It's the 3030s and everybody's thinking about well, not the automobile, because a lot of people are losing their jobs, a lot of people are losing their shirts and families are being torn apart.

Hell, people are even selling their kids at this point in time.

Yeah, yeah, you can send them through the mail and everything else, but the automobile was actually starting to transition by the late 20s.

We started seeing that, well, some of us only like to go somewhere with one other person.

We wanted some leisure time and we wanted to do a little more fast and a little bit more nimble than the standard automobiles that people gave us.

We wanted to have fun and that fun eventually would grow into a brand new segment of the automobile industry.

But today that fun industry is slowly dying out as people wait longer to get their license, don't see a need in a third vehicle and don't view the automobile as something fun anymore, thanks to new laws and regulations on the roads.

Yes, today we're talking about the sports car market, where it came from, where it was and what may happen to it in its future.

Welcome back to the auto looks podcast.

I am your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, mr everett j, coming to you from our host website at autoluxnet.

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So, like I said in the intro, the 1930s it wasn't really a time you're thinking about sports cars and individual automobiles.

Well, not everybody in the world, you have to remember there's still some people that had money.

Well, outside of north america there are lots of people with still money and economies that were still doing good.

During the 1930s we started to see the introduction of small little boutique builders building tiny little roadsters for us to go and have fun with.

Royals over in Europe wanted to go and cruise because the automobile was now considered part of their culture.

Everywhere you went, automobile was there and people didn't want to be chauffeured around all the time in these big limos or drive around in standard automobiles.

No, no, no.

They wanted to go out and have fun, and one country in particular really liked the idea of this, and with a lot of royals and a lot of dukes and duchesses and everyone else, they had a market for tiny little sports cars.

Companies like Riley, alfa Romeo and MG Morris Garage started building these tiny little sports cars for the upper class.

Now we all know what happened.

By the end of the 1930s and into the 40s, all hell broke loose over in Europe and as the Allies came in from countries like Canada, australia, new Zealand, hell, even parts of South America, and eventually, near the end of the war, after the Americans got bombed horribly in Pearl Harbor, they decided to finally join the war effort.

Now they came in with a big bang, they made a big bang and then they claimed they, you know, won it all for everyone, when really you showed up at the last minute, did a big blowout show and then walked away from it.

But while they were over in Europe they started noticing these small little sports cars, mgs especially.

They found them incredible.

Back in America nobody had these things.

Sure, we had the little Ford Model T Roadster, but we didn't have something like a little MG J2 midget or an N-Type or, hell, even the MGP-Type.

These were fun little cars to go scoot around the back country in, and as they saw these, they started realizing these are great, and some of them stayed in the European countries.

They utilized these little vehicles to get in and around and a lot of them started having them shipped home If they could.

You have to remember, not every single buddy could afford to send them home, so they put them on the boats and they shipped them back.

And, as we all know, after listening to our podcast about the Volkswagen Beetle, the Allies gained access to the Volkswagen machine shop and with that, volkswagen itself learned how to make these small, tiny little cars.

Well, the allies at that time America, canada, australia, great Britain, france, poland, finland we were all in it to help.

And by helping build back the Volkswagen manufacturing plant, we realized that small little vehicles like this, especially ones that could be fun on back roads, are something that people were looking at extensively.

Oh yeah, and the little MGs started making their way back to America, at that point in time the biggest single automotive market in the world.

Even to this day, the United States is still one of the top automotive markets in the world, fighting it out every single year with China, kind of back and forth in hell.

India is slowly moving in there and once they get their foot in the door and more people into the middle class, trust me, they're coming after that first place position as well.

But as of today, some of those markets don't have sports cars.

What happened, like?

Why did we lose our love affair with sports cars started coming out in the 1930s and by thes, when all these war heroes were coming home and they weren't able to afford to bring these vehicles back with them, they started demanding them from the car companies around us.

Hell, by the 1950s we had the Chevrolet Corvette and the Ford Thunderbird.

They were giving us what we saw on the other side of the world.

Unfortunately, they came with a lot bigger power plants than the ones we had on the other side of the planet and they were bigger than what we had, because in America, you know, bigger is always better.

Not necessarily.

You've had some great small car companies which you really didn't jump on the bandwagon with.

Come on, really.

But the little MGs came back and more people wanted them and they wanted to have fun.

Well, mg found a brand new market they could sell in bringing the company up.

Alfa Romeo started coming in with their tiny little spiders and by the mid to late 50s the sports car or essentially in America, the roadster rivals.

The British invasion of the roadsters started taking over American roads.

These sports cars were everywhere.

Everyone wanted them, people were able to afford them, jobs were everywhere and people were able to afford having a small fun car Not every single person out there, but still a lot of people.

So they all wanted these small little sports cars.

They wanted to have fun.

But eventually these would become Americanized.

On this side of the planet, on the other side of the world, in Japan, small little roadsters were coming out, same with in Great Britain, the European marketplaces, these miniature roadsters and small little sports cars that were amazingly fun on back roads.

And with the European marketplace and even Asian marketplaces having tight roads that have been around for thousands of years, we needed to fit these vehicles on them.

Something like a Corvette or a Thunderbird was out of the question.

Even today, if you listen to that, you know this whole tariff thing between Great Britain and America kind of worked out, as American vehicles won't be taxed in European marketplaces but Europeans will be.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

We need to sell more American cars in Europe.

You have to look at it at this standpoint.

Australia is a big market that the Americans could go after.

They like big vehicles, european marketplace, skinny little roads, towns that have been around for over a thousand years, with tiny little cobblestone parkways.

You ever wonder why the Fiat 500 was so big in those marketplaces, why something like the Alfa Romeo Spyder came from those markets.

In North America we look at these small little cars and we don't think anything of them.

And that became a problem later on.

The British invasion happened during the 1950s and into the 60s.

By the 1970s companies like Triumph and MG were starting to falter as the Americans were making waves with their muscle cars and the muscle car domination in the marketplace was taking fold.

By the late 60s and into the early 70s, big burly American power is what that market wanted.

These tiny little roadsters they didn't want.

So the sports car market started to retract.

But then, bam, middle of the 70s, we get hit with the oil embargo.

Gas starts drying up, america's running out and we need to find a new suitable place to get gasoline.

We eventually make our way into the Middle East and with it we get cheaper oil, we get the oil we need to power our vehicles.

And with that, well, let's just say the end of the big block era has come about.

Why the big American power and these big muscle cars start dying out in the 70s?

Well, the gas crisis hit them Big gas guzzling V8s.

Well, leaded fuel was a big thing.

Catalytic converters didn't come in.

But the Europeans and Japanese already realized they had a limited amount of fuel, so they needed to use it wisely.

These big motors couldn't fit on their big streets.

Insurance premiums were higher for big motors in a lot of their select markets.

Why do you think the Corvette never really took off in European marketplaces or Asian marketplaces?

That big block V8 is a gas peg and it's select markets in the world.

You're taxed on the size of your engine.

So having a tiny little four-cylinder you could beef that horsepower up to over 500 in no problem still qualifies for your four-cylinder insurance.

But that big block V8 didn't matter if it only had 150 horsepower underneath the hood.

But the big block V8 didn't matter if it only had 150 horsepower underneath the hood.

You were getting taxed Gas guzzling insurance rates.

So those big sports cars from America were not making it through.

The small little sports cars of the European and Asian marketplaces were making their way into the world and as people were still demanding these amazing little sports cars, the markets started to rebound by the late 70s and into the 80s.

We start getting the second coming of the sports car market with the gas embargo, brand new safety features and now specific fuel consumption ratings for vehicles being mandatory Even in America.

These small little sports cars from Asian and European marketplaces were going to have a second coming.

Sure, the Triumph TR7 was an ugly looking little sports car, but it was still cheaper on gas than your Corvette or your Mustang Hell.

Even by this time the Mustang had moved on to the Pinto platform, a smaller platform, gone back to its roots of being a small sports car and less of a power-hungry muscle car.

They still had the power-hungry Mustang II with the Cobra Jet engine in it, but it was still built off a Pinto platform.

And with that, ford released a four-cylinder in the Mustang.

But the four-cylinder, you may think.

Well, that's horrible.

You can't do that to the Mustang, it's going to kill its name off.

At this point in time, the gas crisis set in and not everybody being able to afford those big block V8s and filling them up.

People were looking at economy entries into the sports car game.

Where Ford hadn't done this, the Mustang could have dissolved from the marketplace completely.

Hell, the Camaro and Firebird managed to hold on, but even still dropping to six-cylinder engines as entry-level models was unheard of only a few years previous to that, dodge held out way too long and eventually killed themselves.

By having too many big, burly engines at a time when people started demanding smaller engines nearly bankrupt them.

Eventually they came back with some smaller engines and built themselves back up, and with that a partnership with another Japanese counterpart, mitsubishi, brought them a brand new formation of sports cars to the American marketplace.

Sports cars were back Late 70s.

People started seeing them as an added vehicle.

They're the ones that you wanted to get when you graduated high school.

You know the rich kids can go out and buy the big V8s, but we had to settle for the little four-cylinder Mustangs.

We still got a Mustang, but what did that do to us?

We couldn't afford to outright buy the big block V8 right out of the gate.

What we started doing is tinkering with the smaller engines.

They were more fuel efficient, which means we saved money on gas.

So that money we were saving on gas we decided to utilize that to add a little bit more power to our vehicles.

This helped give birth to the craze of the four-cylinder sports car generation In the 1980s.

Two-doors were all in, coupes were everywhere.

Hell, brand new marketplaces were coming out the mini sports market, japanese and even European marketplaces, the key car market that already existed before.

But now in North America we were starting to get into this.

Vehicles like the original MR2 and Nissan Pulsar, hell, even Hyundai with its original S Coupe and Geostorm were essentially mini sports cars.

They were for those entry-level people who wanted the look of a sports car but didn't have the money to afford a full-blown one.

From that we moved into what we called the sports coupe marketplace.

You're starting to get into things like the original Opel GTs, even the Plymouth Turismo and the rebirth of the Dodge Charger in the late 70s and early 80s.

It wasn't a sports car, it was a sports car coupe.

It was more of a coupe profile with a sports car image embraced upon it.

Getting things like a 40XP or even an Nissan Silvia was cool.

You had a cool car, but with that you needed something more and, like we said, people started adding more power to them, realizing they could get more power out of these cars.

But it's the 80s.

People who are coming back still want those big, burly V8s.

They want the muscle cars.

So the sports car market is there to get people through the door, because everybody wants a two-door.

You have to remember the Oldsmobile Delta 88.

They had a two-door variation of it.

Like, come on, this thing is a beast.

And there was a two-door model of it.

Yeah, we get it, it's not a sports car, it's a coupe.

But two doors were all the rage in the 80s and into the early 90s.

Every manufacturer had at least four variations of sports cars.

You have to remember toyota had the paseo, the mr2, the celica and then the supra hell, even honda.

They had the crx, the del sols and then the preludes preludes, a sports coupe, because you have the honda accord coupe and the honda civic coupe.

The prelude may have been built off their platform, but it was dedicated as a two-door with a coupe.

Look so it's a sports coupe.

These vehicles were coming out and giving birth to a brand new sports car generation.

Unfortunately, it would take until the late 90s before all the great vehicles of that time were finally recognized for how amazing they are.

Take Take a look today for a 1986 to 1989 Toyota Corolla GTS in North America.

The AE86s, the Trenos you know from that amazing show, initial D.

When I was in college you could pick one of those things up for like less than $1,500 anywhere Today.

Looking at them, you're lucky if you could find one under $10,000 because there's so limited amount of them.

These sports cars from that generation were big People at them.

You're lucky if you can find one under $10,000 because there's so limited amount of them.

These sports cars from that generation were big.

People loved them.

But they love them now.

They didn't love them then.

People bought them, drove them as their first vehicles until they can afford that Camaro, that V8 Mustang, until they can get the big, powerful cars.

And from there they slowly moved up the food chain getting Supras, getting 300ZXs.

They wanted those fast touring cars.

They didn't want those little chintzy sports cars that got us through the door.

The mini sports, the sports coupes and the sports cars.

They started disappearing.

But in 1989, one company showed us that there are still a market for entry-level mini sports cars.

When the Mazda Miata came out first generation blew up on the scene.

Everybody loved them and everybody wanted them.

This was a mini roadster that brought back the feeling of the MG in the 1950s, when we all fell in love with it.

This was it.

The Miata was going to take us through.

But the Miata essentially was an entry-level sports car, because from the Miata you went to the MX-3, the Presidia right, then you went to the MX-6.

Then you moved up to the RX-7s.

So you had to make your way up Nissan with its Pulsar, its Silvias, or, in North America, our 240SXs.

Hell, they had the 180SX for quite a while and then you moved up to the 300ZX.

If you lived in European marketplaces, then you would finally get to the top tier and get your GTR or Nissan Skylines.

We didn't get that in North America, but we got these tiny little sports cars.

Toyota gave us a two-door sport coupe version of the Corolla called the Corolla GTS, and I remember seeing these things at kids and thinking they're really cool, like it's a Corolla, one of those boring cars on the road, and now they've given it pop-up headlights, a sport profile and it's got an entry-level price that anybody can get into.

It was it.

It's a car that should have sold in mass quantity, just like the Hyundai S Coupe, just like the 240s.

People should have been buying them in droves, but nobody knew that these vehicles were there because the market was saturated with so many different products from so many different companies.

And then it's like somebody just pulled the rug right out from underneath the sports car industry.

The Fast and the Furious blew up the aftermarket scene, but one little key feature that they put in the first movie was a changeover from sports cars to sports sedans.

That Nissan Maxima that was in the original movie was showcasing to us where we were going.

It showcased to us that we can make these sedans just as cool as driving the sports cars.

And as people started realizing that four doors could be just as cool as two doors, we didn't have to go out and buy a two-door car.

We didn't have to cram our friends into the back of our vehicle just so we had something that was cool.

Two doors were out.

We wanted four doors, we wanted everybody to be comfortable and we wanted to look good.

You got Grand Ams being customized.

You got Accords being customized, accord wagons, honda Civic, four doors.

Those Nissan Maximas, dodge had the Neon, how people were doing Cavaliers, even though they came with a two-door option, the more people customized, they still had the four-door one.

People were willing to do the Ford Focus.

The ZX3s were cool Everybody wanted those but they also had the ZX5s.

Mazda gave us the Protégé 5.

They had the MPS Mazda Protégé Four doors.

Sure, the Miata still kicked around, but the MX-6 and MX-3 were gone and the RX-7 was about to kick the bucket.

By the time the Fast and Furious movie came out, the Supra that starred in that movie was on its way out.

A higher price and not a lot of kids really wanting them or noticing how powerful they really were.

Until that movie came out, the coffin was already being closed.

Sports cars were being covered up.

The movie built a major aftermarket industry and built the sports car market back up at a time that nobody was building sports cars.

And with that we all changed over and started doing sedans, minivans, wagons, hell.

We brought the mini trucking market back, but we started doing a full-size and quad cabs.

There weren't a lot of two-door products anymore.

If you're a kid growing up between the 1960s all the way up to the late 90s, if you were cool in high school kind of rhymes, kind of funny you had a two-door vehicle, two-door truck, two-door coupe, two-door sports car, two-door grand tourer, hell.

Ferraris were two-door, lamborghinis were two-door, porsche was two-door.

Today we got four-door Porsches, four-door Lamborghinis, hell, even a four-door Ferrari.

Now Everything has moved into these ease and accessibility, and the sports car market has literally taken a kick to the nuts.

A few years ago, one company, after its purchase from General Motors of Fuji Industrial, saw that people needed sports cars.

There wasn't a high demand for them, but people were lapping up the GTRs and the Nissan Zs.

They were demanding that the Supra came back, but these people couldn't afford them.

So Toyota took a look at the market and said what if we collaborated with our brand new partner, subaru, and built a car similar to that original Corolla GTS, the Trueno, we make the AE86 yet again.

And if you want to know more about this, we actually did a podcast about the 86, from the Corolla 86 to the actual Toyota GT 86.

People wanted these.

There wasn't a huge market for it, you got to remember.

The Miata was still one of the only small sports cars holding on to that market.

General Motors had killed off everything it had.

There was no more Pontiac, no more Saturn, so the Sky and Solstice were gone.

You want a sports car in their marketplace.

You got a six-cylinder Camaro or you went to a Corvette Ford.

You had a Mustang Dodge.

You can get a six-cylinder Challenger Honda.

You might be able to find yourself a two-door Civic Coupe, nissan GT-R or Zed.

They still had two.

They had one in the high-volume bracket and one in the mid-tier MG.

Well, now they're part of Shanghai Automotive Group and they're kicking it in select markets, but not back in the North American marketplace.

Our market is void of sports cars, but Toyota and Subaru's collaboration for the GT and the BRZ and when it originally came out there was no Toyota GT in our marketplace.

It wasn't a global scale, but in the American marketplace we had the Scion FR-S.

If you didn't know, this Scion gave birth to the original sports cars for the Toyota Motor Group in the 21st century.

We lost the Celica, we lost the MR2.

We lost the Supra, but the 86 was here to save the day.

And these sports cars are giving us a comeback Now into their second generation.

They're showing the world that sports cars can hang on to that lifeline and give us what we really want as people of my generation I don't like to say it the millennials I'm right at the cusp of millennials and Generation X but we're starting to get to that point in our life where we can afford our house, we can afford our two vehicles and we're now thinking of something fun for the weekends.

We're looking at what our parents had.

If we live in the city, we really can't use a snow machine, quad or a boat, so we're looking at these fun little sports cars.

Hell, myself, I got myself a little stick shift back in the day and I've just kept it, no matter how crappy or how many times people make fun of me for what it is.

I keep it around because it's a five speed, which are very hard to find these days, and even though it's a crappy four-door wagon, it's still fun to throw around.

But in all in all, I wanted a two-door sports car.

I had to settle, unfortunately, but it wasn't really until a couple of years ago that I was able to afford to get something cooler.

But now I'm kind of looking at rebuilding the Mustang.

Sorry, I'm getting to that point where I'm starting to look at that big, burly V8.

But the sports car marketplace is starting to rebound slightly and now, with the entry of electric vehicles and the price of electric vehicles starting to come down, people are starting to see that maybe in select areas we can get a third vehicle.

Covid's rush to the suburbs, which actually is a podcast if you want to listen to how COVID kind of rushed us all out to the suburbs and this all intertwines helped us see that there's more to life than work, video games, television, our family and that's about it and going on vacation.

We want more in life and realizing that autonomous vehicles are just around the corner, we need something fun, we need something fast, we need to enjoy life one last time, even though in my home province of material they've created what they call the 50 over law, the stunt driving law, thanks to some stupid kids that killed a cop's kid near my in my neck of the woods.

Yeah, kids are assholes, but there are still areas we can have fun in.

We may not be able to have fun on the streets like we did way back in the 80s and 90s.

That's essentially what killed the sports car industry.

More government rules cracking down on street racing killed the sports car market Because by having a two-door in the mid-2000 years you were a target for the police.

They automatically assumed you were a street racer and for a lot of us, we decided to get out of that marketplace.

The truck market started taking off and then we started customizing sedans, something that didn't look amazing.

We created sleeper vehicles, some of the most random things sedans, wagons, minivans.

Then came an altering moment.

It would come from something you didn't expect the cross track.

Our love affair with crossover utility vehicles in the aftermarket industry blew up Fast and Furious.

7 showed us a four-wheel drive system added to a Camaro and a Charger.

That's pretty cool.

Then a video game called the Crew showed us building sports cars to go off-road could be more fun.

Well, a lot of us have kind of jumped on the bandwagon of the new 4x4 marketplace and crossover utilities.

We had to get off the streets because the cops are clamping down on us, but they don't clamp down on us on back roads in the middle of the bush because there's no one else out there.

I get it.

If you live in a major city, this is a problem for you.

My neck of the woods not really, because there's a lot of these roads around.

So a lot of us started selling these vehicles off.

We couldn't have a two-door sports car, but the market is starting to understand that maybe.

Maybe the issue is that we need an active lifestyle vehicle built into a sports car.

The active sports car market.

We've all seen it before People pouring four-wheel drive Blazers, you know, powertrain systems underneath a Chevette okay, building these things way back in the 80s and 90s Hell, even all the way back as far as the 60s and 70s, people have done this.

Off-road sports cars, things from the rally world like the Lancia Stratos and the Audi Quattro.

That is the key to the sports car market of the future.

We get it.

The electric vehicle industry and companies like Alpha Motors building their two-door sports coupe have given way to us and shown us that we can get back into this world by bringing down the price of batteries.

We can enter it with the standard sports coupe marketplace yet again for young kids out of high school and people looking for just something quick, easy and fun to drive back and forth to work.

But the active sports car market is what really can save the evolution of the sports car industry.

Products like the Lamborghini Huracan Strato or the Porsche Dakar, hell, even the Ferrari Prius.

It may be four doors, but if you make a two-door cross-checking version of it, that would be it these off-road cool sports cars, because the off-road market is one last untapped world for the sports car industry.

We've been kicked in the nuts so heavily over the past decade that the sports car revolution needs to come back.

It needs to give us something we really, really desire An ability to go anywhere as fast as we want, and off-road is where we gotta go.

So for the sports cars, I'm sorry to say, but our time on-road may be nearing its end.

Vehicles like the GT86 and the BRZ may keep it together Now, with Honda bringing back the Prelude and Nissan reconsidering bringing the Silvia back Hell.

Even Toyota working on a brand new Celica with either electric or hybrid powertrain is showing us that sports cars can make a return, and for that we love it.

We would love to go back to our days of the 1980s and 90s, when sports cars were everywhere.

Where you went to your local high school and there was tons of them.

All over the place, there were tiny little paseos sitting right next to a big block v8, mustang.

I want all those people to have fun and enjoy life, because after high school life gets serious.

Without having that sports car at a young age, you don't understand how much fun you're missing out of in the real world.

I've tried to explain that to my father-in-law so many times.

I said you never had fun as a kid.

Well, yeah, I did.

No, you didn't.

Literally, having a fun vehicle when you're younger really opens your eyes to the world.

You see it as an exciting place when you look at an automobile to get from point A to point B and that's it, and only ever drive boring automobiles.

The fun outside your doors.

Yes, I could be one to say that I never owned a sports car in my life.

I've had the joy of being in them, I've had the joy of being around them, but not actually own one.

I've tried to create my own from my own, shooting big brake wagon Hell, even my suicide doors on my brain.

It's a coma because it's a club cab, not a quad.

But even still I yearn for that fun of the two doors.

Closing the door of my 1970 Mustang, turning the key and hearing that big, burly V8 grumble underneath me.

It's an amazing feeling that I look forward to, but not as amazing as the one I missed out on when I didn't buy a 1986 Corolla Notchback version the old GTS Notchback for $400 when I was in college and I had the money To this very day.

I kicked myself in the nuts for not doing that, because that was a sports car that I would have loved to have had and I missed out on so much fun.

But not having that early on in my life that's essentially part of the midlife crisis the people who never did enjoy the life of the sports car.

And with that, we need more CEOs like Toyota has and even Nissan now, seeing that sports cars and fun needs to be rejuvenated back into the automobile industry to give us the pleasure of driving and maybe with that, the rise of the sports car industry once again.

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Go back and listen to some of the ones we talked about in this podcast.

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There's some great stories out there that you need to listen to, about this industry and how it can come back to life once again, all available from one place the autoluxnet website and the Autolux podcast.

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Strap yourself in for this one fun, wild ride.

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