What can we learn from the past?

Remember the late 80s and early 90s? I don’t really, I was pretty young. Mostly I remember thinking that Micheal Dukakis looked like a geek (rather than looking presidential). I was also sick of hearing the word “recession” on TV. It sounded gloomy and everybody looked upset.

Well, here we are again, in a recession. And let me tell you another similarity – we’re again burdened with a plethora of heavy, expensive sports cars and low-volume supercars. If the past is any lesson, that’s not a great combination.

The 300ZX, the Supra, and the RX-7 were all examples of cars that had bloated both in curb weight and in price. While their turbocharged motors were remarkable end-products of years of development (the Supra’s 2JZ-GTE is capable of remarkable power from stock engine internals), the rest of the cars became inflated caricatures of themselves. While some of the increase in expense was due to the exchange rates, I’ll leave that for an economist to explain. Most of the increase was from what I like to call feature-bloat. Nissan and Mitsubishi were the worst. Nissan offered Super-HICAS on the 300ZX, which was a rear-wheel steering system that really offered nothing but weight, complexity, and of course expense to the average driver. And Mitsubishi offered every bobble and device under the sun on their 3000GT model. Do you really need your front and rear spoilers to electronically bob up and down at a certain speed?

No, you don’t. And none of these cars survived the financial turmoil, leading to a particularly sorry period for car enthusiasts. Instead of light, cheap, rear-wheel-drive sports cars that were satisfying to drive (like the original 240z and RX-7), we had a bunch of slow and uninteresting front-wheel-drive cars. Was the Nissan 200SX really a sports car? From the beam-axle rear to the pathetic Sentra-derived aesthetic, it lands somewhere in my personal vehicle hall of shame.

One bright light was the Mazda MX-5 Miata, which sold like hotcakes in seemingly equal quantities to high school girls bound for sororities, and serious sports car lovers. The Nissan 240SX was a bland, if competent, rear-wheel-drive car powered by a truck engine. And the Integra GS-R and Type R made front-wheel drive fun, at least for the first owner. The second owners of these cars were invariably 17-year-old anime fans who immediately grafted poorly-made fiberglass to every part of the car, and then proceeded to hit every speedbump they could find. The resulting duct-tape/splintered-fiberglass look became a hit, judging by its ubiquity.

Now we’re in danger of this happening again. Where are the affordable sportscars? The MX5 is admirably close in size to the original, but it has gained weight and price. The WRX and Evo cars are phenomenal but not traditional sports cars. Toyota and Subaru are supposedly working on a small, sporty car concept, but with this economy its survival is not guaranteed.

Would a riff on the original Datsun 240z theme save automakers? I doubt it, but an attractive, simple, and affordable sportscar in the lineup certainly couldn’t hurt!