Remembering the 1973 oil crisis

I was only 12yo in 73' so I don't really remember much about that one other than the economy went to shite (we were worried my dad wold lose his job) and my mother was was constantly turning down the thermostat that winter! They were tough time for sure...

In 79' I was a senior in HS and had a 1972 Datsun PL521 Puckup truck. It was a four banger and was good on gas and had the benefit of a small gas tank. But I do (un)fondly remember waiting on 1+ hour gas lines on the odd-even days after school. That truck was very light (and being a healthy 18 yo football player) I used to leave the engine off and pop the manual transmission onto neutral and just push the truck from the door frame up the line as we inched closer to the gas station.

Ahhhhh... the bad old days!

 

Bought my '78 Chevette new back then for a little over $3,000 because of the MPG's it supposedly did and the prices of gas at the time. Worst crap car ever. I never experienced gas lines more than ~3 cars in length in 79. Maybe I shopped at completely off hours.

 

In those days, we did not have flex time at work. Everyone came to work at 8AM and went home at 5PM. We car-pooled to work until flex time schedules became popular, I do not know mid 1980's or so. Once flex time was allowed, lot's of folks wanted to come to work early and go home earlier. People did not travel quite as much. So it was relatively easy to work around the disruption, best I can recall. I wasn't working until '75.

So credit lack of flex time as saving the day up to 1979.

 

Not true. As a young teenager I spent every penny I had to purchase my gas-line Savior. No matter how bad the Chevy Chevette was, it was still light years ahead of the quality of the Chevy Vega. Shortly after its miserable 12 month warranty ended - it died at the crosswalk and never again saw another trip. Hey GM - thanks for the great gas saver. Not that I'm bitter
Should have kept my 16mpg Ford Econoline. With their commercial license plates - at least pickups and vans could get cheep gas any day of the week. Yes - it was cheap ... dirt cheap. It's just the oil embargo showed us how much more ridiculously cheep it had been, prior to the embargo. When I think of the early 1970's I think of how we went off the gold standard so we could forever continue printing fake paper money to pay for billions of gallons of fuel we've wasted on inefficient cars over the decades & how we forever keep growing the military industrial complex - it really gets disheartening. 40 years - and we're still doing 2 out of the 3 nation destroying behaviors. Will it be too little too late?
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I remember we bought a datsun 210 sedan, 4 door, automatic. the car got just over 20 mpg driving country roads. not a very good car. our 67 chevy 1/2 ton with 283V8 was getting 18 mpg doing the same trips. my brother bought the 210 with 4 or 5 speed, he was getting close to 30 mpg and that is why we got one. automatic was real bad on those little cars.

we didn't have cable TV. a microwave, and there was no home computer.

 

Just before the gas shortage hit, a woman (named Pina) in our office traded her Fiat 500 for an Olds Toronado. Needless to say, she was not impressed with the luxury.

Back then I was on my third Volkswagen. I can remember the long lines for gas, but I can't remember being in one of those lines. That may be one of the benefits of aging.

 

In '73, I was a 23 year old Marine who had just returned from a year overseas. I came back to find my VW microBus engine was burned up and spent a week rebuilding it before heading to my next duty station in Washington DC. But at the time, I had a physical fitness test every six months and mostly used a bicycle for ordinary commuting.

So I remember coasting by long lines at gas stations on the bike . . . smiling to myself that I was not in those lines. Curiously, if you got over 50 miles outside of the DC metro area, there were no lines. It seemed to be an 'urban problem' but I wasn't driving that much back then.

The bike was my primary transportation for school, groceries and commuting. A good back pack and 'rain suit' made it work.

Bob Wilson

 

Ouch!!

 

I bought a '76 Toyota Celica at Hollywood Toyota in 1976. They bought out the Pontiac/Olds franchise that was there previously. They still had a 73 Bonneville and 73 Olds 98 Brougham sitting in the lot. Wish I had grabbed both of them and put 'em in storage. They'd be worth a pretty penny today.

 

I turned 16 in 1973, and my first thought was "great, I get my drivers license and NOW the price of gas starts shooting up?!" But even through the bad economy, while in HS, I still could find part time work any time I wanted or needed to. I recall by 1978, gas started going over $.70 per gallon. I don't recall ever seeing rationing, growing up in the Denver, CO area but Vega's, Pinto's and eventually Chevettes were selling like crazy. I had all three, all with manual transmissions, and the best driving car of the bunch was the Pinto and the Chevette was the worst due to lack of power. I had no reliability issues with any of them. No a/c, no power windows, only AM/FM radio, and no cell phones - those were the days!

 

1973, I was 22, in the Air Force, stationed at Torrejon, Spain. Gas on base was plentiful, no lines, at 19 cents a gallon. Drove a 1972 Seat 850.

 

I was living in my first house, we had a new baby and I knew it was serious when cars were lined up in front of my house for a gas station around the corner and a block away. I do know I never ran our of gas, but I remember waiting a long time in lines to fill up my 71 Corolla (that car was the worst car I ever had). This Prius is a hell of a lot better!

 

Living in Long Island and still in High School I needed gas for my 69 Camaro. The best secret is the gas station on Wantagh Parkway before the Jones Beach Toll Booth was owned by the State of New York and they had gasoline every day. In many cases they limited you for a few gallons. Managed to get enough gas to go to school. I also did gas runs for my parents. I recall the roads being empty like a ghost town. It royaled the economy back than.

 

I was in High School in Kansas City, Missouri and driving my 1969 VW Beetle. I don't personally recall any real long lines but I do remember the nightly news showing long lines in other parts of the country.

I do remember that I could go a long way on $2.00 - $3.00 worth of gas in that Bug.

 

Same here. My area was rural without enough population to create a long line. We experienced no lines there, but saw very heavy news coverage of long lines elsewhere, and stations running out of fuel.

News also had multiple stories people's strategies for making long but necessary trips on days they couldn't legally buy gas under the odd-even rationing imposed in a few states. These are part of the reason I want a car with good fuel range, and want to know how far it will really go on a tank, beyond the low fuel warning. Sure, it is wise to fill up when the gauge is down to two pips, or even higher before those long no-service segments. But I vividly remember, through direct experience and from other's stories, multiple scenarios where fuel was subject to serious price gouging or simply not available.

 

Back in '73 I had a 1963 Corvair Monza Spyder, so I did pretty good with the gas rationing. The funny part was the lines for gas. I waited in one line for about an hour and a half and the people around me were sitting in their cars with the engine idling. The guy ahead of me had a beetle and we helped each other push our cars up when the line moved, so we wouldn't run our engines.

 

Ahh. yes GM's Corvair ... fond memories. I use to hotwire my moms' Corvair when they'd foolishly leave me @ home while they went on vacation. :-D
I gotta give GM prof's ..... For 1960's standards they sure figured out how to build a light weight vehicle. It was like a thin beer can on wheels. Then along came Ralph Nader ... Telling us they weren't safe. Baaahh - what does he know



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Thanks to Nader and his book, the Corvair stayed in production for three more years. It was to be discontinued after 1966 because the drivetrain couldn't be used cross line and its replacement was to be the Camaro. GM kept it going so it wouldn't look like Nader's book caused its demise. By the way, the book also trashed the Mustang and the VW beetle, but you didn't hear about that.

In 1971, the NHTSA investigated the Corvair and exonerated it from the charges in Nader's book. The report is still available.