Kontextmaschine

20th March 2013

Post with 124 notes

Oh, I was complaining about Harleys being a crappy legacy design? Man, let me tell you about the most terrible American motor vehicle ever. An absolute abortion of a car that managed to combine the worst of both legacy design AND innovation. A car I had the dishonor of actually owning once for like a month.

I speak, of course, of

THE PONTIAC FIERO

Let’s start from the beginning. The Ford Model T. 1200 pounds, 2.4L engine, 40 horsepower. Ever since then, American cars got steadily bigger, heavier, and more expensive.

This is actually a known tendency of all vehicle lines (and software, and animals), as upgrades and new features keep being added. Light tanks evolve into heavy tanks, fighter planes become attack bombers, weight and expense and support requirements increase until a new, leaner model has to be developed to fill the old one’s original role. Top-of-the-line car models are very often the entry-level model of 20 years prior. And that’s assuming the new models work which, as we’ll see, is its own crapshoot.

(For example the F-22 and -35 fighters, ridonculously expensive, still barely functional planes that’ve been in development forever, intended to replace the teen-series fighters of the late ’70s and ’80s that were designed to win Vietnam. By the time, if ever, they get ironed out they’ll be surpassed by remotely piloted drone fighters, the countermeasure to which will be to interrupt their communication links, the counter-counter to which being drones programmed with autonomous flocking behavior, at which point the programming will become the vulnerability and that, my friends, is how Judgment Day is going to go down. But I digress.)

And that mostly worked. Cars got bigger and heavier, but they got bigger engines to compensate, roads and driveways grew wider, and any increases in manufacturing costs tended to be tempered by the efficiencies of economies of scale, as Detroit sold vehicles to everyone in the (First) world.

The problem came in the 1970s, as America receded from the world’s greatest oil producer and exporter to a net importer, which combined with the shocks from the two Arab oil embargoes made fuel efficiency a big thing, and American cars were shit for fuel efficiency.

Same time, the manufacturing sectors of Japan and northern Europe, reduced to rubble by aerial bombing in World War II, had rebounded with up-to-date technology, with smaller designs for home markets in which fuel costs had always been high. For the first time ever, foreign competition became a major threat.

(“Technology” here wasn’t only material but procedural. Even in the late ’60s, Japanese machine tools weren’t as good as American, but the American volume-focused industry induced and accepted a lower level of quality. A given part secured by four bolts would be designed on the assumption that  they were of an average quality of around 3, on a scale of 1 to 5, with at most one 2. More expensive models would use more higher-ranked parts, and only premium sporting packages would use all 4s and 5s. Japanese manufacturers, in contrast, scrapped anything below 4.)

America made compact cars before. “Pony cars” of the 1960s were popular two-seaters, compact for their day, but they relied on a high power-to-weight ratio achieved by using large but otherwise typical engines (“no replacement for displacement”), which solved exactly none of the problem.

The first attempts, in the 1970s, to build a light, cheap, fuel-sipping American car were considered horrible failures. The Chevrolet Vega was riddled with defects; the AMC Gremlin was known as puttering, unsafe, and ugly; attempts to squeeze parts into the compact Ford Pinto while keeping costs - and thus price - low left the design with reputation for catching fire in minor collisions. In each case, failure was attributed to a design philosophy of building compact cars as if they were standard-size, just — less. So,

THE PONTIAC FIERO

was the product of a plan to conceive and design an American compact from first principles. It wouldn’t be the roomiest or most tricked-out, but it would be a stylish, functional, affordable “commuter car” - a second car for suburban blue-collar families, or maybe a first new car for young working men, competing with import offerings like the Honda Civic or Volkswagen Bug.

The Fiero’s design centered on two major innovations. The first innovation was a mid-engine, rear-wheel drive (MR) layout, popular in Italian sports cars of the time. Placing the engine behind the passenger compartment cut the weight, parts cost, and manufacturing expense of a front-to-rear transmission linkage. It also allowed the car to sit lower to the ground and moved the center of gravity rearward while increasing downforce on the drive wheels, all improving handling.

The second innovation was the use of modular plastic (rather than integral metal) body paneling, which reduced total weight and made manufacturing a bit more efficient. This, combined with the rear-engine layout, also made the car a popular platform for aftermarket body kits. A lot of sexy foreign sports cars you saw in the ’80s, both on the streets and especially in movie stuntwork, were secretly Fieros under the hood.

Now a car built around these design innovations had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the Fiero was not that car. GM executives took the design, and attempted to build it out of parts from the existing GM supply chain.

This meant that not only did the Fiero inherit a lot of problems from the existing Detroit system, it pioneered some whole new ones. To begin with, standard frames were designed on the assumption that paneling would bear and transmit some of the twisting force through the body. When this didn’t happen with the Fiero, turning the handling to shit, a series of metal cross-braces were bolted to the frame, which added the saved weight right back.

Second, the convenient thing about mounting an engine in the front of a car is that it’s directly exposed to cooling air flow. You’ll notice that the GT40 and classic Italian sportsters tend to have air scoops on the sides or roof, and sinuous bodies to sculpt the air flow. The Fiero had one pathetic flush vent on the side, and a massive radiator system mounted under the hood, with coolant lines running back to the engine.

This added complications (for example, when you added coolant under the hood, you had to open a second valve under the trunk to “burp” the air out of the pipes) and largely canceled out the weight, parts, and manufacturing efficiencies achieved by simplifying the transmission. Between the re-added weight and the commitment to use stock parts, the planned high-efficiency engine was swapped for a 2.5L engine which didn’t fit in the engine compartment, so the oil capacity was chopped down to a liter under design parameters, which didn’t help much with heat problems. Wikipedia says that only 0.07% of Fiero engines caught fire, which is 0.07% more than I’ve ever seen any other article mention. Even then the engine was considered weak and a popular option was the 2.8L V-6 upgrade, which defeated the whole goddamn point of the design.

Also, with both the front and rear taken up by machinery, there was almost no storage space. There was an area in the rear that could fit a flat-screen TV, if such a thing existed in 1984, or maybe one small suitcase. Even the glovebox was strangely cramped, and there wasn’t even any space either behind or underneath the seats.

Which I guess is for the best, because that’s where the electrical system was. With the engine and battery in the back, the front lights and instruments had to be wired the length of the car. This also recomplicated manufacture, and certainly did nothing to discourage electrical problems.

In my Fiero, sometimes if you sat down into the drivers’ seat strong enough, the lights would come on before you stuck the key in. When you stuck the key in, some of the instruments would start working, and which ones each time seemed to depend on a combination of what order you flipped switches in and random chance. The battery would die if you left it alone for four days, and the release for the rear hood, where the battery was, was electrical. Which was only a problem if, say, the key snapped off in the manual lock, which mine did.

I bought mine off the street from a craigslist ad for $400, which fair enough, owned it for three weeks, drove it maybe 50 miles, had it die on me three times, twice on the freeway, towed twice, sold for scrap for $75. I had a 1984, which was the first model year, so in fairness maybe things got less terrible. But still. It’s this kind of bullshit that made John DeLorean and any self-respecting designer give up on GM, it’s this kind of bullshit that gave American small cars a reputation as crap. (By the mid-90s they were okay, but still not a great value.)

Man fuck

THE PONTIAC FIERO

Tagged: pontiac fierofiero