As a 2017 edition of Wheels magazine proclaimed, the reason for the then rise of the SUV displacing everything else, was primarily because of one key reason - all y'all are fat¹. Between the average age of a new car buyer rising well beyond 50 and the increase in size of the average person from 59kg in 1960 to 76kg in 2017, people are simply fatter and not necessarily taller; so they want something easier to get n and out of.
Since 2017, the pandemic has been and gone, and the car makers have decided to stand on the throats of the car buying public, as they prefer to sell 2x $30K cars rather than 3x $20K cars. Why go to any effort at all to sell cheaper cars, when your more expensive cars can have maybe a buck and a half worth of improvements to bring in five bucks extra in revenue.
The story of businesses doing squat all to comply with changes in technology and/or regulations, is not a new story at all. Indeed when Alfred P Sloan cam up with the idea of the 'Model Year' in the late 1930s, it was purely to create anxiety in the consumer so that they would buy new cars more often to keep up with fashion. In consequence, by the 1950s when cars looked more and more garish, the actual improvements under the sheet metal was glacial. Most cars in the United States still had not even adopted what we would consider basic technology and building methods such as unibody construction, front wheel drive, and disc brakes; all of which were standard on the Citroen Light 15 in 1936. Twenty years later, the build quality of the famed 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, was objectively rubbish; even by standards of the 1930s.
So when the California Smog Acts of 1967 and the Oil Crisis of 1973 came along, it should surprise exactly nobody that the big automakers in the United States responded as they always had done; by doing squat all. When federal emissions standards came along with the invention of the Environmental Protection Agency, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, were all happily producing outdated dinosaurs; when smaller cars from Europe and Japan, including from those car makers own overseas catalogues, made the Big Three look like foolish fools.
Perhaps the most symbolic demonstration of the United States' general malaise and particularly the Japanese' car makers ability to actually build something of quality, was the first generation Honda Civic. It along with the KE10 Toyota Corolla, further made the Big Three look like a bunch of jackasses and when a mid-level manager at General Motors during a press conference, was asked by a member of the press as to why the Honda Civic could meet fuel efficiency and emissions standards, when the 1973 Chevrolet Impala could not, he responded with thinly veiled racism.
Racism, corporate hubris, and sheer stubborn stupidity are hardly the stuff of legend, but this is where the groundwork to our tale begins. At this press conference in which the man in the grey GM suit tried to brush off the 'yellow peril' as being unimportant, the manager at General Motors explained while that the CVCC² technology which Honda were employing on the Civic worked perfectly well on their "toys", it could not possibly work on a proper car like the Chevrolet Impala.
"Well, I have looked at this design, and while it might work on some little toy motorcycle engine, I see no potential for it on one of our GM car engines, he said. Yep, another serving of the same old sh…stuff: haw haw haw, get a real car, haw haw haw."
- Richard Gerstenberg, GM manager
The 1973 Chevrolet Impala had a wheelbase of 121 inches, and had a choice of engines from the 250cid Inline-6, and a 350cid, 400cid, and 454cid V8. This is not a small car by any stretch of the imagination. I used to own a W116 Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL 6.9, and that car which at the time was the most expensive car in the world was still small than the Impala and the V8 up front was only 418cid.
Enter Soichiro Honda himself. Soichiro Honda was an engineer. Soichiro Honda was a cavalier. Soichiro Honda was an abject mad-man; who even made his way down to the factory floor, just to ride the motorbikes and drive the cars that his company was producing because as he saw it, if they weren't good enough for him, then they weren't good enough for the general public and he wanted repeat custom.
In what has to be about most brilliant "go cuss yourself" moment in automotive history, Soichiro Honda found out about the General Motors' press conference in which his cars were being disparaged and he was mad; really mad.
He was so mad that he jumped on an ordinary economy flight to the United States, specifically to buy a bog-standard 1973 Chevrolet Impala with a V8 off of a showroom floor. He then had the car air-freighted back to Japan (because he could) and then immediately ordered his own engineers to do nothing to the car except built a set of bespoke CVCC heads for the car; of the same style and ilk fitted to the Honda Civic. He then had the same car air-freighted back to the United States, where he then delivered it to the Environmental Protection Agency in Ann Arbor; where having done nothing to the car but change the heads, it easily passed fuel efficiency and emissions standards. Not only did the car pass the EPA's standards, it did so without having to have a catalytic converter to it.
"I have made my point. I am done."
- Soichiro Honda
This where most retellings of the story end because every great story has an Act One beginning, an Act Two complication, an Act Three struggle, and an Act Four denouement and triumph. Job done. I am not happy with any of this because there are so many things left up in the air.
This car which purely existed for the sole purpose of being a spite car, and which made arguably one of the most pertinent points in the 1970s, was one of the single most important cars of the period; and we have no idea what happened to it. As far as Honda goes, Soichiro himself probably thought nothing of it because he had no use for the car being proving his point. The people at General Motors had no use for the car beyond being embarrassed by it. They certainly would not want to keep it and Honda absolutely would not give them intellectual property. The EPA had no use for the car because why would they? So where is it? Nobody knows.
As for CVCC technology itself - it no longer serves any real purpose. The advent of fuel injection, firstly mechanical and then electronic, completely obliterates the need for dual chamber valves in the intake manifold and direct injection means that the manifold itself changed all over again. General Motors never really learned anything; and just continued making increasingly rubbish engines until Vauxhall/Opel invented the Family 1 and 2, and they bought out Saab to steal direct injection proper. Honda continued to make all kinds of lovely high tech stuff; learning things from Moto GP and Formula One. So all of this means that the 1973 Chevrolet Impala with the Honda CVCC heads, is now just an appendix to automotive history and nobody knows where it went.
¹ no really, this is a thing: https://www.drive.com.au/news/plump-my-ride-designing-cars-for-fat-people/
² Honda and CVCC - https://global.honda/en/heritage/episodes/1972introducingthecvcc.html
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