70s-80s American Cars

I think we can all agree that American Cars from the 1970s and 80s were, as a general rule, complete dogshit. Some exceptions here and their, fine, but in general huge boxy poorly made gas guzzling pieces of crap. The real reason why the US Auto Companies was hit so hard in the 80s was they made shit cars and refused to improve them.

American cars from the 50s-2010s were cheap poorly made shitboxes in general

>American Cars from the 1970s and 80s were, as a general rule, complete dogshit.

inb4 boomers defending muscle cars

>United Automobile Workers

This desu

Meh, Unions were not the problem. It does not matter how happy or unhappy your workers are if they are making shit cars approved by brain dead execs.

Of course they weren't

late 70's and early 80's was an awful period for car manufacturers and enthusiasts alike. Emission standards were at their absolute peak in strictness, and on top of that there was an oil crisis, the market for sporty v8's was dried up.

Take the 2nd gen camaro, the last few year models whose engines were all the way up to being 5.0L small block v8's only made an abysmal 175-180 mph TOPS.

I say don't hate the car, hate the circumstances it was born into.

A fuel crisis is a fuel crisis OP, don't blame the cars for it

Great Veeky Forums hasn't had an ameribashing in all of an hour so I guess we are due. I wish some of you had some knowledge of them other then just regurgitating memes. None of the cars built in the late seventies were really any good. Yes that includes the immortal cars from the land of the rising sun. In the eighties things were improving dramatically. The Chrysler Kcar program and caravans were great vehicles that dug Chrysler out of its first bankrupt and bailout. Chrysler put turbos into everything at that time from new yorkers to minivans. They built what the consumer was wanted. Ford struck the iron when it was hot with the jellybean cars. Ford got their act together and started making the mustang great again(yes I know, I'll pay trump royalties later.) Once again selling what the public wanted. If they were shit cars sales numbers would have died after a couple of years but surprise they didn't. Pontiac built something America manufacturers hadn't seen since the Corvair in the Fiero. The GN was already mentioned. Olds sold the shit out of their downsized rwd cutlass supreme. GM redesigned the Vette and made it much more than a relic of the 70s. All three built great full size pickups that Japan didn't try to compete with. Now japan had great cars in that time for sure, Supras and Z cars being two but Japan didn't sell nearly the same amount as their american competition the the sedans didn't take off until the 90s. Now I now you will pull your special snowflake cars out of your asses and commence bench racing, but when you do that look up two things as well. How many were sold in the US and the MSRP of them.

Upper management did kill the us auto industry.
emissions and oil crisis didn't help but upper management was getting paid the big bucks to deal with shit like that.
but they shat all over it and fucked up everything their previous workers worked hard for.

Ya, British Leyland sure was pumping out those quality automobiles in the 70's and 80's.

holy shit americans literally on suicide watch

You would be too
French v6 from the 70's made more power than bigger americain v6

I kinda want to bring up the citation and it's stablemates. GM was so... So bad in the 80s. They almost didn't care if it was a good car they made, they thought it would sell anyway. Case in point, the Cadillac cimarron. A barely disguised cavalier that almost destroyed the brand. It was so bad that they still have pictures of it in Cadillacs head office to remind themselves to never do a car like that ever again.

Oh I'm "sure" they were.

The cars made before the fuel crisis took effect are actually pretty decent though.

>somehow it's the workers' fault that exec thought they could continue cashing in on their lazy re-digestion of outdated engineering at a time when foreign competition actually bothered to optimize within the new restrictions and posed a hazard to Detroit's near-monopoly for the first time

>somehow it's the laws' fault that Detroit thought that they could get away with simply choking their tech instead of optimizing it for the new requirements
The US market Porsche 928 made 316 hp from a 5.0L V8 at the same time the Mustang and Camaro still made 200 hp and 215 hp respectively from theirs' while adhering to the same emissions standards.

The Vette was good since 1963 when it got IRS, and didn't witness another milestone in its engineering until 1996 when it got the transaxle. The C3 and C4 were just reheated engineering from much earlier, only with more era appropriate (piece of crap) bodies on it. The thing was as much as 185 fucking inches long and the bastards didn't even manage to include A FUCKING TRUNKLID.

...

Also the only reasons American full size trucks kept going well are that there's no global market for them so it would be a waste of money for anyone else but America to build them, and that they got a much softer law treatment on the emissions and safety than cars did (and still do because Detroit would fold entirely if their SUV and truck sales broke away, it's their last domain).

Anyone can build barges when they don't have to worry in the least about resource usage.

Ever played a strategy game with an infinite resources cheat? Yeah, that. That was Detroit before reality finally hit them in the 70s.

They're still decent as far as performance is concerned though. Anything made before 1974 was safe from the oil crisis.

I don't know how you consider that an argument, it doesn't oppose and might even support my statement that Detroit were in dogshit easy mode before the fuel crisis. Just how easy it was for them before the fuel crisis was neatly demonstrated by how utterly incompetently they managed the fuel crisis.

If a car functions well, I don't see how you can call it a poor design. The fact that it's hurting the company/industry doesn't really matter.

I'm not calling the pre-crisis cars poor design, I only called them easy as shit to design because they had retarded amounts of resources to work with, and I said that Detroit failed to adjust their designs for the crisis in time because they never learned to how make a design within tight restrictions.

thats the reason why these cars were great, all the equipement you need and more, great interior design, lots of room, big engines, great sound.... NO FUCKING COMPROMISES and in our beloved yurope its complete opposite all you see are diquisting ugly and overall shitboxes

I don't care how much your suckle on your old barges or insult the rest of the world because reality has proven that these designs weren't fit for existence in the real world. Also your little worry free bubble will never return.

You seem jealous
>you'll never own a V8

so what if designs weren't fit for existence, if people like me don't make threads why almost all japanese cars sucks or european cars except german of course you don't need to talk shit about cars you don't like ( probably becouse your car just has to be fuel efficient and corner and thats all you care about and still you forgot to compare barges to european daily driven cars and see how barges were ahead of it's time and 1000 times more advanced than japanese crap)

>barges were ahead of it's time

pre oil crisis American cars are still shit

theyre all pretty terrible cars in about every way

too bad you don't know much about cars

post some arguments then

poor build quality and inefficient engines is all that really needs to be said

you are wrong about build quality, to bad you can't appreciate big v8s i guess some people just can't afford gas and consider cars only a tool to get from point A to point B

Im not wrong about the build quality at all

they were shoddily built pieces of shit

I get that you have never been around the cars but I have, they arent good

big v8s that make shit power and sound like theyre barely running arent worth appreciating lol

You're comparing a fox body mustang and a turd gem camaro to a Porsche. You must be literally retarded but I'll play ball. Compare that Porsche to an American car it actually competed with in both price and role.

1990 porche 928 GT: 5.0 L V8, 326HP
1990 corvette ZR-1: 5.7L V8 375HP

>competed with in both price and role.

a big Luxury GT car does not compete with a Corvette

the 911 is a fair comparison

despite less power its quicker in a straight line while being much more comfortable than a ZR1

If a big luxury gt car doesn't compete with a corvette it REALLY doesn't compete with a mustang or camaro

ZR1 is definetly more comftortable, it handlesbetter too

Post examples, otherwise you're just making statements.