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Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.
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Electric Cars and OPEC Oil

Posted January 06, 2009 5:01 PM by dstrohl
Pathfinder Tags: 1973 oil crisis 1974 electric cars electric pinto Ford opec boycott

And just think, there was a time when 60-cent gas inspired things like this. This car, which could almost qualify for SIA Flashback status, appeared in an advertisement that ran in Issue 34 of our own Special Interest Autos magazine, the May-June 1976 issue.

That makes it part of the likely flotsam of the first OPEC-led petroleum crunch that was something like three years old at the time, having already inspired some bad TV plots and neo-survivalist Howard Ruff calamitygrams by the time this electric-powered 1974 Ford Pinto Runabout showed up in SIA's pages.

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Poison
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Join Date: Sep 2007
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#1

Re: Electric Cars and OPEC Oil

01/08/2009 10:46 AM

I think the motivation to make your Pinto electric might have had something to do with the exploding fuel tank, rather than the price of gas!
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Dragonsfarm
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#2

Re: Electric Cars and OPEC Oil

01/08/2009 11:54 PM

It just goes to show that the technology has been around for more than 30 years.

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vainqueur
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Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Lansing, Michigan
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#3

Re: Electric Cars and OPEC Oil

01/09/2009 11:57 AM

It also goes to show that the only thing that motivates society as a whole to change their habits is money...kind of sad when you think about it. Of course, I'm speaking in sweeping generalities.
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cwarner7_11
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#4

Re: Electric Cars and OPEC Oil

01/10/2009 8:52 AM

Actually. electric automobiles predate the Otto cycle and OPEC by quite a few years- supposedly sometime in the mid-1830's was when the first was invented. I would think that were it a truly viable solution, the gasoline-powered automobile would not have been able to compete...
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