If you’re a car guy (or car girl) you probably know the opening monologue to Mad Max II (aka The Road Warrior). I, too, can remember. A time of less chaos; a time when America made some sense. An example comes to mind. You have to go back to another time – to crib a line from the monologue. To the mid-late 1980s. This was a time when you could have bought a brand-new Mustang LX 5.0 for about $7,100.
For those too young today to remember, Ford used to offer the Mustang GT’s performance equipment in a basic Mustang. The LX 5.0 was that Mustang. It had everything you got in the base, four cylinder Mustang – which was next to nothing, other than the shell and the glass and so on. But you did get the Mustang GT’s 5.0 liter V8, the five speed manual and the related mechanical upgrades, including the bigger wheels and tires, etc. You also got less weight – because the LX 5.0 didn’t have all the other stuff that came standard in the Mustang GT. So what you got was a quicker and less expensive Mustang GT in a plain brown wrapper (so to speak; the LX 5.0s were commonly white).
Inexpensive is more like it.
Adjusted for the diminished buying power of the dollar – what’s styled “inflation” – a brand-new ’86 Mustang LX 5.0 hatchback cost $16,817 in today’s devalued dollars. It bears reiterating: In 1986, you could have bought a V8 performance car for less than it costs today to buy a front-drive, four-cylinder shitbox (as Brock Yates styled them). But you do get a touchscreen and “advanced driver assistance technology” as a consolation prize.
By the way, the LX 5.0 was far from the only mass-market, V8-powered performance car people used to be able to buy. There was also the Pontiac Firebird Formula, which was a lower cost Trans-Am. As recently as the ’90s, GM sold V8-powered Impalas and they were family cars.
Well, what happened? Why is it that there’s no such thing – today – as an affordable V8 performance car? (The base price of a 2026 Mustang GT is $46,560.) Or an affordable V8-powered car, period?
There are several reasons why.
The first reason why has to do with “safety” costs, in particular air bags. The ’86 Mustang LX 5.0 did not have any air bags. It is important to understand that it is not just the air bags that add to the cost of a car. It is having to build the car around multiple air bags. It is not just a matter of putting an air bag into the steering wheel. It is a matter of designing the entire dashboard, the structure behind it and the entire car around the air bag system. This alone had added thousands to the cost of every new vehicle. It is also important to understand that vehicle without air bags are not unsafe. That is a hysteria fomented by bed wetters and control freaks. It just means they do not have air bags. It is a distinction that matters.
The second reason is that it got expensive – for the vehicle manufacturers – to mass market V8 performance cars. Or V8 powered vehicles, period. The more they sold, the lower their Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) numbers and that led to fines for non-compliance that had to be folded into the cost of the non-compliant cars. As time went on, another compliance cost got imposed. Carbon dioxide was declared to be a “pollutant” and thus subject to being regulated as an “emission.” There is only one way to decrease the “emissions” of carbon dioxide and that is by burning less gas. V8s burn more gas than small fours and that is why – for compliance reasons – the car companies no longer make mass-market V8 performance cars. The handful of V8 performance cars that are available – like the current Mustang GT – are affluent people’s cars.
It’s a weird Catch 22. The incentive – if you want to use that word in this context – is for the car companies to make fewer of the cars people want, such as affordable V8 performance cars and to stamp out as many four-cylinder/FWD shitboxes as possible.
Another example is the way manual transmissions are becoming exotic equipment, available only in a handful of vehicles and usually only in the high-trim/expensive versions of those vehicles; viz the 2026 Toyota Tacoma. It is available with a six speed manual, but only in one expensive trim. The rest are all automatic-only. Why? Because manual-equipped vehicles use a little more gas (and thus “emit” more gasses) and so the incentive is to build fewer of them, never mind whether there’s a market for them.
Will we ever again see a new car like the old Mustang LX 5.0 available for sale? It could happen. But not before everything changes and returns to the way it was, back then.
. . .
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I remember those days. But not fondly. I wanted a new notchback Mustang 4 cylinder, and couldn’t afford one because I was poor. Jobs were disappearing in the Rust Belt. Factories were closing by the hundreds. Layoffs were daily news.
The economy was changing back then. If you were already established in the old industrial economy, you could still do pretty well for yourself (if your factory hadn’t closed yet). If you were a new Gen X college grad, it was “Fuck you, kid.”
I personally knew Boomers a few years older than me, who graduated in the early to mid-1970s, who bought new cars with cash AND paid their college tuition by working summer jobs in construction or unionized auto plants. I personally knew people with degrees — one guy with a law degree — who stayed in construction for a few years after getting it because the money was better.
By the mid-1980s that was over. $3.35 was the minimum wage. Seven bucks an hour was a fortune. Affirmative action was starting to get difficult for us white boys at the time, too — insofar as anyone was hiring, they were practically begging for blacks and women. The NAFTA, negotiated by a Republican and signed by a Democrat in 1992, codified into law and cemented what had already been occurring for a decade — offshoring of jobs to the Third World, chronic trade deficits, annual budget deficits, and “bend-over-here-it-comes-with-no-lube” for the white working class.
After the 1980s, the way you got ahead in the financialized economy was to have a semi- professional dual-income household with few or no kids, preferably in the government sector where there were no layoffs and you could still get a pension and retire after 20 years (i.e., a cop and a teacher). Or you flipped real estate and got into stocks. Clinton and his hag wife epitomized this type of grift with the Whitewater and Rose Law Firm rackets.
But dual income households with disposable incomes pulled away from the working class and exacerbated wage-pull inflation. They were better able to afford consumer items while the working stiffs couldn’t.
I did have 1980 fox-body Mustang hatchback with a straight-six that I bought used for $800, though. I do remember that car fondly, if not the era itself.
Your historical recount of the period is spot on. Personally, I experienced the exact same thing. The 80’s sucked.
Add in the still present 55 mph speed limit being enforced now by more militarized police. The overt militarization of police accelerated in the 1980s under Raaaaaaayguuuun. I was a fool for voting for him. I shoula stayed home in 1984, not that it would have made a difference.
Eric made a statement in another article that things soured in teh 1980s. They sure did.
Coming from being a free trade Republican, my first brush with job loss, I became a full fledged economic populist
‘Not before everything changes and returns to the way it was back then.’ — eric
Eh, that never happens, except in our dreams. But if one applies the Fourth Turning analogy in an 80-year social cycle pointing back to the 1940s, the future might at least rhyme.
When WW II wound down in 1945, experts expected that millions of returning soldiers would swamp the economy with unemployment, as in the harsh deflationary recession in 1920 after WW I ended and Big Gov stimulus lurched to a stop.
This time, with much weaker US demographics, a killer recession could unfold when Trump’s stupid, evil war grinds to a halt. Depression I in 1929-1933 brought a big shakeout among auto makers, and a total rethink of automotive and aircraft design, launching both into their modern configurations.
Let it bleed.
Yeah, I feel like I’m going to be too weak and old to see anyhing resembling good. Are we in the crisis period yet?
1943-1964 High
1965-1983 Awakening
1984-2007 Unraveling
2007-present crisis?
This is based on Strauss and Howe’s, the worlds #1 demographers, recount of events. Correct me if I”m wrong.