What Defines the Malaise Era, and Will We Experience It Again?

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Article QuickTakes:

• When was the Malaise Era?
• Where the name came from
• What it was like to live through the Malaise Era
• Anemic engines, dowdy designs, recalls, and defects of the time

Car enthusiasts often use nicknames for certain eras of automotive history. There's the Brass Era of the early 1900s, for example, and the 1980s and 1990s are sometimes referred to as the Rad Era. When we talk about the period of automotive history from the middle 1970s through the middle 1980s, we call it the Malaise Era. I'm something of an authority on the Malaise Era, because I'm the automotive journalist who invented the term. Here's what it all means.

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When Was the Malaise Era, Exactly?

The Malaise Era began in 1973 and ended after 1983, full stop. Some will try to convince you that it extended until 1995 (the last year before the OBD-II engine-control standard became mandatory in US-market new cars and light trucks), but they are wrong.

The year 1973 marked the beginning of the OPEC oil embargo, which tripled the price of oil virtually overnight. It was also the first model year in which the federal government required new cars to have 5-mph crash bumpers. On top of that, '73 was the year in which the EPA decreed that lead would be phased out from gasoline. Oh, and it was also the first year in which emission-control regulations really started to bite.

The year 1984 was when the Ford Mustang got an honest 205 net horsepower (up from a depressing 115 in 1981). At the same time, U.S. car buyers could choose from a broad selection of new convertibles (many tears were shed over the "last convertible" in 1976). It was also the year in which the new Corvette would be the first to handle like a true sports car. The Malaise Era was over by 1984, though we almost missed it due to a brush with nuclear annihilation in 1983.

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Why It's Called the Malaise Era

The term Malaise Era has its origins in a speech President Jimmy Carter gave in the summer of 1979. In this speech, officially known as the Crisis of Confidence address, the nuclear engineer and Sunday-school teacher preached that Americans might have to make some sacrifices in their lives in response to world events beyond their control.

The idea that the citizens of the nation that invented the airplane and then helped defend the world from Axis powers would ever need to sacrifice anything didn't sit well with Americans. Though Carter didn't use the word "malaise," journalists quickly dubbed it the Malaise Speech, and the name stuck.

My membership in the older cohort of Generation X means I sat in my parents' thirsty 1973 Chevrolet Beauville in gas lines as a second-grader in 1973 and again as an eighth-grader in 1979. I reached driving age in a household with a miserably underpowered 1978 Pontiac Bonneville and a hilariously unreliable 1979 Ford Granada in the driveway. I shunned vehicles made during the 1973-1983 period after that, and my name for those years, the Malaise Era, made its way into my writing for the automotive news website Jalopnik when I began working there in 2007.

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What Was the Malaise Era Like?

There was a sense among Americans during the Malaise Era that everything would always get worse from then on, fueled by such humiliations as Watergate and the fall of Saigon and made more painful by stagflation. As Merle Haggard sang, the good times seemed over for good.

There were plenty of reasons why Malaise Era cars seemed so bad. Part of their negative image derives from their coming on the heels of boom times for the automaking powerhouses of the world, during which wages kept going up and cars got more powerful and designs improved with each passing year. The late 1960s gave us more U.S. factory hot rods than could ever be listed here, while the sounds of high-revving Porsche 911s, Datsun 240Zs, and Alfa Romeo Giulias echoed on the boulevards. And they looked good, nearly all of them.

That said, it wasn't just the fall from a high point that made the Malaise Era hurt so much. Let's take a look at some of that pain.

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Malaise Era's Anemic Engine Power

With pollution problems in cities reaching deadly crisis levels throughout the 1960s, governments were forced to act. California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed legislation to tackle vehicle-produced smog in 1967. Under President Nixon in 1970, the Clean Air Act acquired sharp teeth.

To meet ever-stricter emissions standards, engines needed lower combustion-chamber temperatures and some means of dealing with excess hydrocarbons in the exhaust. With the crude technology of those days before digital engine controls, most emissions-cutting solutions came at the expense of power. A low point of this process came in 1978, when Ford sold 460-cubic-inch (7.5-liter) V8s making just 202 horsepower.

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Ugly Faces of the Malaise Era

Insurance companies had become fed up with the absurdly expensive repairs that resulted from minor bumps, so the federal government mandated that new cars withstand a 5-mph impact with no damage. Meanwhile, laws regulating headlights forbade the sleek-looking lights of European and Japanese cars sold in their home markets, which forced British Leyland to jack up the MGB's suspension to get the lights higher. Regulations crept into all aspects of car design. The results were often unfortunate.

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Recalls and Defects of the Time

High-profile industry problems soon became everyday news in the 1970s, kicking off with more than 6 million Chevrolets recalled for bad motor mounts in 1971, then moving onto hysteria over exploding Ford Pintos and the Chevymobile scandal. By the time we got to the many recalls of General Motors X-bodies and the Ford Park-to-Reverse fiasco of the early 1980s, everything seemed hopeless.

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Why We Aren't Entering a New Malaise Era

Government regulations are beginning to squeeze internal-combustion vehicles over emissions, but electric vehicles are already quite powerful. Getting them to have gasoline-like range is a predictable hurdle compared with the technical challenge of getting 1960s-style fuel-delivery and ignition hardware to deliver a huge drop in smog output with a significant increase in efficiency. I wouldn't mind seeing a new generation of EVs with Malaise-style Brougham badging and landau roofs, though.