Have We Seen The Last Of The Muscle Cars?

Somewhere in America on Feb. 17, a man with a mullet and wearing tank top, ripped jeans and driving a Trans Am with mud flaps with a cutout of a woman on them shed a lone tear as he listened to “Radar Love” by Golden Earring while speeding down the highway and shifting gears.

That was the day that General Motors announced it was all but eliminating the Pontiac brand by demoting it to a “focused niche brand” as part of GM’s realignment plan.

While the end of Pontiac isn’t exactly a death blow to muscle cars in America, it does leave them hanging by a fingernail and means that beloved models like the Firebird, Trans Am and GTO will likely never come back.

From the muscle car’s glory days of the 1960s and '70s, when it seemed every busy street in America had some souped-up, loud car burning rubber and causing trouble, only the Ford Mustang, Chevy Camaro, Dodge Challenger and a few others remain as 2009 models.

Several forces have combined into a perfect storm over the last 30 years to bring the muscle car to the brink of extinction. So what happened? How did the muscle car go from something that was considered as American as apple pie to a “focused niche” more likely to be seen in a museum than on a street corner?

History Of Muscle Cars

According to Webster’s Dictionary, a muscle car is “any of a group of American-made two-door sports coupes with powerful engines designed for high-performance driving.”

Missing from that definition is also a level of affordability.

“There’s this history of the Camaro and the Firebird -- it’s a poor man’s Corvette, you could say,” said Charles Kenny, psychologist and president of the consumer psychology firm Kenny & Associates, which has worked with many of the major auto makers by helping them understand the mind of the American driver.

The concept of making high-performance cars at an affordable price started in the 1940s, but the 1960s are considered the birth of the muscle car.

There was the Plymouth Duster, Plymouth Variant, Plymouth Road Runner, Plymouth GTX, Dodge Super Bee, Ford Thunderbolt and many others.

Muscle cars became a symbol of working class America and, in a sense, of the power of the American economy -- that glamour, power and sex appeal could be had even by working class people.

Despite them being relatively cheap cars that could be driven by the average American, Hollywood glamorized the muscle car in films like “Bullit” “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Vanishing Point;” TV shows like “Charlie’s Angels;” and songs like the Beach Boys’ “409” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.”

“Smokey and the Bandit,” starred Burt Reynolds but costarred his 1977 black Trans Am and helped make the film the second most popular of the year, right behind a little film called “Star Wars.”

In 1978, GM sold 260,000 Camaros and 175,000 Firebirds, according to the New York Times. As Burt Reynolds and his Trans Am were jumping bridges on the silver screen and sales were as strong as ever, it seemed that muscle cars were going to dominate the highways forever.

But by 2001, sales had dropped to 42,000 for the Camaro and 31,000 for the Firebird. GM also announced the discontinuation of the two models – although the Camaro was brought back for 2009.

What Happened?

The first blow to the muscle car was the 1970 Clean Air Act, which forced the automakers to make more environmentally friendly cars, which brought about the catalytic converter and unleaded gasoline, which cut down on muscle cars’ performance.

Then there was the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, which brought about major gasoline shortages in America and had the automakers looking to make more fuel efficient cars.

In 1965, activist Ralph Nader published the book “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which called on the automobile industry to improve safety. The book in particular focused on the Chevy Corvair, which was not a muscle car but came in a small, sporty body.

Following the fame the book brought him, Nader led a campaign through the 1970s to pressure the auto industry to stop marketing muscle cars to young people. As a result, the auto insurance industry levied surcharges on high-performance cars, making the muscle car suddenly unaffordable to the average American.

“The insurance costs really put the muscle car out of reach for a lot of people,” said John Gunnell, author of the Standard Catalog of American Muscle Cars, 1960-1972. and many other books about classic cars.

In the late '80s and early '90s, electronic fuel injection helped the surviving models see an increase in sales and a larger share of the market. But that was only until the late '90s and early part of the 2000s, when SUV sales started to eat into muscle car sales. Consumers looking for power and performance started to buy more SUVs, which caused GM to discontinue the Firebird and Camaro in 2002.

And with the announcement that Pontiac has been reduced to a novelty line, it means that only the Mustang, Camaro, Challenger -- which was brought back in 2008 -- and a few others remain to carry on the muscle car tradition.

But with the dramatic rise in gas prices last summer, combined with the large bailout money the automakers have gotten from Congress, could the muscle car soon be gone for good?

“The death of the muscle car has been proclaimed before,” said Gunnell. “But they are still around, and I think they will continue to be.”