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“If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend.” Doug Larson, author of Don’t Shoot the Decoys: Original Stories of Waterfowling Obsession.
21 Comments on “Quote of the Day: Did Cars Really Maintain That Gap Back Then Edition...”
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In today’s terms: If all the cars in the United States are placed end to end, it’s Monday morning.
Cars on the highway back then usually maintained a large following distance because the brakes were awful. One brake line. No power assist. Four-wheel drums. Constantly varying grip (or lack thereof) from one drum to the next while braking. 60-0 in several hundred feet. The old-school definition of pucker factor.
Lug Nuts, You nailed it. And I assure you, that traffic in the picture was doing no more than 45-50, because that old bus there couldn’t do more than that.
It’s why I still leave that kind of gap in front of my drum-braked ’66 Ford PU.
Miles of auto driving per capita:
1935: 1,960
1960: 4,000
2000: 9,770
+399%
People forget… todays Corolla has supercar performance compared to yesteryear’s cars. It’s one reason that all these safety devices haven’t had the benefits that the wonks predicted. People feel safer, more in control, so they drive fasster and closer than ever before. And do other crap while doing so!
Nobody wants to drive behind that bus; the nearest car is like 50 lengths away! No hyper-miling zone.
But seriously, to add to the braking note, I see every car is off center-lane as if to increase their vision/reaction time.
Interesting picture.
I find it hard to believe anyone in Mich. left a gap, even back in the day.
Another reason: the exhaust back then bordered on chemical warfare.
If you want a taste, go drive in Russia or the Middle East. Lots of blue (or black) smoking tailpipes. That’s on the clean cars. The dirty cars just belch like smoke bombs…
Just seems like everyone listened to the DOT back then.
Note too the black streaks running along the middle of each lane. Caused by oil/blow-by gasses in the days before PCV.
Jesus Christ guys, imagine riding a motorcycle back in those days, lots of oil in the center lane, horrible brakes, and god awful exhaust. At least the drivers do seem to be paying more attention back in the “good old days.”
And no anti-lock brakes, and no rack and pinion steering, no traction/or stability control, and no airbags or crumple zones or even seatbelts(!), all riding on marshmallow suspensions and bias ply tires. Carnage waiting to happen.
This photo is before my time, but I’m surprised they were even following as close as they were…daredevils!
About 20 years ago, I had a 29 Ford Model A. It got to where my wife didn’t even like to go out in it because everybody else on the roads kind of assumed that I had the same ability to stop as every other car on the road. But with the mechanical drum brakes and the skinny tires, I had more than one “jam on the brakes and pull the handbrake too” kind of moment.
Cars of that era were built for country or small town life of the 20s, not modern city/suburban motor warfare.
Watch this (and if you dare, the other 3 following parts too) and you’ll begin to understand why sane people drove better “back in the day”.
As someone else said; drum brakes (single brake circuit), bias tires (with tubes before new 1956 cars), 6 volt (dim) lights, marshmallow suspensions, and from 1955 – plenty of V8 power!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx-rXEdaGao
So nowadays, we have an alphabet soup of equipment and ingnoramises paying no damn attention.
@ menno…..You forgot to mention,vacum powered windshield wipers. Try climbing a steep hill in the pouring rain with an early Ford Falcon.
Besides what passed for automotive technology at the time (I still have memories of my 1937 Buick Special), there’s a few other reasons for such behavior:
1. People were a lot more polite and considerate back then. Social consideration for one’s fellow man was expected, not optional. And it was taught from a very early age.
2. Motorcycles before WWII: Not a factor. In the early 1940’s, total motorcycle registration was slightly under 100,000 for the entire United States, including police. Back then, if you saw a motorcycle in the rearview mirror, you automatically assumed it was a cop.
3. Just the same, riding them (unless you had a then-new Harley Knucklehead) was scary, with a level of technology not seen in automobiles since the demise of the Model T. Try: total-loss oil systems, hand pump for the oil, almost non-existent brakes, manual spark advance where you’d expect the throttle (the throttle was on the left hand grip). What I’ve just described is an Indian that would have only been six or seven years old in that picture.
4. Back to human nature: People were incredibly laid back compared to today’s attitude. Speeds of 50mph were considered quite sufficient. And . . . the highway authorities had a lot more faith in human nature back then. When the Pennsylvania Turnpike first opened (1940) there was no posted speed limit, nor was it intended there would be one. Only after discovering that modern tyres couldn’t hold up at sustained speeds of 80-100mph was a speed limit established.
5. Oh yeah, drivers were well behaved enough that you were allowed to stop and picnic in the median of the PA Turnpike, too. Assuming the divider was wide enough – on the rest of the turnpike there was no center rail between the lanes. Yeah, try that today.
My first drive on a divided highway,was my moms 64 chevy 3 on the tree. My dad,may he rest in peace,would flip out,if I dared to brake without depressing the clutch. Folowing too close was not an option.
Paul Niedermeyer
The other big dif between then and now is that there are more than twice as many people in the country. So betw the greatly increased miles per capita and the population explosion, the population density of cars on the road at any given moment is much, much greater. I don’t think paving has even kept up with the number of cars in the US (probably up from then by a factor of 3, but I don’t feel like looking it up right now), much less the fact that cars spend more time on the road driving all those increased miles.
My recollection of speed from the late ’50s through the ’60s was that my father virtually never exceeded 60mph, and that he was fairly typical on the highway.
I do remember being somewhat surprised when I drove across the country the summer of ’70, keeping the Falcon to 50 because it was old and I wanted to preserve it, that in the west, cars passed me at speeds I estimated went as high as 80. My family of origin visited Seattle (from Stanford CA) that winter, and I can remember feeling guilty as hell driving the new Plymouth Valiant at 70 on the freeway with my 8 year old sister in the car (my parents were at their friends’). I did take the Valiant up to 80 once on the Bayshore for maybe a minute, just to get a sense of what it could do. And I had once floored the previous parental car, a Peugeot 404, for a period of a few minutes, pushing it up slightly over 80. I guess those incidents weren’t associated with guilt becuase I didn’t have my sister along.
sfdennis1 :
September 7th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
And no anti-lock brakes, and no rack and pinion steering, no traction/or stability control, and no airbags or crumple zones or even seatbelts(!), all riding on marshmallow suspensions and bias ply tires. Carnage waiting to happen.
This photo is before my time, but I’m surprised they were even following as close as they were…daredevils!
That’s the first thing that went through my mind when I saw the photo… those are actually gaps?
Just three or four car-lengths… on drums? What bravado! no wonder America was a superpower back then… back when men were real men and cars were rolling coffins with lap belts.
The numbers speak for themselves–traffic fatalities from 1957 to 1997:
Annual US Highway Fatalities
The recent numbers show the trend continuing.
Fewer total fatalities in 2008 than in 1957, despite the much larger population and much greater number of miles driven. All that technology actually does something!
@niky: “…back when men were real men, and cars were rolling coffins with lap belts.”
You had lap belts if you were lucky!
My Dad buried them between the seat cushions so that they’d be out of the way for all seven of us. We had more than one neighbor who went even further, by cutting them out of their new vehicles.
In his memoirs, Lee Iacocca wrote of a letter he received from a disgruntled woman who owned a 1956 Ford, which was the model year in which the car company promoted safety with an optional “Lifeguard” package that included seatbelts. Her complaint was not that uncommon for the time: “The belts are uncomfortable to sit on!”
The pre-American Motors (1954 merger of Nash & Hudson), 1950 Nash Rambler compact was very ahead of its time in many ways, including the fact that it was a “dressed up deluxe” car including niceties standard – you know, stuff like a heater, and ventilation system.
It also had the worlds first (?) at least, American’s first ever standard equipment seat belts (pretty much patterned after airplane safety belts, as was the case until the 1960’s).
Nash executives (read: Mr. Mason, the CEO) wanted the car to be safer for the public. After seeing letter after letter from the (ignorant and ill educated) public saying that they felt the seat belts made them think the car was LESS safe, Mason relented and had them deleted as standard equipment, I believe before the 1950 model year was even finished.
Mason was actually a hell of a nice guy, a real man’s man; a sportsman (he helped start Ducks Unlimited, for one). He was also “rotund” and smoked cigars, which brought him to an early end just post-1954 American Motors’ merger. He died and his protege’, a certain George Romney, took over those oversized shoes at the top and brought American Motors to success and survival. Romney then went on to lead the state of Michigan as Governor, after which AMC slowly began to sink. And yes, Mitt Romney IS the son of the late George Romney.
Ahhh, the good old days…
I remember how I felt the day I discovered that three hard stops would totally fade the brakes on my father’s 1950 Packard so that I had all I could do to get it stopped a fourth time.