Don’t blame the (1970s) engineers

Reading a brief wiki article, I came across the phrase “emissions performance model,” and it reminded me of the Detroit automakers’ attempts in the 1970s to conform to the new emissions standards. In this industry and hobby, people tend to demonize emissions standards much less than they used to, but there was a time when it was all seen as pointless government power-grabbing. In neuropsychobiology, I did have the opportunity to read more about the effects of some of the pollutants we so casually threw into the air back then - lead in particular - and I was much less inclined to say “let’s just take off the cat and tear out these hoses” than some people were. To put it bluntly, all that pollution was killing people, and causing kids to grow up mentally retarded or, at least, not living up to their full potential. The costs of the pollution outweighed the costs of reducing it at that point. 

There’s no doubt that performance went out when emissions standards came in, and that was only partly because they pulled performance engineers into emissions work. The company - and Detroit in general - lost their fascination with performance when it backfired on them. The E-bodies might be acclaimed today, with good reason, but they were most likely a financial disaster; sales were very light considering they had unique chassis and a baffling variety of powertrain options, and the money spent on them, had it gone into customizing a Simca or Rootes car for the American market, may well have saved Chrysler from its flirtation with bankruptcy. While the company survived, what it lost cannot be understated: its European subsidiaries, the highly profitable Simca and the loss leader Rootes Group; a defense division that would have profited immensely from the coming wars, while quite probably saving many billions in taxpayer dollars; all sorts of research that had to be cancelled; substantial holdings in Mitsubishi; and, when it comes down to it, a sense of permanence. (To be fair, the company also put money into full-sized cars just before their sales plummeted; it was most likely the combination that caused the pain rather than one or the other.) 

Chrysler was making a bewildering variety of cars, with hundreds of thousands of possible combinations. Dealers had to contend with models where every single car could be a one-off combination, had everyone colluded to check the appropriate boxes. The assembly plants were overwhelmed with options and vehicles could end up with the wrong trim, mismatching mirrors, and all sorts of more serious problems. With insurance costs shooting up for these cars, the market was drying up; and had it not been for emissions, they would certainly have been killed just two year later by the Arab oil embargo, which made gasoline a scarce commodity and pushed Americans into smaller cars with smaller engines. Chrysler was in the awkward position of having a popular line of high-mileage cars - in France. Not until the Horizon would the company make a serious effort to customize a European vehicle for American use, and that was a runaway success. 

In any case, there came a point when Chrysler realized that they could not go on making a series of customized vehicles for an ever-shrinking market. They dropped the enormously expensive 426 Hemi engine, which required substantial work to vehicles’ other systems as well, and, I would suspect, were never profitable except if you added in their marketing value - which was, and is, substantial. They dropped the Six-Packs, the high-performance 340, and slowly started to detune their vehicles for emissions and gas mileage. 

The engineers were exceptionally talented, but their hands were tied. The company refused to spend more, unlike Japanese and German automakers. Weight reductions were found across the board, but the level of commitment that had been given to performance was never given to economy or emissions reduction. The Feather Duster was as far as they went in economy - unless you count the creation of the new four-cylinder cars. There were certainly ways they could have kept their performance while cutting pollution dramatically - fuel injection being the main one. Unfortunately, those were expensive; fuel injectors added around $100 to the price of the car, over carburetors, according to engineers we’ve spoken to. The executives refused to go that far, maybe because they resented the government intrusion into their business, maybe because they couldn’t justify it when times were tough, maybe … well, there could be any number of reasons. In the end, though, the imports pushed Detroit to use more expensive technology, with terrible results. Had they led the world, as they had done in the past - electronic fuel injection was first used by Chrysler in 1958! - they might well have kept America’s hearts and minds.

Because they were constrained by costs, they came up with a work of genius - the Lean Burn system. Today derided because of its failures, the fact is that the system was incredibly clever. It took the humble carburetor and, denied the sensors used in later years, managed to use cheaper sensors and vacuum signals to convey information to a central spark control computer. The Lean Burn system was a Band-Aid when a transplant was needed, but it was still a work of genius, because it fit into the budget. Perhaps implementation could have been better but Chrysler engineers did learn from it and put easy diagnostics into their fuel injection systems, when they finally arrived. Meanwhile, over at Volkswagen, multiple port fuel injection was built into the Rabbit as early as 1979, where it co-existed with a primitive points-based ignition system, allowing Rabbits to avoid catalytic converters and ace emissions tests.

The Chrysler engineers were quite probably capable of using electronic fuel injection earlier than that, having been the first to mass produce electronic ignition systems, the first to put on-board travel computers into their cars (with the Horizon), and the company that was building the reliable rockets used by NASA. However, it wasn’t until 1981 that the Imperial first got fuel injection, and then there was a long pause until the four-cylinder engines got it. By then the Japanese had established a reputation as the leaders in technology, and Detroit had gotten a reputation for being dinosaurs.

Fortunately, times have changed. Chrysler shot ahead in the 1990s, albeit still under the thumb of relentless blind cost-cutting (hence the Neon head gasket failures); and then after a decade of darkness, the company appears to be ready to race forward again. Yes, heavy cost controls are in place, but in the final years of Daimler control, Dieter Zetsche turned the fist upside down and gave the thumbs up to innovative technology that had been turned down as being too expensive for inferior brands. It’s going to be an exciting time… but our ride on the roller coaster isn’t over.