- This is a 1969 Mustang,
and this is a 1974 Mustang.
What the heck happened?
Well, emissions standards happened.
New emissions regulations put in place during the 70s meant
that car makers had to cut down
on their ozone-depleting exhaust by 90%.
And when that happens, you go from buff pony
to My Little Pony, but the Fox Body,
it got the Mustang back on track.
It showed the world
that you can make an all-American V8 sports car
while still keeping the EPA happy.
So how did Ford do it?
How did they bring back the 5.0 badge,
revive the Mustang, and keep the EPA off their backs?
Well, today, we're gonna look at three ways
Ford re-engineered their 'Stang,
and then how they used 70s computer technology
and then how they use 70s computer technology
in the fabled 5.0, and lastly, the misunderstood
and underappreciated catalytic converters.
Don't cut those things off.
They're actually pretty good.
Let's go.
(lively electronic music)
When you think about Fox Bodies, chances are,
When you think about Fox bodies, chances are,
you're not thinking about aerodynamics.
You think of in-traffic burnies,
But in the late 70s, Ford was starting to experiment
But in the late 70s, Ford were starting to experiment
with aerodynamics in their production cars.
And the reason was, well, they had to.
When you're forced to cut emissions, there's only a few ways
that you can tackle that problem,
and one of the more obvious ones is, well,
you make your car more aerodynamic.
Fox Body was based on the platform of the Ford Fairmont,
but with a wheelbase that was five inches smaller
to make the car more nimble, and more importantly, lighter.
Less weight means you burn less fuel to move it,
which means less emission.
Not only did they make the car lighter,
they slanted the front end backwards
and raised the cowl point of the hood
to give it more of a wedge front end.
And that shape allowed the car
to cut through the air better.
And the purpose of all that was to have a drag coefficient
that was as low as possible.
Now drag coefficient is a measurement of how much an object
or shape is affected by fluid, and like all great,
dimensionless numbers, we can actually calculate it
using the drag equation.
I know school's out for summer, but stay with me, okay?
The area is the surface area of the front of the car.
The velocity is the speed at which you're moving at,
and the fluid density in this case is the density of air.
That's the fluid we're moving through.
We're moving through air.
You might not know that.
We're in a, we're on a bunch of air right now.
So, if we were in a controlled environment, like, say,
a wind tunnel, we could control the air density
and the airspeed and we can measure the drag force.
That's the force pushing on the car due to air.
And once we have all those numbers,
we can plug it into our equation
and determine the car's drag coefficient.
Now, what is all any of that science, math stuff
have to do with fuel economy?
Well, the more drag there is,
the harder the engine has to work.
Pretty obvious, right?
And as you accelerate, the air velocity
hitting that car increases, and the force pushing on the car
gets exponentially stronger.
Look at our drag equation.
The V in our equation is squared.
That means exponential, so even a little change
in the shape of a car can have a significant effect on drag.
We've all stuck our hand out the window
to feel the air pushing our hand back, right?
You feel more force on your hand when it's shaped like this
rather like this, so you have a more aerodynamic car,
the engine has to do less work,
and that means it uses less fuel.
Now in the case of the Fox Body, its new shape,
with its bucketed headlights inside that slanted grille,
quarter window louvers, and that wedge-style hood
got its drag coefficient down to 0.44,
which doesn't sound all that great,
but at the time, that was the lowest drag
of any American Ford car ever built.
Now the Fox Body actually had the same drag coefficient
as Ford's Le Mans-winning GT40.
That's pretty cool because if you were
to compare these two cars, nine out of 10 people
would think the GT40 would have a lower coefficient of drag,
but now, maybe you have one out of 10 person
who knows that they're the same.
So that's the first way
Ford tackled some of these emissions problem,
making the 'Stang slide through the air with curves on it.
The next was some fancy tech
called electronic fuel injection.
(lively instrumental music)
The 1986 Ford Mustang GT
was the first-ever fuel injected Mustang.
It used a computer that controlled the amount of fuel
being sprayed into the injectors.
That's what electronic fuel injection is.
There's not a car out there today being manufactured in 2020
that I know of that doesn't use EFI.
If you know one, throw it down in the comments below,
but before we can really explain
how Ford engineered EFI to the Fox Body,
we have to look at what they were doing before.
They were using carburetors.
(gasps) No.
Up until 1985, Ford had been using carbs
for getting fuel and air into the Mustang cylinders,
and they had this engine, you may have heard of it,
I don't know if you have, I have.
It's called the 5.0, and it was the engine
that was going to bring back the horsepower
into their pony car.
Problem was, their existing carburetor setup
wasn't cutting it.
Ford tuned the engine normally, it would be so bad
on gas mileage, that you get hit with this gas guzzler tax,
that would be way too expensive to sell, and then,
if they de-tuned the engine too much, the car made no power.
So what's going on with this carb and why is it so finny?
Now a carburetor is really just a fancy tube,
and I'm greatly oversimplifying it,
but it makes understanding how they work pretty easy.
Now, there's a plate inside that tube,
it's called a throttle plate, and that controls the amount
of airflow through the tube.
Now the shape of the tube doesn't have a constant diameter
across its length.
It actually narrows towards the center,
and then opens back up.
It's called the venturi, and the reason there's a venturi
is because when air flows through it,
it creates a difference in pressure, a vacuum.
And you might have heard of the Bernoulli principle,
and the Venturi effect.
This is what's allowing a car to work.
Air flows down the tube, creating a vacuum,
and it's this vacuum that draws in fuel
through various holes, also called jets, inside the car.
And adjustments can be made on the carburetor
to fine-tune how much fuel gets mixed in
with that incoming air.
It's really an ingenious process, but here's the problem.
While a manufacturer or auto shop mechanic, or your dad,
can adjust a carburetor very precisely, they can't adjust it
while you're driving, and things like the engine RPM,
the throttle position, the conditions of the piston rings,
and yes, even the type of exhaust you're running,
affect the carb jetty, and not only that,
carbs can't take into account changes
in air or fuel temperature or atmospheric pressure,
so anything outside of perfect conditions,
a carb will be delivering a less than perfect mixture.
So the Ford engineers had reached their limit
on how much power they can make and how much emissions
they can control with the carbureted system
in the 5.0 engine.
So what did they do?
Well, the engineers decided to use this technology
called electronic fuel injection.
Boom, boom, boom.
(lively instrumental music)
Now with EFI, it is just a nozzle spraying fuel
when a frigging computer robot tells it to,
and it has the ability to change fuel volume on the fly,
so in 1986, Ford developed their first fuel injection system
for the Fox Body, the SEFI system,
which is sequential electronic multiport fuel injection.
They missed a couple letters in there,
but engineers aren't good at naming stuff,
and they're really not good at engineering stuff
a lot of the time, too.
As an engineer, you can say that.
We can make fun of ourselves.
And the brains of this SEFI used in the Fox Body
was a very sophisticated computer, at the time,
called the ECC-IV, Electronic Engine Control-IV.
It was their fourth version.
This thing was built by Intel using a 16-bit processor
with only one kilobyte of RAM.
Okay, say, your computer has an eight-gigabyte ram stick.
That's eight million times more RAM in that little stick
than this whole entire computer setup had.
It's just, you know, so that computer
controlled eight injectors, one per cylinder,
and the distributor that fed ignition to the 5.0.
So, how does that work?
Well, stored on that massive amount of memory is a fuel map,
and a fuel map is just a pre-programmed table
that engineers write based on various sensor data.
And it looks something like this.
Now you have your engine RPM, and you have your engine load,
and for each point, you have the amount of fuel
that the injector is squirting in.
So this fancy-dancy computer uses that map
to tell it how much fuel and for how long the injector
needs to squirt, and with sequential fuel injection,
it fires each injector separately,
just as the intake valve is opening.
And this helps EFI give your engine only the fuel it needs
when it needs it.
That means no fuel is wasted, and that means the car
can be more fuel-efficient, you get better emissions,
and in fact, you get better performance.
And fun fact, that efficiency
actually doesn't have to mean better miles per gallon,
and in fact, the Mustang was so efficient
that Ford sacrificed a little bit of that efficiency
to dump more fuel into the engine, along with more air,
and as we all know by now, more air plus more fuel equals...
- You goddamn right, more power!
- So like any new tech, the initial reaction
to EFI was not good.
Car guys, they're like, dude, electronics?
I don't know, am I gonna be able to modify my engine?
Obviously, they were wrong.
The Fox Body's EFI showed that making power using fuel maps
and computers would be the way of the future.
Frigging Fox Body, man.
So the Fox Body brought the pony car into the modern era,
with aero and electronic fuel injection,
but those two things don't cut down on 90% of emissions.
To do that, you need not only engineering,
you need chemistry.
(relaxing instrumental music)
Luckily, there was this hack, this magic box,
that scrubbed emissions, called a catalytic converter.
All cars made after 1975 were required to have them.
Inside a catalytic converter is a honeycomb of material
coated in rare metals that neutralize those exhaust gas.
And when heated, these elements inside become a catalyst,
and they speed up chemical reactions
of the oxidizing exhaust gases,
converting that gas to something less harmful.
Hence, the name, catalytic converter.
So how's it do this?
Well, it's a two-step process.
So those rare metals inside the cat
are platinum, palladium, and rhodium.
Now first, platinum and rhodium
pull oxygen off nitrogen oxides, that's the bad emissions,
so that nitrogen can be shot out as N2.
That's a harmless gas that makes up 78% of our air.
Now the second step palladium, is used
to take that free oxygen pulled off from the first step
and help bind it with carbon monoxide.
Again, carbon monoxide, another bad emission, to form CO2.
Not only that, it also helps oxidize
any unburned hydrocarbons
by throwing a bunch of oxygen on it.
That's what oxidized means.
Now the Fox Body fans know if you want more power
out of your 'Stang, you should cut those cats off.
The cat is a bottleneck on the exhaust flow.
The more the emissions need to be reduced,
the tighter that honeycomb needs to be,
and the more back pressure gets built up
between your cat and your engine.
Your engine needs clean air in the cylinders,
and if exhaust gases are backing it up,
it means the exhaust gases can't escape quickly enough
to make more room for more clean air.
Just, everything gets bound up in there.
But here's the thing.
Don't go cutting off your catalytic converter
'cause this was in the 70s, so nowadays,
cats are super efficient, and actually,
they can help give you more power.
And really, we don't want all those harmful gases
getting spewed out into the air.
Think about your kids.
You don't want them breathing that stuff in, it's nasty.
The 1986 Fox Body may have made less power on paper
than a standard GT of 1969, but it has the same zero to 60,
had a higher theoretical top speed,
and it got 18 miles per gallon.
It hit that sweet spot of power, cost, and fuel efficiency,
that Ford actually still targets in their GT today.
Now the Fox Body 'Stang, it wasn't the first car with cats,
or that used aerodynamics, or electronic fuel injection,
but because Ford changed the muscle car formula
and added these innovations to their halo pony car,
it's probably the reason the Mustang is still around today.
Heck, they have a huge cult following.
There's a reason for that.
I want to be a part of that Fox Body cult.
I know James wants to be.
He wants a Calypto Green Fox Body.
I also want a Calypto Green Fox Body.
So if you know where there's two Calypto Green Fox Bodies,
be in the comments, tell me where I can find it.
I want to be in the comments for the first hour.
So come hang out with me.
Hit me up on Instagram @jeremiahburton.
Hit us up on Donut, @donutmedia.
Bye for now.