Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Dave
“All of a sudden” in reality means a twenty to thirty year time frame. When the first anti-pollution regs came out in 1973, car performance fell off the cliff. It began to come back in the mid 90s and had caught up to 1970 levels by the early twenty-first century.
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Maybe, if you're just looking at what came out of Detroit. I wouldn't know about that, 'cause after that Vega I wasn't real interested in buying an American car. But I had a couple of 80-84 Subarus: flat 4, not a lot of extra emissions equipment, and they got decent mpg considering the amount of time I spent in 4WD, driving up mountains in snowstorms - and pulling the occasional SUV out of snowbanks :-). The '85 CRX I had likewise didn't have a lot of power-robbing extras, and would get 40+ mpg even with the way I drove it. So it seems the Japanese, at least, managed to get their emissions control act together in fairly short order.