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Auto executives argue with justification that they have had to reduce gas mileage to comply with federal safety and antipollution standards. Modifications to auto engines since 1970 to meet the requirements of the Environmental Protection Agency have indeed cost an average of 3 m.p.g. But added luxury features have been equally important. Air conditioning, which now goes into 73% of all cars, drains off as much as 2.5 m.p.g.; power steering, put into 88% of U.S. autos, can cost another 0.7 m.p.g. The combination of these features and antipollution equipment has been more than enough to cancel any improvements in engine efficiency.
Detroit insists that it has been adding the high-profit accessories to meet public demand—and that has indeed been true for some time. But the energy crisis is radically altering the popular mood. Politicians, ever sensitive to public attitudes, have recently been falling all over one another to swap their long limousines for more modest cars: Delaware Governor Russell W. Peterson is exchanging his chauffeur-driven limousine for a chauffeur-driven Ford Pinto. Some legislators have gone so far as to attempt direct action against the big car. Early this month, the Senate voted to require that by 1984 all U.S. automakers increase fuel economy by an average of 50% or more over 1974 models—a move that would surely force a drastic reduction in size and weight unless some radically more economical engine is developed. A number of other bills before Congress would clamp excise taxes on new cars on the basis of weight or horsepower.
Whether any of these proposals will ever become law is uncertain, but American drivers scarcely need to be ordered to think twice about their bigger cars. In a trend that dismayed Detroit, they had already begun doing so even before the energy crisis struck. In the 1973 model year, compact and subcompact cars captured 41.5% of the domestic new-car market, up from 38% the year before and 32% in 1970—before the first Vegas, Pintos and Colts appeared. Last month, sales of smaller autos, which frequently get around 20 m.p.g., were up 10% over the same period in 1972, while sales of standard-size cars (roughly, anything larger than a Dodge Dart and smaller than a Cadillac) fell 25%. That trend continued in the first ten days of December. Foreign cars, many of which are as small as U.S. subcompacts and get equally good gas mileage, have captured 15% of the American market and held that share despite dollar devaluations that have raised their price above those of some competing U.S. small cars. Sales of new Cadillacs and other luxury cars have held strong, presumably because their buyers do not worry about fuel costs, but prices on used-car lots are dropping.
For dealers caught with large inventories of gas guzzlers, the abrupt change in the market has produced some bad moments. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, who recently spent two days at Los Angeles' Cal Worthington Dodge, one of the largest Dodge dealerships in the nation, found the atmosphere reminiscent of halftime in the locker room of a losing football team. Of the 1,200 vehicles sitting on Worthington's nine-acre lot, only nine were compact Colts; the rest included