And I want you all to look t those SPECTACULAR milage numbers and how similar they are to what you are being sold today, 47 years later. That's really the best we can do? or is that the ideal mileage for oil company profits?
It seems to me we should have been able to do much better than selling people the exact same vehicle for the last 50 years without any innovation or improvement beyond the bare minimum government mandate.

You bring up an interesting point. 110 CID is 1.8 liters. That is a small 4 cylinder engine for a pickup. In contrast, the last Ford Ranger I owned (an '05) sported a 2.3 liter engine. The best I could do for mpg in it was 26 on the highway.

The Ranger had 16 valves, fuel injection, an automatic transmission with overdrive. It wasn't any better than the carburated, 8 valve, 2.3 L '82 Ranger with a manual transmission and no overdrive that I previously owned. 23 years with minimal improvement.

That being said, I'd much rather have been in an accident in the '05 than the '82 Ranger or the Chevy LUV as well. On the older small trucks, the whole vehicle was a crumple zone, including, unfortunately, the cab.

I do remember delivering a pump with the '82 Ranger that weighed about 500 lbs. to someone driving a half-ton pickup. We backed up tail-gate to tail-gate with about a 6-8 inch difference in tail-gate height. As we shuffled the pump up onto the half-ton's tailgate, the Ranger springs lifted the bed to just shy of the other pickup's gate level. The other truck didn't even flinch with an extra 500 lbs.