Less Horsepower and More Fun?

Cars – in general – were more fun when they were much less powerful than they are now. This is not nostalgia for the past. It is a measure of the bleakness of the present. Most new cars – most of which are crossovers now – have more power (and are quicker to 60 MPH) than most of the performance cars of the ’70s.

Which are more fun to drive?

A ’78 Mustang Cobra’s 5.0 liter V8 made less power than most current 2.0 liter turbo fours, but the Mustang had a personality, something no new crossover appliance has. A little pickup truck from the early-mid 2000s such as my 2002 Nissan Frontier has less than half the horsepower a 2026 Frontier’s got – but my truck has a manual transmission, which you can’t get in the new Frontier.

Which is the more fun to drive?

Why is the Mazda Miata considered one of the most fun-to-drive cars ever made? It does not have a lot of power – the current Miata’s four cylinder engine touts just 181 horsepower, which is several hundred fewer horsepower touted by the “electrified” Dodge Charger. Which is more fun to drive? The answer can be gleaned from the fact that Mazda sold about 20 times more Miatas in 2025 than Dodge sold “electrified” Chargers. An interesting thing about the Miata is that it has about the same power – and offer about the same performance, in terms of acceleration, as one of my most favorite fun cars, the mid-late 1970s Pontiac Trans-Am and its Chevy sibling, the Camaro Z28. These typically same with V8s that offered up about 180-220 horsepower, max.

What’s especially interesting is that both sold in volume – as in more than 100,000 of them annually. Even though they were – like the Miata – not particularly practical (ot speedy) cars.

So why did they sell so well? For the same reason the Miata sells. They were – and are – fun.

A great mistake has been made – by the car industry – in equating power (and power alone) with fun. This is especially obvious with EVs, which sell so poorly the government has to bribe people to buy them. This is so even though many EVs tout “ludicrous” speed. It is a kind of sugar rush in that dissipates quickly, leaving you sleepy (and bored). Do you remember the first time you rode up in a high-speed elevator such as the ones they have in skyscrapers? The first – and maybe the second time – it has the excitement of a new experience. The more you experience it, the less the excitement. By the fifth or six time, you just get in and push the button. It’s as exciting as yawning.

The government never had to bribe people to buy Trans-Ams and Z28s back in the ’70s and ’80s – or Miatas even since the ’80s all the way to the present (Mazda introduced the Miata was back in ’89; it has been in continuous production since then). These cars are desirable cars and they are desirable because they were – and still are – fun. As readers of my stuff know, I still have a ’70s Trans-Am and even though it is completely outclassed by a new Corvette, which do you think is more to fun drive? The Corvette – like the high-speed elevator – is initially breathtaking. But because it is focused so much on numbers, it is less fun to drive than a ’60s or ’70s Corvette is merely to look at. The latter turn heads.

The new Corvette doesn’t.

VW used to sell millions of Beetles and Beetle-derived vehicles such as the Microbus, Karman Ghia and oddities such as the Thing (yes, really). Even though these VWs were underpowered and slower than a Geo Metro – which is to say, really slow – people loved them. Ask anyone who owned one. They will almost certainly smile as they tell you stories about their car. Does anyone smile when they tell you about their crossover appliance? Do they even have stories?  Even though a late-model crossover typically has three times (or more) the power and gets to 60 in half the time it took a Beetle to get there?

It speaks for itself, does it not?

So what would make cars more fun again?

A good start would be making them more fun to look at again. Getting the government out of designing new cars via the regulations it lays down that have homogenized the way new vehicles look would allow for the creative expression that used to make cars interesting and even exciting to look at. Cars made 60 years ago are remembered today.

Does anyone remember the appliances made ten years ago? Or five?

Making them functionally interesting would be the next step and – once again – getting government out of the way would make it feasible for car companies to (once again) offer new designs that differed from the homogenized, 2.0 liter turbo fours that have become the almost universal thing you find under the hood today. In the past, you might find the engine in the rear. It might be air cooled. Maybe it didn’t even have pistons (e.g., a rotary engine). Let the engineers use their imaginations and let the market rather than the government decide what people want. The same goes for “safety.” Let the people buying cars decide whether they want air bags and back-up cameras and so on.

Instead of one-size-fits-all, we might once again have the panoply of personality that made cars interesting, even exciting and certainly more fun than the dreary, Sovietized appliances foisted on us today via the government.

. . .

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