ArcaMax

Do you know why SUVs became so popular? It wasn't because of their, er, sportiness. Or even their utility. It was because they provided a way to get the size (especially under the hood) that American buyers wanted but which the government was doing its damndest to deny them via fuel efficiency mandates.

The story goes like this: In the mid-late 1970s, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE, in government-ese) standards began to bite down. Government bureaucrats and politicians, in their usual secular Puritan we-know-best way, decided - then decreed - that new cars - generally - weren't "efficient" enough.

It wasn't that there weren't numerous high-mileage cars available on the market for people who valued fuel economy more than other attributes (size, power, etc.). Granted, they were mostly imports - models like the VW Beetle and Honda Civic, Datsun B210, etc. But the point stands: Fuel-efficient cars were available. The problem - from the government's viewpoint - was that not enough of them were being made. Or, bought.

The bureaucrats and politicians felt that all cars should be more "efficient" and ordered it be so - regardless of market wants and needs. And regardless of the destruction and distortions this might impose on the car industry. CAFE was enacted. Henceforth, every car company would be required to achieve a certain "fleet average" miles-per-gallon, the number decreed by political-regulatory fiat.

Compliance was determined by averaging the mileage of every car an automaker produced. The presence of even one "gas guzzler" in the mix lowered the automaker's overall CAFE number and put the automaker in danger of being fined, the fines passed on to the buyer. Which made the "gas guzzler" models less attractive to buy. Fewer and fewer such were sold.

Initially (in 1978) the CAFE mandatory minimum for passenger cars was 18 MPG - ascending as the years rolled on to 27.5 MPG by 1990. This put enormous pressure on the industry - especially the American car industry - to downsize the cars it sold. To make them smaller and lighter, so they'd use less gas.

Almost overnight, the entire domestic car industry shifted from producing large numbers of big cars with big engines - what had for decades been the traditional American car - to lots of smaller cars with smaller engines. Rear-wheel-drive and V8 power became the exception rather than the rule. And the imports - the Japanese, in particular - gained a huge and artificial competitive advantage over American car companies, because the Japanese (at that time) didn't build big cars with big engines. They specialized in small cars with small engines. It was a boon - to them.

Meanwhile, American car companies struggled to recoup the huge losses incurred as a result of the forced/premature retirement of whole lines of cars. The quality of American-brand cars suffered as the Big Three rushed the new generation of government-compliant small cars into production to meet the Japanese threat.

It was a disaster on the order of Stalingrad - with the American car industry playing the role of the German Sixth Army. But, there was a "loophole" (as it's styled whenever someone finds a way to legally avoid some suffocating government edict).

While passenger cars were required to meet an ever-increasing mandatory minimum MPG average, there was a different CAFE standard for what the bureaucrats styledlight trucks. A more "lenient" (god, there it is again) standard. All the way through the '80s and into the '90s, the CAFE standard for these light trucks (that is, 1500 series and smaller trucks) trailed about 7-8 MPG behind the CAFE standard for passenger cars. This amounted to tacit acceptance of the fact that for a truck to be a truck - that is, useful and capable for work - it would need to have a bigger engine, heavier frame, and so on.

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