In my childhood and adolescence, in the Malaise Era Detroit of the 1970s and 1980s, a tachometer was a rare sight. This was, in part, because nearly everybody in the Motor City still drove American cars back then and domestic cars, even ostensible performance cars like my brother’s 1978 Pontiac Firebird or my friend’s manual-transmission Ford Tempo, didn’t have a tach. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-80s, in my Quixotic quest for a daily driver appropriate for a teenage Car Weirdo, when I test drove all manner of oddball European iron — a Fiat 850, a Saab 99, a half-dozen BMW 2002s including the one I eventually bought — that I really became familiar with rev counters.

Staring at the thin, tach-less, plasticky-wood veneered dashboard of a 1976 Eldorado Convertible on Hemmings recently, I wondered why this was.

“A tachometer is a very important thing to have in your toolbox when you need to know how hard your engine is working at any one time in any gear,” Donald Osborne says. Osborne is a top-tier vintage car appraiser and the CEO of the Audrain Museum (and its related enterprises) in Newport, Rhode Island. “But in an American car, this really wasn't an issue, because, since the twenties, American cars have been designed to be very low-stressed, powerful, fast cruisers.”

These large, lopey, high displacement motors — like the 8.1-liter behemoth in that Caddy — came into prominence for various reasons. Primary among them was the elemental bounty of the new world.

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