Six Reasons The 80s Was The Single Most Important Decade In Automotive History

The automobile has been in development for over 140 years to get to where we are. On a global scale, we suspect a graph of development would show a gradual curve upward, even through the 1970s when things got a little rocky for the automotive industry. The reason we believe the 1980s became the most important decade for cars is because just about every technology that could be applied to a car took a big step forward in this period.

At the same time, many automakers were doing well enough financially that they could spend money on research and development, as particularly well demonstrated by Toyota and the Lexus LS400. The 1980s also saw computing taking a leap forward, particularly with computer-aided design (CAD) and computing chips becoming affordable. It was a perfect storm for the 1980s to become the most innovative decade in automotive history. These are the big game-changing innovations.

The Rise Of Turbocharging

Turbochargers are now a common thing to find under the hood of a car, aiding both power and efficiency. Turbochargers had been around since the early 1900s, mainly for airplane engines, but in the 1970s they were only just being proven on the racetrack for reliability and rarely appearing on consumer cars.

But a few things happened in the 1980s. First was that emissions became a big concern, and turbos could increase fuel mileage and performance on diesel-powered commercial trucks.

The second was that turbos became reliable enough for mainstream and performance cars, and could add a lot of power to a smaller engine. At the same time, the idea of a turbo grew in the car enthusiast world through motorsports, particularly through rallying and the infamous and unhinged Group B cars with no restriction on boost levels. The result was the proliferation of Turbo badged cars, and automakers competing with each other to make more and more horsepower without blowing engines up prematurely.

Anti-lock Braking System (ABS)

Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Like most technology, the anti-lock-braking had a long germination period before it reached the mainstream. In 1971, Mario Palazzetti, working at the Fiat Research Center, fine-tuned modern ABS for cars as we know it. Before speed sensors and control valves, the driver of a car would need to be taught to do something incredibly counter-intuitive when the car starts sliding while braking: release the brake and put it back on again to regain traction.

Essentially, when the ABS detects a wheel has locked up while the car is moving, the control module pulses the valve for both wheels on that end of the car to prevent the wheels locking up. Mercedes, being Mercedes, put the system on its S-Class in 1978. But it was Ford in Europe that found success with the Scorpio and started researching ABS for its whole range of cars. In 1987, Mercedes made ABS standard equipment throughout its range.

Traction Control

Credit: Bring A Trailer

While being similar in how they work, ABS stops people from sliding off the road while traction control helps people maintain traction under acceleration in slippery conditions. BMW is largely credited with developing traction control for cars in the 1980s, although others, including Buick and Cadillac, had more basic versions in the 1970s. Those systems modulated engine power when rear wheel spin was detected, but the big jump forward was the use of individual wheel braking as well as throttle control.

If you put ABS and traction control together, you have the nuts and bolts of what we know now as electronic stability control (ESC), which helps steer the vehicle where the driver intends to go when there’s a loss of control. In 2012, ESC became mandatory in the US and in Europe around 2014. It has saved countless lives, not just by preventing cars spinning off the road, but large SUVs and trucks rolling over.

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This article originally appeared on CarBuzz and is republished here with permission.