As the inventor of the term "Malaise Era" for the period of motor-vehicle construction spanning the 1973-1983 model years, I bring up the 1973 and 1979 Oil Crises with great regularity in my writing. My childhood experiences with the anxiety of gas lines in both years had a lifelong effect on me, as I learned during the Colonial Pipeline madness of a couple of weeks back.
When the ransomware baddies struck and gas lines formed in the Southeast, I had just driven my 1997 Lexus LS400 Coach Edition from Denver to Door County, Wisconsin (yes, I photographed the car in the Wisconsin woods with a 1952 Pho-Tak camera loaded with Rollei Infrared film, because that's how I do car photography whenever possible). Despite the fuel shortages taking place more than a thousand miles from me, I felt a cold stab of fear through my heart: what if I can't get gas to drive home?
That's because I was seven years old when OPEC turned off the oil spigot in the fall of 1973, and my family had just moved to Northern California in the previous winter. My parents had a very thirsty 1973 Chevy Sportvan Beauville and a pair of economical-but-flaky 1973 Fiat 128s (nearly the cheapest new cars available at the time).
Each parent had a fairly long work commute at this time, in different directions, and so filling the gas tanks became a source of great stress in late 1973. The Beauville got single-digit fuel economy, flirting with 10 mpg only when going downhill with a tailwind, and so it had priority when word came through the grapevine that a gas station had the precious go-go juice in stock.
They'd get a call from a friend or coworker, usually at about 3:00 AM, and they'd burn rubber in the Beauville plus one of the Fiats to the allegedly fuel-stocked gas station. The lesson I learned from this: never run low on gas!
Six years later, the Iranian Revolution caused even rougher fuel shortages in the United States. I was 13 at that point, just a year from buying my very first car, and my family still had the Beauville. The Fiats were long gone by then, replaced by a thoroughly miserable Ford Granada, and this time residents of many states experienced the dreadful "odd-even" days for fuel purchasing, in which the final character of your license-plate number determined whether you could even try to purchase high-octane gazoline.
When I started driving on my own in 1982, I always carried a full can of gas in the trunk… just in case. Spectacularly dangerous as this was, it seemed a necessity when some faraway geopolitical event could take away your fuel. I continued doing this throughout most of the 1980s, though a couple of can-leaking incidents in my Competition Orange '68 Mercury Cyclone eventually cured me of this idiotic practice.
Will I get a low-mile Geo Metro XFI (the most recent new car with under 50 horsepower available new in the United States) in the wake of the latest gas-line incident? A horse? Probably not, but rooftop solar panels and an EV seem more appealing by the day.
