5th gen concept affect GMs stock?

 

So Corvette can kick it's a$$ AGAIN????

Yeesh. You would think they would have learned by now.

 

Thinking of having an even better muscle car era for my generation that came too late for it gives me the chills. I've always been jealous of all of you that lived through those years to experience it, I just hope we have some sweet looking cars to go with the power, I don't want some boring looking car with an LS7 *coughGTOcough*

 

AC compressor kicks off at WOT. Having most of the options on is not likely to have much of an affect on the final HP total on the dyno.

 

What SRT-4 replacementS ?

I know of the Caliber STR4.. Whats the other one?

 

How is the TBird coming back? Is it going to be another 2-seater, or is it going to be like the TBirds of the 90s?

 

When the insurence industry started slamming it to performance cars, they did it through a number of means. Horsepower ratings, gender, and the version of the car you bought and how many doors it had. At one time, even the color of the car influenced your insurance. If you were a male driving a '69 Red Plymouth Road Runner with a Hemi and a manual, you'd be selling your new born next to a married female who bought a blue Plymouth Satellite with a 318.

Insurence today is quite a bit better than it was back then. They actually look at driving records, age groups, zip codes, and (at least in Cali) are gender and car color neutral.

Most important of all, a car's rate is based on average claims. Cars with an older demographic tend to be alot cheaper to insure than so-called "ricers, regardless of actual horsepower. That's why you have Mitsubishis V6 Eclipses and I4 Acura Integras costing more (and Mustang GTs with nearly a 100 horse deficit costing as much or even more) to insure than high powered, 160 mph Chevrolet Camaros of the same year.


Stocks are affected by one thing.....money! The 5th gen won't affect GM's stock alone. Ford can't make enough Mustangs and F series trucks, yet their stock is still in the basement.

 

I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you.

Seems a personal luxury coupe this round. I envision a GTO-like car... without the blandness or tireshreading reputation.

 

Wait, Can you say if it exists already or will it be a brand new model SRT4'ed? like the Caliber...

 

The tree huggers certainly played their part. The low emission engines required catalytic converters and/or retarded timing. Both of those reduced performance of the engine. They also increased gas consumption, which made high performance models less desireable. If a 145hp 350 got 12 mpg, then a 240 hp 455 would have gotten something like 9mpg. If not for the emission standards, the 145hp 350 would have been a 175hp 350 and would have gotten 15. The 400hp 455 would have gotten 12.

Also, the work required to meet safety, emission, and fuel economy standards pretty much took all the engineering resources, leaving very little to develop high horsepower, low emission engines.

Just compare what you could get in Australia and Europe in 1977 with what you could get in the U.S. It was much grimmer here. Europe never really went through the junk-car stage.

 

The final decision to trade in my '02 Black SS on an '04 Vette, was based on the insurance rates. It sealed the deal. Believe it or not, the rates are *CHEAPER* on the Vette. I couldn't believe it. My agent explained it to me like this:

Most people driving an SS Camaro, are in their mid 30's...still lots 'o testosterone, and thus a higher risk than the typical 55 year old male/female driving a Vette.

 

Actually, those engines got pittyful fuel economy BEFORE emissions.


Though you're right about engineering resources being diverted, that was after the muscle car era. Industry began diverting resources in the early to mid 70s... again, well after muscle cars died in the market place.

It's popular to lay everything that happened to muscle cars to enviromentalists coming along and taking over the entire country, but the reality is that is simply wrong. They like to think they killed off the cars, and enthusiasts like to oblige them by believing it. But that would be like them taking credit for today's plunging sales of large SUVs even though fuel prices are actually doing it.


As a whole (though not every individual), that group is full of it..... trust me, I live in Northern California.

1969 saw muscle car production drop. by 1971, you couldn't give away muscle machines to save your life. Timing, converters, power robbing emissions equptment...that all happened years after muscle cars became all but extinct.

If you wanted to look at the top 3 reasons, in order it would be sudden skyrocketing insurence, changes in market tastes, and finally banning lead in gasoline. Throwing tree huggars in on this is alot like blaming the silly or obnoxious colors and decals on alot of the cars (which turned off people who now wanted more adult cars). Both played a role, but only out on the fringes.


In 1969, Liberty (if I remember correctly) started an actual black list of cars that it hit with outlandish insurence rates. Allstate was another early one. It spread to all other insurence companies instantaneously, and within a year it decimated muscle car sales.


A bit of trivia for everyone.
The Super Duty 455 that ended up in Trans Am was also slated for the restyled 1973 GTO. Due to the changing markets, Pontiac decided against it (likely would have been the quickest factory GTO ever made...even with the pollution equptment). The public in the early 70s equated muscle cars with people who today would be equated with "ricers". GTO ended up with the regular 455 that was available on all other Pontiacs.

Pontiac was moving upscale to attract customers who were maturing from the "muscle era", and were planning a GTO line which included sedan. It had a unique nose, different from other Lemans, unique tail lights, and would focus on handling and balence more than "raw" performance. Instead it was decided that the GTO name would be too much of a liability to the new car, and it was called something else.... the Pontiac Grand Am.

Don't laugh or blame just Pontiac management.... what do you think the Chevrolet Laguna S3 replaced?

Believe me. Tree huggers didn't do in muscle cars. Insurence & public taste did.

 

I 1/2 believe you

Let me put it a different way then.

If the U.S. had implemented European standards rather than what we did, then yes, I agree that the days of the 450hp LS6 (around 380 net maybe) still would have been behind us. But I believe you would have been able to get something like a 350 cubic inch Chevy V8 with 275hp in 1978 instead of the 220hp 49-state thing that we had (or whatever it was).

Would that have been a muscle car? Maybe not compared to what we had in 1970, but definitely so compared to what we could get in 1978.

And unleaded gas came from the "tree huggers" too. Leaded was still freely available in Europe until the 1990s.

So tree huggers may not have killed the huge engines and stripes and all those great things from 1970, but they did kill any last vestige of performance.

Btw, the Super Duty 455 dropped 20hp between the prototype and production models due to complications in meeting the emission standards. Who knows what it would have had instead of 290 -- maybe 390 with 1970 emissions.

 

I just hope that GM decides to go through with their plans for putting a supercharger on the corvette for 2009