Muscle car power, that is.
The first (method for getting rid of muscle cars—M) was to strangle them via emissions controls they couldn’t comply with – and didn’t, at first. Those first generation muscle cars of the ‘60s and early-mid-‘70s all had engines designed back in the ‘50s – i.e,. designed without emissions control in mind at all. The only way to make them “compliant” with the emissions regs passed decades after the fact was to cripple them by grafting clumsy emissions controls onto them.
These made them run poorly – and gradually killed off the muscle, too.

It only took four years – from the passage in 1970 of the Clean Air Act – to eliminate literally every muscle car except the last one, which happened to be a Pontiac, too. It was the 1974 Trans-Am equipped with the 290 horsepower SD-455 V8. Just a few hundred made it through the noose and by the following year – 1975 – the Trans-Am’s strongest engine was a 185 horsepower 400 V8 geezing through a catalytic converter and single exhaust made to look like two.But just like the Terminator rebooting himself after receiving a shotgun blast to the guts, the muscle car only seemed dead. Gradually, performance began to return. Clean performance, too – via engines designed to be “compliant” and powerful.
By the ’90s, performance had returned to what it had been in the late ’60s and soon exceeded it.
So that had to be stopped, too.
This time, the method applied was unanswerable. Federal fuel economy fatwas descended. It no longer mattered that muscle wasn’t dirty. It now had to be fuel-sippy and that is like making a ribeye without the fat.
The fuel economy fatwas also served to attack mass-market large cars, which went the way of the muscle car.
By shifting the meaning of fuel efficiency to mean “emissions” once again – though this time, not pollution. The new meaning is “greenhouse gasses,” which don’t smog the air or foul the lungs but are asserted to change the climate.
Whether it does or does not is a matter for another column.
What it unquestionably will do is achieve the goal which has been their goal since at least the 1960s. That goal, of course, is to get rid of not just the muscle car, not only the large car and not merely the SUV but every car.
By making it impossible to make them compliant. So as to get people into other forms of transportation, under their control.
Regardless of what they may say, control is ultimately what it’s really all about—each and every time, without exception, whatever the issue or context. The Progtard lust for absolute, untrammeled power is in full effect 24/7/365, a sort of Universal Constant that goads them in a mindlessly eternal quest for MORE.
They never sleep; they never relent; and they never, ever, ever stop. It’s a resounding testament to the adaptability of the internal combustion engine, as well as to the creative genius of American auto engineers, that workarounds have somehow been found to blunt the bitter Leftist assault on the venerable American muscle car and the rebellious freedom they so perfectly represent. So far, anyway. It’s no mystery why Proggy hates them so fanatically, and wants them gone for good.
- Entries
At its root, the automobile is an instrument of freedom. There is no greater expression of freedom than the ability to get into a device that one owns and can transport him to another place in the country without the controls and routing of public transport. Lefties hate freedom, hence they hate cars. Muscle cars are an ultimate expression of freedom and individualism, so they hate muscle cars even more.
+10
Soon Comrade it will be illegal to drive a gasoline car. Only electric. Then that will be banned.
Get your red barchetta hidden in the barn with supplies of gasoline stored.
To steal a phrase from another movement: If it’s time to hide your muscle car, it’s time to drive it.
WWKD? What would Kowalski do?
I agree the rabid marxists want power and control and would like nothing better than to have us all riding cattle cars.
OTOH, I do not think the original emissions controls were anything more than a needed cleanup. I well remember the dirty air prevalent in certain places, like say east of LA up against the mountains. You could cut out chunks of air with a knife.
It took time for the manufacturers to figure it out and what we have now is the clean ICE with more power than the old muscle cars. Put a car of today in East LA 1970 and the air coming out of the exhaust would be cleaner than what went in 🙂