Whilst the idea of a ‘muscle car’ might conjure up an image of a cartoon drawn car with enormous pecs bulging through the bodywork, it is actually a term that refers to cars that are considered to be high performance. There are many different types of muscle cars, from the earliest models that were developed in the 1940s, to the 1980s cleaned up versions, which had much less muscle. Muscle cars have always been designed for ‘street use,’ i.e. normal driving, but have also been used in drag racing, which was a sport that was central to their rise in popularity. They’re quite distinct from the more expensive and specialised sports cars and high speed touring cars that were geared more towards road racing.
It is widely recognised that 1949 was the year that the muscle car concept first appeared on the automobile scene. The 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 was one of the first cars to be made that reflected a new desire in car buyers for something more than a reliable runaround. Power and speed were the new watch words for car manufacturing at this time, and the addition of a V8 engine to an Oldsmobile 76 series body created the first ever muscle car; and so a love affair with powerful cars accessible by the man on the street was born.
By the 1960s, the popularity of this combination of power and speed had really caught on and a wide range of manufacturers, including Chrysler, General Motors and Ford, and later American Motors, started battling it out for control of the market. Drag racing was key to the rise and rise of the American muscle car – essentially a simple, straight race from a standing start between two modified vehicles, where the first to cross the finish line was the winner. The quest for ever-lighter bodywork, combined with every more powerful engines peaked in the 1970s, when horsepower in some vehicles was advertised as being as high as 450hp. By now, pretty much every car brand in the American market had at least one or two muscle cars in its lineup, from the Mercury Cougar at Ford, to the Pontiac Trans Am coupe.
The 1970s was also the decade in which the popularity of muscle cars began to decline, mainly because of the Clean Air Act and the oil crisis that hit the country. Insurance rates also shot through the roof, which tended to put potential buyers off, and the price of muscle cars rose, taking them outside of the budgets of most normal people. Many of the muscle car lines began to be discontinued in the 1970s and the market for these vehicles all but disintegrated until the 1980s when there was some resurgence. Unfortunately, the 1980s vehicles were not built along the same lines as older muscle cars, mostly because government had now tightened up laws on safety and pollution and the cost of making the muscle car was much higher than in previous years. However, some of the older vehicles survived, with the addition of features such as electronic fuel injection, and there remains a considerable market for muscle cars today.
This was a guest post by John for Mitsubishi UK who have a great range of used cars and 4×4 cars for sale.
