It had been there from the start of the internal combustion automobile. In fact, the carburetor was one of those key advances that made it possible to put an explodey contraption on top of a wheeled cart and semi-reliably travel down the road. But for all things an end must come, and the last carbureted passenger vehicle rolled off an assembly line in 1991. Or was it 1994? 1999? 2012? Let's see which date is correct.

To begin with, the carburetor certainly had come to the end of the line by the late 1980s. Electronic fuel injection had largely supplanted it over the prior decade, and those carburetors that hung on past the Reagan era only did so with feedback systems and emissions controls making them nearly unrecognizable (and, as many a frustrated mechanic of the time will attest, nearly unworkable). The California Air Resource Board mandate for emissions monitoring equipment on all cars sold there starting in 1988 certainly hobbled the carburetor, but it was the looming OBD-II, set to take effect in 1994, that put the carburetor out to pasture.

By the time the OBD-II legislation was passed, however, automakers had already converted nearly their entire U.S. fleets to fuel injection. Those cars and trucks still using carburetors typically were the automakers' oldest and/or least expensive models. In fact, we only count 12 models that made it to the Nineties without switching to fuel injection.