The Day Horsepower Died

This story first appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.

It was 51 years ago on a busy Saturday in September that the pumps went dry at Barker’s Texaco on East Independence Boulevard in Charlotte, North Carolina. Owner Aaron Barker scrawled a sign that read “Out of Gas,” hung it in the window, and sat down at the counter. Over the next two days, during which the station would normally have rung up around $1600 in sales, he took in just $82. “You work yourself to death for years, both for yourself and for Texaco,” Barker said at the time. “Then they’re yelling ‘allocation, allocation’ and the next thing you know, you have no product.”

During the previous two decades, Americans had grown accustomed to driving big, powerful cars fueled by cheap gas, the spoils of victories in two successive world wars and the subsequent creation of the world’s greatest economy built on a bedrock of democratic principles. But in the fall of 1973, it all seemed to be coming apart. The cheap gas became scarce, the greatest economy in the world was spiraling into an inflationary malaise, and even the democratic principles were straining under the weight of the Watergate scandal.

It was, as Dickens might have observed, the worst of times. However, when humans have come face to face with the same imperative as nature’s other creatures—that is, to evolve or go extinct—we have invariably chosen the former. Though nobody knew it at the time, when the tunnel seemed to lead only into darkness, the automobile’s future was bright, and it was exactly the oil crisis that made it so.

The one-minute sketch of American history has the big-block, Hemi, Six Pack, Cobra Jet 1960s crashing headlong into the Arab oil embargoes of the dreary 1970s. It’s not untrue, but it misses a lot of the story. In fact, warnings of an impending energy crunch were sounded as far back as when the Beach Boys cut their first album, Surfin’ Safari, in 1962. America’s oil consumption was doubling roughly every 10 years at that point and nobody seemed to care. “Left to our present profligate ways,” observed the syndicated columnist William Hines in 1966, “we may very well doom our remote decedents to a misery that would probably be avoidable with a little sensible work and planning now.”

By the dawn of the 1970s, when an America representing less than 6 percent of the world’s population was consuming 60 percent of its oil, the “sensible work and planning” had yet to happen. Brownouts from electricity shortages had already struck major cities in the summer of ’69, and coal and natural gas producers were warning of dangerously tight supplies. Meanwhile, it was generally believed that the oil industry would soon reach the production limit possible with the known reserves—the so-called peak oil theory—so it was restrained by regulation in how much it could extract from government-leased land.

At the same time, a burgeoning environmental movement, spurred by a massive oil spill off California’s Santa Barbara coast in January 1969, was stiffening public opposition to expanded oil production, crystallizing in a two-year moratorium on offshore drilling. Nuclear power, seen as the great savior in the 1950s and early ’60s, also landed in the environmentalists’ crosshairs, and new atomic projects became bogged down in regulation and community resistance.

With the Alaskan pipeline still in its planning stages, and with spot gasoline shortages already cropping up in some places because of a regulated distribution system that could not respond well to shortfalls in local supplies, the administration of Richard Nixon looked overseas to fill an increasingly ominous gap between supply and demand. However, the nations that in 1960 banded together in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and one of its later off-shoots, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), began to see their sticky black blessings as not just an economic windfall but as a powerful political cudgel against the West.

Thus, America’s energy situation was already a teetering house of cards in October 1973 on the eve of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement known as Yom Kippur. On October 6, as Jews around the world went to synagogue and headlines trumpeted the latest legal travails of Nixon’s embattled vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack against Israel. A desperate three-week struggle ensued that forced both the United States and the Soviet Union to rush military aid to their respective allies, and the moment for the oil cartels had arrived.

On October 19, the members of OAPEC shut off oil shipments to the United States while also cutting production, causing the worldwide price of oil to spike. Although imported oil only represented 10 percent of U.S. consumption—and not all of it came from the Middle East—the embargo was enough to cause havoc in the nation’s already-strained supply. The price of gas practically doubled overnight in some places, from the 35 cents a gallon it had been more or less since the 1950s to, in some places, as high as 80 cents. As we know from recent post-pandemic experience, rising gas prices force up the price of everything. Nationwide, for example, the price of milk went up by a third that October. And with winter approaching, America suddenly faced a daunting choice between having enough gasoline for its cars or enough heating oil for its homes.

Extreme measures were explored, some significant, such as Nixon calling on gas stations to voluntarily close on Sundays, thereby discouraging unnecessary pleasure driving (it was noted sourly that the flotilla of helicopters bearing Nixon and his entourage to a Thanksgiving retreat at Camp David burned 600 gallons of fuel, in addition to the gas needed to move his multiple limousines there). Some acts were obviously performative, such as Republican Connecticut Governor Thomas J. Meskill announcing that the state would sell off its own fleet of Cadillac limos. World War II–style gasoline rationing was proposed—and it was reported that New York’s mafia crime families were already lining up printing presses to produce counterfeit ration coupons.

Out on the farm, ancient wood-burning steam engines were pressed back into service. Two partners in a restaurant near Indianapolis started commuting in a 1911 Oldsmobile because it reputedly got 50 mpg. Meanwhile, in Olympia, Washington, the Boone Ford Town dealership advertised a deal on auxiliary fuel tanks for your pickup, $90 for a 16-gallon tank or $155 for a 32-gallon, because “there’s no telling where you could be stranded someplace where all the gas stations are closed.”

Fingers pointed in every direction. The government blamed the eight largest oil companies in the U.S. for monopolizing the industry and manipulating prices. Oil companies blamed government regulators as well as the environmental movement for curtailing drilling (does any of this sound familiar?). Florida official Robert Vernon, head of the state’s Interior Resources Department, called out Detroit for building high-horsepower gas guzzlers. “Those monsters people travel to and from work in ought to be eliminated,” he fumed to reporters.

It must be said Vernon had a point. The newly created Environmental Protection Agency noted that most of the new 1974-model cars were only good for mid-teens fuel economy, specifically citing the dismal performance of certain models in urban driving: Ford’s Torino six-cylinder, 14 mpg; AMC’s Gremlin six-cylinder, 16 mpg; Cadillac’s DeVille with the 472 V-8, 9 mpg—good for a mere 247 miles on its 27.5-gallon tank. Even new fuel misers such as the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega, two of Detroit’s subcompact answers to the imports, were said to achieve just 20 to 23 mpg. Congress subsequently passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, establishing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard that to this day requires automakers to meet ever-escalating mileage standards or face huge fines.

Horsepower was entirely forgotten, replaced in car adverts by fuel economy as the single most important vehicle stat after its price. Another victim of both inflation and the energy crisis was the convertible. In 1965, Detroit’s three native carmakers plus AMC offered 57 convertible models that garnered more than a half-million sales. By 1972, only 60,000 buyers a year were going for ragtops. On July 5, 1973, at 10:40 a.m., Ford built its “last” convertible, a ’73 Mercury Cougar, a signal that the era of fun was over (a decade later, the ’83 Mustang returned Ford to the soft-top business).

However, Americans proved reluctant to give up their “monsters.” Sales of profitable large cars remained strong through the 1970s, even as new fuel-economy and emissions measures robbed them of power. “We build a car the customer wants,” insisted Buick general sales manager Frank Frost while unveiling the 1974 models, the most potent of which was the Riviera, with a 455 V-8 that made all of 210 horsepower to move its 4700 pounds. Frost added that Buick wouldn’t stop building such behemoths until “the customer tells us he is absolutely through with the many comfort and performance pluses of larger cars.”

By 1978, the customers seemed to be absolutely through. Imports had ballooned to nearly half of new-car sales in California while Detroit’s own small-car offerings were sagging in the market. Even the unions were haranguing the Big Three to get serious about downsizing, with United Auto Workers president Doug Fraser imploring the C-suite suits to act before more of his members were laid off. A second oil crisis, in 1979, ignited by the Iranian Revolution, hit a system that was still reeling from the first. That gallon of gas that had been 35 cents only a few years earlier was now $1.20, and there seemed to be no end in sight.

It cost the automakers an estimated $50 billion over five years to adapt, but adapt they did. Fuel injection combined with computer controls made engines more efficient as well as cleaner, allowing them to meet a seemingly impossible CAFE standard of 27.5 mpg by 1985. Turbochargers arrived in force in the 1980s to give four-cylinders the power of V-8s, and curb weights tumbled. The 1981 K-cars launched with the first four-banger from Chrysler since the 1930s and were more than a thousand pounds lighter than any sedan the company built in the 1970s.

All this economizing helped lead to a tumble in global oil prices in the mid-1980s, which led to a whole lot of fun cars being produced in the late 1980s and 1990s that were cleaner, more powerful, and relatively efficient. And, thanks to advancing technology, we’re still on a roll. The fastest mass-market car today, the Tesla Model S Plaid, burns no gasoline at all. Even the industry’s most horrendous guzzlers, such as the 6.2-liter Hellcat-powered Ram 1500 TRX (12 mpg city/highway combined), would only have rated about average in 1973 fuel economy terms. Meanwhile, the Ram’s tailpipe emissions are 98 percent cleaner, even as its 702 horsepower is more than three times that of the most powerful Detroit iron of the day. The onset of the electric era seems to threaten the relevancy of horsepower figures once again, but this time in a good way. The 2024 Lucid Air Sapphire is a luxury sedan rated at 1234 horsepower, a figure so lofty that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. If it were 900 or 1500, would it make much difference?

In our own time, when we seem to lurch from one crisis to another, we can take some comfort from what our history seems to be telling us. Which is that crises, in all their ugly, terrorizing, and brutal manifestations, are actually good for progress. In the auto industry, as well as in life, if you’re not moving forward, you’re sliding backward. The gas pumps may well go dry again, but the next time it happens, it’s possible that few will really notice.