In the last installment of this mini-series I covered the immediate aftermath of what was the Muscle Car Era through the rebirth of the muscle/pony car in 1982, and after banging away at the keyboard, I was thinking I was pretty much done. I thought this was going to be where I wrapped up loose ends and made a few snarky observations about the state of the performance automobile and today's muscle car culture. But it looks like that will have to wait a bit longer.
The problem with being 55 years old is that I tend to think everything that I've been around to see happen is recent history. It seems like just yesterday that I traded my well worn '69 Road Runner for a brand new '83 Mustang GT, but a lot has happened since then, and since I'm trying to tell the whole story I just can't leave 30 years out...
With the sales success of those early 1980s V8 Mustangs and Camaros, the Japanese imports would respond with increasingly powerful cars using turbos to make up for displacement. Without a heavy V8 hanging out over the front wheels, and with an independent rear suspension out back, the turbo Supra and 300ZX and Rx-7 were formidable competition for the pony cars and even GM's Corvette. Detroit would respond with wider tires and stiffer springs and shocks for the new breed of muscle car - cars that were now expected to take a corner almost as well as they could hammer down a quarter mile.
Probably due to the foreign competition appearing in the late 1980s, pony car sales would sag in the early '90s. During the 1980s Ford and GM were still struggling to modernize their lineups, and the Mustang and Camaro had gone largely unchanged since 1983. Ford dabbled with the idea of replacing the Mustang with a front-wheel drive V6 powered car based on a Mazda chassis; GM considered dropping the Camaro and Firebird outright - but there were enough hard core buyers for the existing cars that in the end both Ford and GM just kept stamping them out with minimal changes.
In 1994 Ford would restyle the Mustang with just a bit of retro-styling drawn from the first '65 Mustang. Two years later Ford would finally retire their 5 liter (302 inch) small block Windsor V8, replacing it with an all new 4.6 liter V8, both a 2-valve SOHC version for the garden variety GT and a 4-valve DOHC version in the top-dog Cobra, topping out at 305 relatively honest (SAE Net) horsepower - probably the most powerful Mustang up to that point.
In 2002 GM would discontinue the Camaro and Firebird, due to declining sales and the lack of a rear-wheel-drive platform to build a car for what was becoming an increasingly small niche. Chevy still had the Corvette, and muscle car buyers were increasingly older and wealthier than they had been before; developing two performance cars that competed with each other in the showroom didn't seem to make sense.
For 2004 Pontiac would import a Holden (GM of Australia) rear-wheel-drive sedan, packing the Corvette's V8, and badge it as a GTO. It was a good modern muscle car, but it lacked any styling or engineering ties to the original GTO and it never sold well.
For most of the 2000s Ford would cash in on the lack of competition, selling lots of V8 Mustangs. GM couldn't ignore Ford's success, and would come up with a plan for a new Camaro based on the same Holden platform Pontiac had used in their GTO. Somehow it took nearly 5 years for GM to get the new Camaro into production; it finally went on sale in 2009.
Once proud Chrysler had been hit hard by the shift to smaller more fuel efficient cars in the 1970s; as the smallest of the Big 3 they didn't have the cash to retool their product line as fast as Ford and GM had done, in 1979 they would turn to the US government for an unprecedented $1.5 billion loan to avoid bankruptcy. Chrylser would use that loan to develop the K-car, a modern but uninspired front-wheel drive mid-size car that would keep the wolf away from the door but generated little passion among buyers. In the early-to-mid 1980s the US economy was still shaky from the oil-shortages of the 1970s; the K-cars were cheap and sold well but Chrysler had neither the funds or a rear-wheel drive platform to use to develop a modern pony-car of their own. The best Chrysler could do for performance fans was to add a turbo to the 4 cylinder engine in their front-wheel drive compact Omni and Horizon. These little cars were fast but looked like every other cheap econo-box on the road; no one was lining up to buy them.
In the second half of the 1980s Chrysler would fall into an unexpected success with their new minivan line. With cars shrinking, the minivan would become the new big-family hauler, and Chrysler would sell a lot of them; the mini-van would finally put Chrysler back on its feet financially.
While the majority of Chrysler's cars were front-wheel drive with 4 or 6 cylinder engines, they were still building V8s based on their 1960s vintage small-block design, but those engines were going into SUVs and pickup trucks. In the early 1990s Chrysler would stretch a small-block V8 into a V10 to power a modern-day halo car - the Viper - essentially an updated Shelby Cobra - but there would be no main-stream V8 powered cars from Chrysler for another decade. Finally in 2005 Chrysler would launch a new 4-door rear-wheel-drive sedan carrying the Charger name powered by their new Hemi V8 (a further evolution of their venerable small-block V8 and in no way related to the hemi-headed monster motors of the 1950s and 60s). With the continued success of the Mustang and rumors of the return of Camaro flying out of GM, in 2008 Chyrsler would shorten the Charger platform to resurrect the Challenger (by then Chrysler had consolidated Plymouth into history, so there was no 'Cuda twin).
When the new Camaro arrived in 2009, it was like 1967 all over again with V8 powered pony-cars from all of the Big-3 competing for top-horsepower honors. Except today, its not just horsepower; buyers also want to know which is faster around the Nurburgring. Modern pony cars have independent rear suspensions and wider tires and more horsepower than a 1960s NASCAR racer. The latest Challenger Hellcat has a supercharger and 700 horsepower, and runs the quarter mile in the low 11s. A new Camaro is due this year that will at least match the Hellcat, and the next Shelby 500GT Mustang is due out next year and will almost certainly outrun them both and take top spot - at least for a month or two!
What the future will bring is anyone's guess. While the modern muscle car seems firmly entrenched, in 1969 no one would have guessed the original muscle cars would go from the high-to-the-low-to-the-end-of-the-show in just 2 short years. Over the next 5-10 years gasoline will almost certainly get more expensive and the Boomers who buy many of them will age out of their car buying years. But the basic concept of the muscle car is just too much fun to go away; as long as we're driving cars I'm willing to bet there will be really fast ones for those of us willing to pay extra for a totally impractical vehicle that is more fun than a roller coaster every time we flex our right foot.
I'm looking forward to 2025 when its time to write the next chapter in this series.
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