The "Government cars'

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33106, 22 December 1972, Page 14

The "Government cars'

American motorists are finding their new 1973-model cars a new experience in motoring —and not always a happy we, J. C. Jones reports from Detroit. There is not a breathing motor engineer who is not in favour of clean air, Jones writes. The trouble is that the latest American Government-required antipollution equipment is infecting engines with mechanical bronchitis and acute dyspepsia, and carowners are expanding their vocabularies in order to address themselves properly to their balky gasgulpers. So are mechanics. One recently wrote “Newsweek” five pages of finely-honed observations on what he called “Government cars.” The trouble was. he said, that the new rules forced the engineers to “make the idle ports in the carburettor bigger and set the idle speed up from 600 r.p.m. to 900 r.p.m. to make the thing run. But then it’s pouring out so many emissions, you have to lean out the fuel mixture so much that you starve the engine, and you go along surging and bucking like a threelegged horse. I’ve heard so many complaints that it makes a guy want to find a new trade. “The man to blame is Senator Muskie. He takes credit for the Clean Air Act, and I hope his car is acting like those at our house,” Jones writes.

“Mine accomplishes jack-rabbit starts at idle; I brake down from 25 miles an hour on the first curve without ever having laid foot to the accelerator. And

my wife’s car is a gradeA gasser. She comes home from the supermarket, parks in the garage, puts the groceries away, hangs up her coat, asks if anyone telephoned in her absence, remembers that she left her pocketbook in the car, walks back to the garage—and finds the engine still gasping, chugging and slobbering like one of our bulldogs after a run at a squirrel. They call that phenomenon ‘dieseling.’ If we wanted a diesel, we’d buy one.”

But the mechanic’s customers are unfairly abusing him. If he tunes an engine to get better performance, and, in the process, tampers with antiemissions equipment and settings, he and his boss are in deep trouble. A dealer can be fined $lO,OOO for diddling with a car’s flatulence quota. So can a manufacturer.

But independent garage owners are exempt, and

until the Government gets after them, they are in the sweet-pea patch. One, for instance, owns a garage in Warren, Michigan, across from the Ponderosa Steak House. His basic business is building racing cars. But lately folks are flocking in to have him unhitch their emissions systems, and in 45 minutes, for a mere $2O, he’ll do just that.

So far this year he has decleansed more than 1000 cars. He guarantees to add two to three miles a gallon; more important, he’ll deliver far better acceleration, so that crossing a hot intersection from a standing start doesn’t become an experiment in terror.

That’s no hyperbole. “I guarantee you,” said one “Big Three” engineer who would rather not be named, “that critical stalling will happen sooner or later to every 73 built. When you pull into an intersection and stall and 50 m.p.h. traffic is coming at you

from both sides, that’s a safety hazard of the first order. The National Highway Safety Bureau might consider that.”

Mr Leslie Henry, the curator of the transportation collection in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, might be considered a man with some knowledge of cars. Mr Henry is convinced that the 72 models were the last good cars that will ever be built. So he bought three Mercury Comets at the end of the 1972 model run. He plans to store two of them until the first wears out, then drive the second until it dies and go on to the third, “cannibalising” spare parts from the others.

He calculates that that! way the three Comets will last his lifetime. When the Model T Ford went out of production in 1927, he says: “A fellow in Toledo bought six of them. He finally wore out the last one in 1967.” — Newsweek Feature Service.