Settling an argument: The Original Sport Compact Car

  • Thread starter Jetboy.
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What about the beloved Ford Pinto.:dopey:

Also the Honda CVCC Civic really started the import craze here! Not exactly America though.

I believe Toyota trucks were the first imports brought here?

As to sport compact American cars, I'd go with the GLH-T. It was the first FWD American car to really compete with V-8's performance wise(mass produced/American car).

If you really want to go back? What about America's first sports car, the 51-54 Nash Healey.
 
The Nash is a good one, and I'll add these two:

Austin Healey Sprite Mk1, '58-'61

austin-healey-sprite-01.jpg


And perhaps stretching it, the Crosley Hot Shot, from '49

1950CrosleyHotShot_01_700.jpg
 
long time no see, guys. Leo pointed this one out.
american cars aren't measured by exterior dimensions for that, but by interior volume, I think.

and I nominate the Omni GLH
 
I agree with YSSMAN it was the CRX. All of the small European sports cars mentioned were part of a different "movement" that was unrelated to "sport compact car movement".
 
Slashfan
Apparently there are different levels of compact then. Its classed as a compact by Ford and the DOT, and sometimes labeled a sport compact, and therefore it is one. Wether or not you agree with it is irrelevant.
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Unfortunately, this doesn't really hold water. The government bases its class definitions on interior volume, not exterior size.

The list @niky posted shows how daft some of their classifications are.
 
Leonidae@MFT
Please, by all means, expand on this claim..?
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I was pointing out the fact that it came with both a 304ci and 401ci V8.


homeforsummer
Unfortunately, this doesn't really hold water. The government bases its class definitions on interior volume, not exterior size.

The list @niky posted shows how daft some of their classifications are.
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An that matters how? At the time being it was a compact car. I could give a rats ass how that's changed. theres 40 years of difference here. It was classed as a compact car when it was new. End of discussion.
 
Slashfan
An that matters how?
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It matters because they're talking about a specific thing and you're trying to be clever by saying some car that doesn't remotely belong does anyway. Because Ford.

Slashfan
I could give a rats ass how that's changed.
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And that intentional ignorance is why you're very frequently wrong about many things of this nature.
 
I read the rest of your post. I've read every post in this thread. It still amounts to several people attempting to tell you exactly why a car that was "small" in comparison to most (but not all) of the humungous oil rigs American companies sold at the same dealer was not actually small by any other conventional measurement other than how inefficiently it used its space; and you saying that yes it is because the U.S. government said it was. Even in 1971 when it got that big V8, the Ford Maverick was not the small car in the Ford lineup; nor was it a small car compared to the Vega, or the Gremlin, or the Colt, or the 510, or the Corolla. The Maverick was instead literally just "the car that replaced the Falcon".
 
40 years of seperation here. Whats classed as compact now isn't quite the same. As I said, regardless, it's still classed as compact. I can't how no one can't comprehend that.
 
How hard is it to understand that the interior volume definition of "compact" =/= the physical exterior dimensions of "compact"?

I understand your single-minded obsession with shoehorning anything Blue Oval into any discussion, no matter how poorly it actually related to the topic at hand, but even for you this is a stretch.
 
I totally get that. The inside of that car isn't all that big....
 
Slashfan
An that matters how? At the time being it was a compact car. I could give a rats ass how that's changed. theres 40 years of difference here. It was classed as a compact car when it was new. End of discussion.
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Just because Ford calls it a compact, it doesn't mean it actually is. It's a full two feet longer than most of the cars it was designed to compete against (actual compacts and subcompacts like the Beetle).

Incidentally, official classifications were fairly lax back then. If the DoT said it was a compact, that was merely because Ford said "this is our compact". They could have said "this Galaxie is our compact" if they didn't produce anything smaller, and the DoT would have just written it down.

I don't know if there was a hot variant of the Pinto (pun very much intended), but that would be a lot closer to the mark.

Regardless of all that, it doesn't really answer the question in the OP anyway, which was "which car started the sport compact craze". Arguably, it wasn't a "craze" at all until some of the Japanese stuff from the 1980s - so the real answer isn't some random Ford you've plucked out of the air (as per usual), it's one of the Japanese lot - Civics, Sentras and the like.
 
I don't know if there was a hot variant of the Pinto (pun very much intended), but that would be a lot closer to the mark.
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yes, there was, actually...Mustang II was on the same platform with tweaks!

and you forgot that there was no actual nameplate to Nissan/Datsun products in the US until the early eighties. they were still using alphanumerics

the US "think small" era was apparently 60-63, the origin point of ANYTHING smaller than the titanic US full sizers in the postwar era.

another nominee might just be a Chrysler! I'm not talking the original 300 series run, here, but a '35 or '36 New Yorker.
 

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