CAFE was first passed in 1975 and didnt actually kick in until 1978.
Corporate Average Fuel Economy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
You can't blame it (directly) for the death of any of the classic muscle/sport cars you mentioned. It just piled some extra dirt on top of their corpses.
What killed the musclecars was a combination of higher gas prices, high insurance, the changeover to unleaded gas, and the increasing amount of emission controls. But none of those are CAFE.
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Originally Posted by FlashBazbo
You forget basic history (or maybe you're too young to have lived it). When current CAFE standards were first introduced, they DID eliminate cars like the Viper, Z06, GT-R, etc. No legal high performance car survived in the U.S. They killed Challenger, Barracuda, Z-28, Mustang (the horrid Mustang II was a CAFE special), Road Runner, GTO, Marauder, Cougar -- those very few performance cars that survived did so only by losing the performance. Raising the CAFE took us through a dark automotive age and it took over twenty years for technology to catch up and give us performance cars on the same level as we had before. During those dark years from the mid-70's, a 200-hp Corvette was considered a BIG deal just two years after they offered several Vette engines of over 400 hp.
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