How car technology has progressed since PDI’s birth
Imagine that it is 1985. The Ford Escort sedan is the best-selling car in Europe, and probably the world. A brutal dictator is about to be toppled in the Philippines, the end of his thieving regime close. To document these interesting times, the Philippine Daily Inquirer had just been founded.
In the world of cars, it’s an exciting time as well, when anything seemed possible. With advancements in computers and technology, perhaps cars could drive themselves soon, or even fly. “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” said US President Ronald Reagan, quoting “Back to the Future.”
Flash forward to 2021: The harsh reality is that motoring, superficially, is pretty much the same as it was 36 years ago. Purchasing a vehicle is still a substantial expense, nearly all of them continue to burn gasoline or diesel, and traffic jams remain a daily slog. But take a longer look, and any motorist would see that, under the skin, automotive technology has advanced significantly in the past 36 years. Let’s take a look at how automotive technology has improved the car, in ways that the motorist can see and feel:
SAFETY
For the state-of-the-art in automotive safety circa 1985, let’s take a look at one of the safest cars of that era, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class model series 126. The 126 model featured a driver airbag, in conjuction with a seatbelt pretensioner to protect the driver in a collision. The S-Class also contained other safety features such as anti-lock brakes, electronic traction control, electronic traction control to limit wheelspin, limited-slip differential, and fluted taillights. Passenger airbags and a high-mounted third brake light would follow in the next couple of years. A chassis that used high-strength steel helped to keep the passenger cell intact at impact speeds of 55km/h, and was designed to take into account asymmetric frontal collisions.
In 2021, safety innovations pioneered by the likes of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class has been adopted by even entry-level automobiles. One of the cheapest cars available in 2021, the Suzuki S-Presso, comes with dual airbags as standard. It also has ABS brakes, seatbelt pretensioners and force limiters, ABS brakes, and a chassis designed to channel impact energy away from the passenger cabin. The current Mercedes S-Class, all-new for 2021, constantly monitors for a possible collision via its numerous onboard sensors, and it can actively brake the vehicle and mitigate injury and damage by preemptively positioning the car body, closing windows, and cinching the seatbelts. It is the first car to have frontal airbags for the two outer rear seats.
POWER
For a measure of cars’ power levels, let’s take a look at the bestselling car in 1985 vs that in 2021. For 1985, it would probably be the Nissan Stanza. You must remember that this was in 1985, the last year that Ferdinand Marcos was in power. The corruption of the Marcos regime caused the collapse of the economy, and the mass exodus of carmakers. The once robust car industry in the Philippines, which boasted world firsts such as the first Mercedes-Benz factory outside of Germany, left what was then the “sick man of Asia.” Even Toyota closed shop in the Philippines. One of perhaps two new cars available in 1985, the Nissan Stanza had a 1.6-liter engine with 80 hp and 123 Nm.
Car manufacturers returned with a vengeance after the collapse of the corrupt Marcos regime. 1988 saw carmakers Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Nissan return. These three still dominate the market until the present. The best-selling passenger car in 2021 is the Toyota Vios. The Vios 1.3 Base MT delivers 98 hp and, remarkably, an identical 123 Nm, but from a smaller-displacement engine. The Vios with a 1.5-liter engine has 105 hp and 140 Nm. Nissan’s 2021 Almera dishes out 99 hp and 160 Nm from a turbocharged 1.0-liter engine.
In advanced markets like the United States, the increase in power is more remarkable. In 1985, the average power in all US vehicles was 113 hp, with passenger cars averaging 110 hp and trucks 124 hp. In 2021, this has more than doubled, with cars packing an average 214 hp, trucks a whopping 276 hp, with the US fleet averaging 252 hp.
EFFICIENCY
Even as we head toward the last years, or more likely, decades, of the internal-combustion engine (ICE), engineers are still pushing for improvements in efficiency. Fuel economy is as much of a selling point in 2021 when fuel prices are at a record high. Thanks to advancements in engine design, metallurgy, materials, and most significantly, computer control of fuel delivery and combustion, the ICE delivers even more km per liter even as power levels have increased.
The way to greater efficiency is electrification, when the ICE Is supplemented with, or outright replaced by, a battery-powered electric motor. In terms of energy efficiency, electric motors can convert more than 85 percent of input energy to propulsion, compared to the 40 percent efficiency of a gasoline engine. Gasoline-electric hybrids are rated at nearly double the mileage as their non-hybrid counterparts.
Circa 1985, the real-world fuel efficiency average of all vehicles in the USA was 9 km/liter: 9.77 km/liter for passenger cars, and a dismal 7.42 km/liter for light trucks. By 2021, this has improved: US vehicles averaged 10.77 km/liter, with cars doing 13.33 km/liter and trucks 9.6 km/liter. The US Environmental Protection Agency is aiming for a fleet average of 22.10 km/liter by 2026.
COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE
Compared to today’s average new car, which is loaded with myriad comfort and convenience features, the average car of 1985 was pretty basic. Even before you activate any control, you can see and feel hard plastics, itchy fabrics, and even bare metal. Even an entry-level cars are packed with features not common even in the luxury class in 1985. The Chery Tiggo Pro 2, for instance, is equiped with keyless entry and push-button start, power windows and mirrors, auto headlamps, cruise control, reverse camera and parking sensors. Seats are trimmed in leather and the instrument panel in decent plastics. The Tiggo’s big brother Tiggo 7 Pro, which is by no means a luxury car, has a panoramic moonroof, digital gauge cluster, N95-level cabin air filter, automatic climate control, power tailgate, selectable ambient lighting, and perhaps most usefully, a high-definition 360-degree monitor.
ENTERTAINMENT
The only entertainment options in a 1985 car were, non-concupiscently speaking: shifting gears, talking to your passenger, and turning on the radio. This would usually be an AM-FM unit with push-button controls—actual buttons that you had to press to physically move the tuner to a different station, and if you were lucky, a cassette deck. You could pop in the cassette you had just bought from Odyssey, or the mixtape that you spent all afternoon dubbing from a record. Pioneer had launched the CDX-1, the first car CD player in 1984, but it would be a few years before the technology would be widely available. Now, thanks to wireless Internet and the popularization of the smartphone by Apple and later Android, there’s practically no limit to what you can play inside your car. If they’re online, you can bring millions of songs and movies along for ride. To that objective, practically all new cars above the very basic entry-level models, feature smartphone connectivity. They usually have pretty decent speakers, too.
That connectivity unfortunately carries a new danger, that of distracted driving. The admonition to “Don’t text and drive” is just as important nowadays as “Don’t drink and drive.” Drivers using a mobile device are four times more likely to be involved in a crash. Voice command and integration into car touch panels help to minimize such collisions, but even then hands-free phones are not much safer than hand-held phones. As cars morph into rolling entertainment centers, the impetus is still on the driver to stay focused on controlling the car.
If you’re looking from the lens of 1985, the cars of today may seem quite unremarkable—or at least, not too different from how cars were back then. Peter Theil put it succinctly when he said “We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 words.”
Yet we can’t say that there’s been a failure of imagination and technological progress. Looking from the vantage point of 2021, it seems that cars are in for a giant leap in technology. They might not fly anytime soon, but electric propulsion and autonomous capability are already on board some prodution vehicles. Where we’re going, we won’t need gasoline—or drivers.
