I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE. I may have to give up my membership in the Democratic Party to say this, but I will no longer live with the secret shame: I think the pre-Oil Crisis cars made by American car companies up until the late 1970s were just wonderful.
I know — they were almost 20 feet long and thus impossible to park in a place like San Francisco; they tipped the scales at almost 3 tons and had the aerodynamic qualities of a brick, so city gas mileage was usually in the high single-digits, and highway mileage not much better; they spewed pollution so profusely that in my neighborhood in Richmond, California I was sometimes unable to see the El Cerrito Hills that were perhaps a mile away; and in the days before airbags and crumple zones, they were not a good place to be in a car accident. So I understand their disadvantages.
And yet … I still remember them fondly.
Part of this has to do with my memories of the car my parents owned. It was not one of the cars I describe above. In 1969, my Dad bought a brand-new Volkswagen Microbus, and he spent the next 10 years fixing it. He’d previously owned a ’59 Beetle that was a great little car, and so he felt a certain loyalty to the brand. My Dad was an engineer, so I suspect an additional factor was the reputation German cars had for being well-engineered.
The’69 VW Bus was not, however, a prime example of German engineering prowess. For one thing, it had a 57-horsepower engine that was barely adequate to push the roughly 3,500 pounds of bus (with passengers) up to the minimum speeds on some of the interstates of the day. Trying to run an air conditioner on such a low-power engine would probably have dropped the top speed to 45 mph. The additional weight of sound-deadening materials was likewise an unrealistic luxury in such an underpowered vehicle.
This meant that a 250 mile trip down to my uncle’s ranch near Santa Maria on the Central Coast of California was a lengthy ordeal. If the temperature on the way was above 85 or so, the interior of our VW began to resemble one of those tin boxes they used to put Southern prisoners in when they got mouthy with the guards. We had the additional burden of having to practically scream to be heard over the noise of an engine that was wailing at its limits to propel us at speeds in excess of — well, 50 miles per hour. At best. Down a hill.
Sometime in the early- to mid-Seventies, my family took a camping trip to Oregon in that car. My memories of that trip are mostly fond — it was the last family trip before my late older brother had the accident that left him paralyzed, and we saw some truly stunning scenery as we traveled through the Siskiyou Mountains and up the Willamette Valley. But I also have a vivid memory of being on Interstate 5 somewhere south of Redding on a blistering August afternoon, sitting in a puddle of my own sweat on rubber seats and seeing a Mercury Colony Park station wagon glide by us at 75 mph. The Mercury’s windows were up, and the family inside was basking blissfully (or so I imagined) in the chill of its air-conditioned interior. I would have given my favorite bike and a year’s worth of desserts to travel in that kind of comfort.
Another part of my memories of the road behemoths of 40 years ago is a kind of middle-age nostalgia common in men my age. There is a strong temptation in midlife-beset men to want to make the world a museum of their youth, and I am not immune to this.
It is hard to convey, at this remove, how completely American car companies used to dominate the American market. As recently as the mid-70s General Motors commanded almost 50 percent of the American car market, and Ford and Chrysler had most of the rest. Before the Arab oil embargo of 1974, the formula for winning the American market was virtually unbeatable: Build It Bigger. The 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, for example, was 5 feet longer than a top-of-the-line Mercedes of that era, had an interior big enough to stage an opera, and had a trunk vast enough to allow a mafia hitman to clean up after a very busy night.
And those cars were made by well-paid union workers, whose wages gave them a ticket into the the solid middle class.
I miss those days. God help me, I do miss them so.