The Gravity of Safety

As my piece of my son’s never-ending Mazda Miata story draws to a close I’d like to share a couple of things that have occurred to me along the way.

1st – I really like our household name for the car much better: the Mazda Piñata. Sure, tongue in cheek and maybe slightly irreverent, but due to the mismatched, multi-hued body panels, it captures the essence of this particular car much more accurately.

2nd -  Although this car is now approaching 25 years old and is as simple as a sandbox (honest, a great training vehicle for auto-wrenching!), the vehicles of the period were already showing legislative obesity.

My son is an all or nothing sort of guy, so he is now a veritable fount of technical data related to the Piñata and its peers of that period. It was based on his continual spewing of facts and figures that I got inspired to look at this weighty (pun fully intended) topic.

America’s love affair with cars has always been as fickle as the rest of our cultural pursuits. WWII GI’s coming back from service in England brought with them the memory of such classic British cars as Jaguars, Morgans and MGs. The 2-seat roadsters definitely had their appeal to returning GI’s, likely owing more to the pipedream of the blonde with blowing hair sitting next to them than the actual roadster.  Regardless of the reasoning, the interest was there so it wasn’t too long before dealerships here started importing and selling those same cars.

These cars were typically more pedestrian versions of factory race cars, so while they weren’t really equipped to do serious blacktop battle, casual club-sponsored racing developed around them. They came to be known as sports-cars. The term sports-car had no firm definition, but the cars all shared a few major attributes. They were small, low to the ground, built to be very light for quick handling, but were often otherwise remarkably low-tech. And so America starting driving these gnat sized cars into the new post-war boom.

Americans are notorious for wanting too much of a good thing. Going back to the Ford Model T many barns across the country were filled with disassembled engines and young men scratching their heads figuring how to get more power. After Oldsmobile and Cadillac launched their overhead valve V-8’s in 1949, veterans with government-issue mechanical training were souping these cars up along with the familiar Ford Flathead V-8.

The newer engine designs were already more powerful than their pre-war brethren, but they also responded so well to simple modifications that hot-rodding became a common term. Detroit, never remiss in capitalizing on a trend, saw opportunity and started developing factory hotrods. By the late '50's/early 60’s the factory horsepower wars were well underway. Stock-car racing and eyeball-flattening acceleration where taking the attention away from the little imported roadsters.

It was Washington DC that dropped the anchor. Largely as a result of scathing review of the auto industry's safety engineering by Ralph Nader in his book “Unsafe at any speed”, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards were implemented in 1967. This act was followed in 1968 by adopting auto emissions standards. By the early 1970's cars were impacted with reduced performance, increasing weight and drivability problems. Tiny imported sports cars were hit particularly hard. What were marginal engines before this legislation’s impact really couldn’t cut it now. The buying public noted the poor performance of post emissions sports-cars and moved on, preferring to enjoy the twilight of domestic performance in the last of the muscle cars. The little roadsters were left to die a slow, agonizing, 0-60 in one afternoon death.

The 1980’s saw technology start to develop in a way which made smaller engines and sporting vehicles viable again. There was a resurgence of interest in the roadsters too (Nostalgia? Antiestablishmentarianism? Wishful thinking about the blonde?), so it wasn’t long before a new generation of tiny topless imported 2-seaters were showing up at the party again.  The Miata arrived late in the trend. It debuted in 1989 and appeared to be a near plagiaristic visual copy of the early 1960’s Lotus Elan.

The Elan had been one of the premier giant slayers through the 1960’s. Light, nimble and quick, the Lotus was one of those cars that consistently won on the track and could throw a punch way out of its class. Mazda's choice to build an Elan clone proved very wise, as these little cars flooded the streets, often propelling 50-60 year-olds through mid-life with fond memories (the blonde factor?). 

The original Elan sat on an 84” wheelbase, had a 1.5 liter engine and produced 100HP, which allowed it to scoot 0-60 in about 7.1 seconds. The 1990 Miata sat on an 89” wheelbase, had a 1.6 liter engine that made 115 HP and clocked 0-60 in 8.1 seconds. So why the 1 second lag? Physics. The first generation Miata weighs around 2100 lbs. while the Elan was a 1500 pounder.

The original Elan couldn’t be sold today due to the lack of emissions and safety equipment all cars must wear. Any equipment weighs something; there is no free ride. So while small cars used to weigh in at 1500-1900lb, it isn’t unusual to see them scale at 2700-2900lb now. And with this weight comes slower handling, poorer economy and poorer acceleration than the same platform could deliver without the excess baggage.

Manufacturers continue to raise the bar on horsepower, handling, economy and structural safety. Cars today are very good and can outperform similar cars of the past in a big way, while still meeting legislative requirements. But this weight factor only makes me wonder what kind of a rocket an original Lotus Elan could be with a 252HP 2-liter Ford Ecoboost from a Focus underfoot. Makes my palms sweat to think about it. No blonde required.

© 2015 D.W. Williams