The CC time machine somehow got stuck in 1978. We had the 1978 Grand Am yesterday, and the Olds Cutlass scheduled for this morning. And to keep the disco party rolling, we’re going to re-run some other 1978 classics in the compact-mid-size field today, and then we’re going to ask you what you would have bought as a family sedan/coupe that year. Hold your final comments until we get them all up, one every two hours.
I had a neighbour, when I was a boy, who had a Ford Fairmont station wagon. My aunt had a 1977 Dodge Aspen. I used to know someone who had a 1978 American Motors Concord DL. I had a teacher when I was in my teens (by that time, in the mid 80s), who had an Olds Cutlass.
why 1978, i always ask myself. the only year with amber turning lights on Volare/Aspen. looks like a lot of things happening that year.
for a car that old and with tight budget i prefer to get a basic model, there would be less trim to worry about ( even though i still lost one piece on vinyl roof, a badge on the fender but glued back, and two hubcaps ) but usually for a car that basic, AC and radio would be hard to count on. i spend quite some time turning the AM radio every day when i drive it.
Having owned a 2004 Ford Taurus as one of our family cars, I’m going with the Fairmont. It’s homely, but we have two children to shuttle about. And I didn’t care for Recardo Montalban.
Blasphemy! You don’t care for Ricardo Montálban’s soft/rich Corinthian leather?
There is definitely something about that year for me personally as my family and I have owned a few cars from that year throughout the years. All but two were owned in 1978. The rest were purchased used years later. Must have been a good year for cars.
1978 Caprice-me
1978 Cutlass Supreme-Dad
1978 Cutlass Supreme-Mom
1978 Dodge Colt-Dad
1978 Camaro Z28-Cousin
1978 Caprice-uncle
1978 Nova-neighbor
1978 Jeep -Cousin
1978. Graduated high school. And had first and only car from an American manufacturer…just may return home on the next purchase though.
Looking at this made me think how glad I am that today midsized buyers get to drive Accords and Camrys. These cars represent what Detroit gave us when they weren’t worried about their American customers looking at what else the world had to offer. Ford and GM were building much better cars for other markets at the time, but looked at the US as a captive market to be kept ignorant of rear suspensions, engines with high volumetric efficiency, effective braking technology, radial tires, and anything else that would add to their cost or hinder their ability to badge engineer price classes. There are reasons that go beyond funding bad politics for not buying from the domestics.
The burning question is, if not for the Japanese ‘invasion’, what would domestic cars be like today? Would the myriad federal regulations and world events have still brought cars into what they would eventually become, or would they still be stagnate in the same level of quality as 1978?
World events seem to be the key. If the price of oil had never skyrocketed, it’s quite possible that domestic cars would still be ponderous ‘brougham-mobiles’ from the seventies. But when the price of gas went bonkers, suddenly, those small Japanese cars that got good gas mileage looked pretty attractive and maybe it was just a happy coincidence that they held up a whole lot better than the domestic offerings, too. I don’t think American consumers initially bought Japanese for the quality; they bought for the fuel mileage.
Of course, big ponderous, brougham-mobiles still exist, they just call them full-size, luxury SUVs, now.
In the early 70’s (about 1972) in something like Popular Mechanics I read a news item that suggested electronic fuel injection would replace carburetors in a few years. When the mid 70’s Cadillac Seville was introduced with electronic fuel injection I was hopeful that GM would soon replace carburetors with EFI. However the microprocessor became available in the mid 70’s too and GM quickly realized that a digital processor could do far more than an analog processor. So EFI was delayed until the eighties. I bought a 78 Olds diesel. I did think about getting a downsized deVille with the optional fuel injection, but Cadillacs were really out of my price range. I was not interested in midsize either.
I must say, the best looking of the class of 78′ has to be the Ford Fairmont, except for the color. The ugliest is the AMC Concord.
What about the imports? What were the foreign competitors to these?
Imports tended to be small or expensive or both. VW’s biggest car was the Dasher. Today, it has evolved into the two-ton Audi A4, but it was pretty tiny then. Toyota’s Corona would have been an inspired pick, but it too was small compared to the cars listed above. Space efficiency really wasn’t that bad for the Fairmont or Malibu, so there was a real advantage for cars that were still used to carry families. Datsun’s 810 was considerably smaller than the domestics too. The 730i BMW was the right size, but each one cost as much as a few of the US midsized cars. Same goes for the Mercedes-Benz sedans of the day. Volvos weren’t as big or as cheap. Nor were Saabs. The Honda Accord was a sub compact. Peugeot’s 604 was as bad as any of these Detroit sedans in addition to being more expensive and less reliable.
Interestingly, I got a chance to drive just about all of these (well, maybe not all in 1978, but if not, that generation of vehicle in another year). I worked for Hertz as a transporter back then (a summer job). Hertz specialized in Fords, so the Fairmont and Granada were regular rental fare, but they dabbled in AMC (Concord) and some Dodges (Aspen). I was one of the guys who brought back one-way rentals to their home location (probably many people don’t realize that rentals have a home location, or maybe they don’t anymore). I had the job in both 1977 and 1978 and it is still one of my favorite jobs (didn’t pay worth a hoot, but as a car crazy guy, getting to drive for work was pretty neat at the time). However, as a young guy I’d always get what I felt was extra checking (profiling) at the US/Canada border (they’d always ask me to open my trunk, coming into the US from Canada), guess they didn’t think a young guy could afford a new car (and I couldn’t at that time and they didn’t know I was just driving the car, and didn’t own it).
Of course I didn’t get a chance to find out how they aged, as the cars were all pretty much new at the time, so my opinion is probably pretty skewed. I did have to drive some cars that had been wrecked and/or stolen, but they were still the current model year. I liked the Concord, and another car you don’t mention, the Dodge Diplomat, which I guess is like a fancy version of the Aspen.
Of course as a young male at the time, 4 door sedans really seemed pretty boring to me, one of my favorite cars I drove only once was a ’78 Dodge Magnum…I think I recall a Buick Regal Turbo, which was a pretty big deal at the time…But now I’d probably go for the Concord or the Diplomat if I had to choose (I know the Diplomat isn’t on the list, but I’d prefer it to the Aspen).
Funny thing is, at the time I would have classified the Concord and Aspen as compacts, as was the Fairmont, but the GM cars I thought were mid-sized (though they had just been downsized, so I guess that’s partly semantics).
We had three 1978s in our family –
1978 Honda Accord (Dad’s) – 1977-1982
1978 Chevy Nova (Mom’s) – 1982-1990
1978 Toyota Corolla (mine) – 1995-2001
I worked at a Ford dealership at the time, and thought the new Fairmonts looked positively frail. We were also selling Honda, and couldn’t keep the Accords in stock. They’d sell out as soon as they came in.