Professor Elam

Believe it or not, the ‘car’ pictured at left is an Isetta, OK that is the easy part to believe,  Now would you believe that making this ‘car’ kept BMW no less in business while it worked on the fore runner of the BMW 1600?  Yep BMW was in such bad shape after the war and Europe was so poor this worked.   More detailsin this article on Isetta made by various manufacturers before BMW.   By the 1960s VW had an incredibel 10% or the USA car market. I say incredibel because, and again you aren’t going to believe this, instead of gasoline lines, we had gasoline wars.  Occasionally one oil company would try to get more business by lowering prices to or below cost in a ‘gas war.’  While prices were typically 36 cents a gallon, this would take prices to the low 30s.  And if you got a fill up, usually ten gallons or more, they might throw in a set of free steak knives or at least a dollar a set.  My point being that with gas so cheap economy was  tough sell.

American Motors with its Rambler and Jeep and VW were pretty much the small car market.  VW had 10% of the market advertising that its car used pints of oil, not quarts.  Frankly the car was pretty awful, it never offered factory air conditioning and with the windows down, the buffeting at 60 mph was awful. Its popularity peaked in the late 1960s. The extremes of operating temperature of its air cooled engine doomed it to extinction once air quality rules came in.  American Motors was bought by Chrysler which kept Jeep and the factories and junked the rest.  American Motors did not have the funds to re tool for the new compact front wheel design that VW used in its new Rabbit and Chrysler used in its K Cars. 

The best American could do was quirky rear wheel designs featuring its old in line cast iron six like the Gremlin.  Quality problems with the Rabbit introduced in the mid 1970s took VW way back down in the import rankings form which it has never recovered. It is currently trying to trio of cars priced about 15-16K. 

Meanwhile in the 1968-1970 period Toyota brought over its Corolla and as I mentioned  a couple of posts back Nissan had the immensely popular Datsun 510.  Honda had started with a tiny car that actually featured its motorcycle engines.  The big breakthrough for Honda came with its first Accord in 1976 that met US emission standards without a smog pump via clever engineering Honda called CVCC.  This established Honda in the American mind as an innovator and engineering leader.  All three got great gas mileage and were essentially bullet proof designs needing little repair.  Nissan and Toyota did the same thing for small pickups, another market ignored by Detroit, and got a loyal following with again near bullet proof designs and reliable 4 cy engines. 

GM gave VW a go with the Corvair , an illfated rear engined design.  Its rear swing axles became the foder for Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, instead of re design GM famously hired detectives to follow Nader around to ‘get something on him.’  Ford himself in Iacoca’s book derided small cars saying ‘small cars, small profits.’  Its Falcon was simply a small Ford with no real engineering innovation.  All these cars got eclipsed by the muscle car (GTO, Chevelle, GTX, Roadrunner) and pony car (Mustang, Challenger, Camaro) contests which were only possible with the cheap gas of the time.  That 1965-68 phenomenon ended abruptly with the 1971-2 oil embargo and the move to emission standards in 1968.

Which takes us to today. KIA has carved out the low cost leader with its RIO. It’s weight is about 2400 pounds with the 1600 cc (90 cubic inches).  In my 40 years experience with everything automotive that is pretty much minimalist to get both good mileage and enough power to be out on a  highway. Renault trried it again here with a 1400cc engine and finally failed.  Probably the most innovative was the Suzuki made GEO line sold by Chevy here in the late 1990s that featured a 1000 cc three cylinder engine.  Those cars would actually get 35 mpg and up.  As to Matt’s suggestion of 80 mpg, well physics is physics, you kow that mass times velocity thing.  The Logan has a 1400 cc engine. And if you want power robbing air conditioning and power steering, you are either going to have to sacrifice more weight and size, a dicey proposition in a world of 5,000 pound pickups.

I think an alternate solution is different vehicles for different purposes.  This Kawasaki Mule is powered by a 600 cc (36cubic inch) engine and costs $5899.  Kawsaki could certainly put an alternator and turn signals on it as they do with their motorcycles.  Governments run these things around parks and up and down urban streets. Why can’t you and I?  The answer is that the Govt will let itself run these on the street but not you and it. Looks like it would be fine on suburban street going a mile or two to the grocery or cleaners or the golf course. NO it won’t work on I 20 but most short errands are not down I 20 anyway.  One hardly needs a 5,000 pickup to go to HEB but that is what we are doing. 

Isettas, VWs, Corollas, GTO, Buick Electra, Dodge Ram Pickup,  Rabbit, GEO, KIA, Logan, gee goes around comes around.