Automotive Power Plays: Those Radical ‘50s

At the beginning of the 1950s, the average US car produced 117 horsepower; by the end, it generated 260. Vive la révolution!

by Lance Ealey

The jalopy that sits in your driveway is the product of a savage kind of industrial Darwinism that began in the nineteenth century and continues to this day. The goal of this contest has always been the same: winning the right to define the automobile’s current archetype (or paradigm), which involves how each of the many inventions that make a car possible fit together.

Why cars share key characteristics

Some elements of this archetype have endured for a hundred years or more. They’re the reason cars usually have four wheels in four corners, an engine in the front, doors on the sides, a passenger compartment in the middle and a trunk in the back, and why the front wheels always steer. They’re why most American cars have automatic transmissions but European ones feature manual (or clutchless manual) gearboxes, and why certain options, from power door-locks to windows controls, have become de rigueur while others such as four-wheel-steering landed in the ashcan of history.

Some of these elements have changed significantly over the years. Suspensions, for example, have evolved from simple systems with solid rubber tires and no shock absorbers to the current sophisticated designs because people got tired of having to count their teeth every evening after a ride to make sure none had bounced loose. These wobbly-toothed riders have played an outsized role in this battle since customer demand powerfully shapes the vehicle archetype.

Sometimes, however, mere consumer demand—even if overwhelming—fails to have a lasting impact. Take the Ford Model T. Produced from 1908 to 1927, the Model T’s cumulative production run totaled nearly 15.5 million units. But look inside a Model T’s passenger compartment and you’ll see a weird combination of levers and pedals that bear little resemblance to today’s control configuration. The forward gear selector is where today’s clutch pedal would be, the reverse selector is in the brake pedal’s position, and the brake pedal sits where the throttle should be. The throttle is on the steering column across from the spark advance lever, and to put the car in neutral you pull the handbrake all the way back. Why? While Henry Ford was eccentric, he wasn’t crazy—his use of a planetary gear transmission in the Model T necessitated this Rube Goldberg-like design. Since few other carmakers adopted planetary transmissions, the T’s influence on the rest of the industry in terms of vehicle controls was nil, even though millions of then-contemporary consumers learned to drive exclusively using the Model T’s control configuration.

In the 1950s, the big archetypal change involved the engine. At the start of the decade, Ford was still installing its old-timey flathead V-8 engine in cars and pickup trucks. Introduced in 1923 in the Ford Model A, the company only reluctantly stopped using it in 1953 in its US product line. Still, you must credit Henry Ford with creating the first V-8 for the common man, and he did it by obsessively focusing on eking every penny of waste out of the product and its production process. What’s more, he overdesigned the engine so much that it could easily handle virtually anything the drag racing community bolted onto it. It was the reason Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame took time out from jacking up banks to send a letter to Henry Ford praising the Model A: “I have driven Fords exclusively when I could get away with one.”

Starting with Ford’s flathead throwback

While it started with the throwback Ford flathead V-8, by the time the decade ended a major revolution had occurred. Back in 1935, the average American car generated about 25 gross horsepower per liter of engine displacement. By 1950, it produced just under 28 hp/L—three piddling more horsepower per liter in 15 years. The engineers responsible for engine power seemed to be on permanent vacation. Then it jumped to 39 hp/L in 1955 and bounded again to almost 49 hp/L in 1958—double 1935’s average performance. In terms of absolute power, between 1935 and 1950, the average increased only 7 hp, from 110 to 117 hp, but then it exploded to 260 hp by 1958. Clearly, something profound was happening to US automobile engines; something that made it possible for automakers to dial up the available power for Mr. and Mrs. America to formerly unimaginable heights. That something involved both new blends of gasoline and redesigned engine combustion chambers.

Gasoline engines create power by compressing a charge of air and fuel and igniting it, which causes it to go off like a hand grenade. This rapid (but controlled) gas expansion pushes the piston down on a power stroke, and the more you compress the air/fuel mixture, the more power it produces. There’s a catch, though. Without the right kind of fuel or combustion chamber configuration (e.g., one that “swirls,” “squishes” and “tumbles” the air/fuel mixture), higher engine compression ratios will cause the engine to “knock.”

Also called pre-ignition or detonation, knock occurs when the air/fuel mixture ignites in an unsynchronized way, which can damage mechanical components and depress power output. Anyone who’s ever owned a mid- to late- 1970s-era American car likely knows engine knock on a first-name basis, because the industry lacked the technology it needed to meet new emissions standards while also ensuring smooth performance. Instead of shutting down when you turned the ignition key off, for example, pre-ignition caused cars of the era to gag, sputter and wheeze for extended periods like cats coughing up Cadillac-sized hairballs.  

Pre-ignition occurs at higher compression ratios because the act of compressing air heats it up, increasing the chances that the compressed hot air itself will automatically ignite some of the air/fuel mixture separate from the spark plug. When this happens, the two flame fronts collide in the combustion chamber, often making an audible “ping” or knock. The problem, paradoxically, is that the gasoline of the time burned too fast. Intuitively, that doesn’t make much sense. Some would probably assume that you wanted gasoline that burned as fast as possible to keep up with the new high-revving, high-performance combustion process, but the opposite is true: high compression engines need slow-burning gasoline. The measure of how quickly a blend of gasoline ignites is its octane rating. Again, somewhat counterintuitively, a lower octane rating means faster burning, while a higher one signifies slower burning.

Charles Kettering, General Motors’ resident engineering genius since 1920, had been experimenting with ways to reduce engine knock for years by raising the fuel’s octane rating. Adding in ethanol solved the problem nicely, and even introduced some “extra” oxygen into the mix that improved combustion. But no ethanol production infrastructure existed and the additive had other problems as well. In the mid-1920s, the industry began adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline in a one thousand to one ratio to boost its octane rating—a poor choice given the health problems associated with lead poisoning. In any event, leaded fuel helped the industry to boost octane levels to a degree, but this change alone did not move the needle much on engine power. The big breakthrough came during World War II, when gasoline refineries began producing 100-octane aviation fuel. In the 1910s and ‘20s, the typical octane rating was probably 50 or 60, which made 100-octane a very big deal when introduced. In fact, Charles Kettering at GM used high-octane fuel in the late 1940s to develop an experimental inline-6 overhead valve engine with an at-the-time incredible compression ratio of 12.5:1, nearly twice the average for US cars. The engine generated significantly more power and its overall fuel economy went up as well. Among corporate gadabouts, this is the very definition of the term “win-win.”

GM’s V-8 advantage

Using Kettering’s designs as a template, GM began to introduce a series of high compression, overhead valve V-8s in 1949 and continued to upgrade its engines throughout the decade. Other US automakers followed suit, and by 1959, the average domestic car compression ratio had jumped from 7.0:1 in 1950 to 9.3:1.

This boosted power significantly; so much so, in fact, that it changed the automotive gestalt in profound ways. At the end of World War II, the average domestic sedan produced about 3.3 horsepower for every 100 pounds of weight it lugged around. By the mid-‘50s it was making 6 horsepower per hundred pounds, and by the end of the decade, 7.2. This power-to-weight transformation heralded an age of gigantism in the US auto industry. Now cars had power to burn, enabling them to grow to Jurassic proportions and accommodate more power-consuming features like automatic transmissions and air conditioning. Kettering, a practical Ohio farm boy, saw his discovery as a way to boost the average car’s efficiency and fuel economy, but the industry had other plans. Vehicle power-to-weight ratios for US domestic cars had been dropping since the mid-1930s as automakers continued to make their cars bigger and heavier but engines remained relatively feeble. The new high-compression engines quickly reversed this trend, providing more than enough oomph for every powered seat, window, door lock, headlamp dimmer, air conditioner, brake system, and steering unit that the fevered brains of car company marketing types could dream up.

The developments that occurred in the 1950s set American cars apart from those produced in the rest of the world for the next twenty years. No similar transformation happened in Europe or elsewhere, in part because these regions often taxed fuel at much higher rates, making the classic American boulevard barge too expensive to operate. In 1955, for example, the price of a gallon of gasoline was over three times as high in Britain as it was in the US.

 In 1951, the typical European car produced 75 hp and by 1959 it generated only 6 hp more. Comparatively, European cars remained small and underpowered: in 1951 they made 3.6 hp per 100 lbs., and by 1959 that number actually dropped to 3.4 hp. Another consequence was that the Europeans didn’t introduce air conditioning or automatic transmissions in anything like the same volumes as the US, because their cars lacked the power to operate these features effectively. What’s more, Americans had grown rich in the post-war years compared to populations in other countries, enabling far more consumers to own homes and buy new cars, even ones a lonely pterodactyl might ask out on a date. 

US cars stand alone

The horsepower and size gap between US and European cars grew into a chasm as the decade progressed. The little horizontally opposed four-cylinder engine that powered the Type-1 Beetle and the inline four-cylinder engines favored by most British sports cars stood increasingly apart from the larger inline six and V-8 powerplants that moved Detroit’s metal. America’s lead in the horsepower race appeared absolute: in contrast, at the end of the 1950s, after witnessing the orgy of power taking place in the colonies, the suits at the British Motor Corporation raised the MGA’s displacement by 100cc, adding a measly 10 hp to the car’s already underpowered engine and called it a jolly good show.

Beyond such resolute stupidity, however, some legitimate considerations limited Europe’s embrace of Big Power. The German OEMs, for example, clearly sought balance over the exaltation of a single vehicle attribute. British sports cars, on the other hand, faced a unique engine-related impediment: the infamous Royal Automobile Club (RAC) horsepower tax. The RAC horsepower rating system, established in 1910 in the UK, involved a simple formula for assessing a vehicle’s horsepower based on the dimensions of the engine’s cylinders. The RAC originally developed the calculation to help consumers determine how much power a specific car produced. And it did actually come close to estimating actual engine horsepower. However, after the government hijacked it in 1920 to form the basis of a tax, engine designs and metallurgy improved, and a tenfold gap emerged between tax hp and actual power. Worse, because the tax only took bore area and number of cylinders into account, it distorted British engine designs, causing companies to choose small bores but extremely long strokes, which provided the same swept area as a big bore/regular stroke engine would, but often resulted in suboptimal performance.

Meanwhile, the Big Three had to scramble to upgrade components such as brake systems suspensions, chassis configurations and wheel/tire combinations to handle all the extra grunt their engines produced. (They apparently succeeded though, since automotive fatality rates dropped throughout the decade.).

Nonetheless, the steroidal effects of the under-hood revolution that occurred in the US in the 1950s changed the way American drivers thought about automotive power. It ultimately gave rise to the muscle car phenomenon of the 1960s, just in time for the massive Baby Boomer generation to volunteer to drive them without the required skills or training. In that largely pre-emission control decade, horsepower was a cheap date. The 1964 Pontiac GTO produced nearly 350 gross horsepower; the 1968 Dodge Charger R/T generated almost one gross horsepower per cubic inch of displacement out of its 426 Hemi V-8. Dumping all of that power into a 1940s- or ‘50s-era chassis design and then handing the keys to a pimply-faced teenager now seems just a small step shy of filicide. Statistics tend to support this argument. While US auto fatalities did trend downward during the 1950s, the 1960s experienced a sharp increase in crash-related deaths. They remained high until the oil crises of the 1970s and tough new emissions laws forced automakers to detune engines significantly, effectively ending the original muscle car era.

While many automotive historians have criticized the US car market of the 1950s as a triumph of corny styling over substance, the decade represented the culmination of several long-evolving trends that together lifted the automobile to an entirely new level of performance.

Note: I independently undertook the analysis presented here. Collecting the data required long sessions in the library of the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, where I thumbed through old Ward’s Automotive Yearbooks and other sources. Check it out!

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