- It's the international crisis
that changed the way Americans lived their lives.
It's the reason people lined up
for miles in front of gas stations
literally fist fighting each other in the streets
just for a drop of that sweet, sweet Texas tea.
What caused it?
How did it change cars forever?
You've asked for it a million freaking times,
we're finally giving it to you.
This is everything you need to know
to get up to speed on the gas crisis.
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- This episode's gonna be a little different.
There are no sick cars, no heroes, no obvious villains,
but this story is just as important,
maybe even more important for the history
of cars than any story we've ever done before.
But before we get into it, hit that like button,
because it really helps us out with the algorithm.
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The early 70s were pretty good times
for American car companies and the drivers who loved them.
Cars were big.
V8s were big.
Gas was cheap, like 36 cents a gallon cheap.
So cheap.
Everyone had muscle cars and no one gave a (bleep)
it was great.
It would've been an awesome time to be alive,
but good things don't last forever.
And soon there were EPA restrictions
in place that sucked the power straight from the muscles.
The solution American car companies came up with was simple.
Just make the engines bigger, dumbass.
So that's what they did, but it didn't really work.
All right.
This is a 1973 Cadillac El Dorado,
and as an eight liter V8 and it takes all eight
of those liters to make 235 horsepower.
That's like almost three Faygos
and that's a pitiful amount of power.
Now, as you can imagine,
Detroit's inefficient power creators
weren't exactly fuel efficient either.
That caddy got eight miles to the gallon.
That's one mile per liter,
but because the US still produced a ton of oil
at the time and gas was, say it with me again, cheap,
it didn't really matter.
Until it did, in the 1950s,
the government put restrictions on the amount
of foreign oil that could be imported into the US.
Restrictions that helped promote Texas oil.
Thanks Eisenhower.
Think you're cool, because you're on a fricking dime?
Yeah, right. Not fooling me, pal.
By 1970 uncle Sam's oil fields hit peak production.
What does that mean?
Well, they produced the most that they ever would
and it was all downhill from there.
America's domestic oil supply was in decline.
Luckily there were plenty of other countries that had
a bunch of oil and they were more than willing
to sell it for cheap.
And because of that,
Americans didn't notice any difference at all.
And oil demand kept climbing and climbing and climbing.
Now thanks to the US's oil price controls,
gas prices couldn't go up, which is why that no one really
noticed that America's oil supply was already dwindling.
That demand just kept rising
and much like my take on bananas foster,
this was a recipe for disaster.
You can't sub beer for brandy.
It started with a minor fuel shortage in 1971
then another one in 1972.
And that was enough to convince everyone's favorite
huge piece of (bleep) Nixon
that it was time to ditch the oil
import quotas put in place by Eisenhower years earlier.
Why not import what we need from our buddies in places
like Egypt?
Syria?
Saudi Arabia?
They have gobs of oil and they like money.
We have gobs of money and we like oil.
It's a match made in heaven,
the middle east plus America forever.
Things were going great for a while.
But then something happened in 1973 that
poured sugar in the gas tank of this relationship.
And that sugar was the Yom-Kippur war.
Now to make a long, complicated story short and car focused,
the US and some Western European countries came
to Israel's aid during the Yom-Kippur war.
A ceasefire was eventually signed
but the oil producing countries weren't happy
about which side the Americans chose.
They were all members of
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC.
You ever heard of it? I'm sure you have.
And they decided to band together to teach America
and its European cronies a lesson
by setting up an oil embargo to cut off the oil supply.
Now this was bad news
for people who guzzled gas like
a freshman guzzles Natty Light.
Suddenly the massive American cars of the 70s,
the cars that people relied on to get
to work or go to school or pick up a box of puppies,
they were way less practical than before.
It was a brutal reality check.
People actually had to choose
between going to work or picking up a box of puppies.
That's a decision that
no American should ever have to face.
Gas prices went up,
nearly doubling and the Middle East proved their point.
They won the breakup.
They're already dating someone else.
Europe fared a bit better than the US
probably because they already had a bunch of tiny cars.
Now if your mini Cooper gets 30 miles
to the gallon going from $2.50 a gallon
to $4.50 a gallon sucks, but you can deal with it, right?
But if you're floating back
and forth to work in an eight mile per gallon
land yacht with a 27 gallon tank,
you are going to feel that price hike.
And even if you could afford it
there just literally wasn't enough gas to go around.
Now remember 2020, the summer of no toilet paper?
Well that same sort of panic happened,
instead of at the dumps, it was at the pumps.
Now as you can imagine, there were some pretty
sketchy scenes going down around gas stations in 1973.
There were lines for gas, lines went on for multiple blocks.
People would wait in them for hours
only for the gas station to run dry.
There was a lot of yelling
and a lot of straight up street fights,
just like with the toilet paper in 2020,
it was not humanity at its best.
OPEC's embargo didn't last for very long.
They lifted it in early 1974
but the fresh horrors America experienced
at the gas pumps had changed the country.
The US government saw how crazy things got when OPEC
turned off the taps, to them,
going back to chugging gas like nothing ever happened
seemed like a national security risk.
And to the government's credit,
they decided to actually do something about it.
They formed CAFE, and no I'm not talking
about place where open mics live and die.
Talking about the corporate average fuel economy.
Something that played a big part
in the changes to the American auto industry
over the next dozen years.
In 1973 the average American car
got a whopping 11.9 miles per gallon, through CAFE,
the government mandated that the average
had to rise to at least 27.5 miles per gallon
by 1985, seems like a good idea,
but American car companies obviously were not stoked.
But still they figured 10 years,
that's a pretty long time,
and they had a lot of money,
money that had helped sway politicians in the past.
And as long as they started to work
on making their cars more efficient
making it look like they were doing their best,
they wouldn't get in trouble.
Plus they were pretty confident
the new standard wouldn't last long.
They were wrong, dead wrong.
Average fuel economy drifted up from 11.9 miles
per gallon in 1973 to 14 miles per gallon in '77.
So, you know, baby steps.
As long as another gas crisis didn't come along
everything would be fine, right?
But the eyes
of the American public have been pried open
much like that scene from "A Clockwork Orange"
when the guy's eyes are pried open
and all of a sudden their crazy neighbors
with those fuel efficient Datsuns, Volkswagens,
and Hondas didn't look so crazy.
Speaking of Honda, they brought the Civic
to the American market at the perfect time.
1972, it was called the CVCC back then
but pretty much everything that has always
made the Civic a Civic, great little car,
this thing had it.
It was practical. It was well built.
It was fun to drive
and affordable in the wake of the gas crisis,
thousands of Americans had their first experience
driving cars like this, and they liked it.
They weren't the big rolling couches with gobs
of V8 torque that they were used to
but they had their own unique charm.
They were nimble, zippy,
and fun to drive in a different way.
They were also much better on gas.
Now that's not to say that American car makers
didn't build any cars to compete with the Datsuns
and the Volkswagens that were already popular in the states.
They'd rolled out their versions
of these compact fuel zippers a few years before
with amazing automobiles like the Ford Pinto,
the Chevy Vega and the AMC Gremlin,
they were just kind of really crappy.
The Ford Pinto was infamous for exploding
in rear-end collisions,
which is obviously not a huge selling point.
The Chevy Vega's engine overheated super easily
and was plagued with recalls, and the AMC Gremlin,
Well, it did have a denim interior so that's (bleep) cool.
To oversimplify it, besides denim,
the engineering just wasn't there like it was
with the foreign competition.
So the cars the American companies designed
to ward off the rising popularity of import subcompacts
ended up making the import subcompacts more popular.
So if, for example, Ford had really nailed the Pinto,
or if it just didn't explode so much,
American roadways might look a lot different today.
Now we're gonna jump to 1979.
(upbeat music)
The phrase gas crisis has mostly faded into memory.
OPEC sourced oil is used
around the globe and it's pretty cheap.
Everything's good.
Cars are generally getting better thanks
to the widespread adoption
of newer tech like fuel injection.
American companies are still behind the curve,
but with gas prices cheap again,
there wasn't a serious fire under their butts
like there was in 1973, things had cooled down,
and they'd settled back into the road hogging
V8 comfort zone.
And then something happened to reignite
that butt fire, revolution in Iran.
oil production plummeted,
crude oil prices more than doubled,
Americans were back to honking,
back to yelling and gas lines.
They were fighting in the streets.
- And I'm out of gas. Dead out.
- This second oil crisis wasn't as long and gnarly
as the first, but it was a big
(bleep) just got real moment for American car companies.
They were still taking week little baby steps thinking 1985
was a long time away and they had plenty of time
to get a handle on the CAFE standards.
This smaller crisis woke them up.
Suddenly everybody was scrambling to come up
with something that could deliver a comfy
powerful American car experience
that was also good on gas and didn't explode at all.
This was their time to shine
as in punch themselves in the face super hard again
and give themselves a shiner
which is what your grandpa called a black eye.
All right, let me give you an example.
GM thought that maybe they could use a diesel engine to
get better fuel economy but they didn't wanna spend any
money actually developing a new diesel engine
from the ground up.
So they basically converted an Oldsmobile 350 gasoline V8
into a diesel and called it a day.
The result was probably the worst engine in GM history
but when it came out,
the American public they were excited.
Here is an Oldsmobile '88,
a traditional full size American stand.
And it got 30 miles to the gallon?
Sure they we were slow as hell, but guys,
they were big, comfy.
- 0 It's like sitting in our living room.
- And American.
So they sold much better than they should have.
Then they started failing in massive numbers.
It was such a huge problem that car historians
say the diesel V8 is partially responsible for
GM getting rid of Oldsmobile in 2004.
Back in Detroit, 1979,
the Cadillac guys heard about Oldsmobile's diesel V8.
And they were like, hold my steak.
They whipped up a V8 that could transform itself
into a fuel sipping four cylinder on the freeway.
A four cylinder dragging four extra pistons
of dead weight around in the engine block.
Now as you can imagine
that didn't work super great either, but to be fair,
lots of modern cars use cylinder deactivation
to increase gas mileage, but they have the advantage
of 40 years of engineering and tech advancement.
Now it's hard to be ahead of your time.
Believe me, I know.
Fast forward to now,
the American cars of today are leagues better
than they were in the 1970s.
In fact, they're generally pretty really good
but it pretty much took the big three
the whole 80s and a good chunk of and 90s
and a lot of 2000s to get their crap together.
And in the meantime, foreign car companies who
already had their game dialed in tight nabbed
an increasingly large chunk of the American car sales pie.
And it's still going on today.
Just last year in 2021,
Toyota became the number one selling car brand in America.
Now there is no way that that would've happened
if not for the gas crisis.
Like I said, it changed cars forever.
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of "Up To Speed" and everything else on Donut Media.
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