8 thoughts on “End Of A Long Era”

  1. Always count on a Brit to come along and piss in everyone’s cheerios at any mention of “stupid fat Americans and their stupid fat cars”. Fletcher, I know full and well about the wonders of power to weight ratio. All that fades away when you crank up a big block with .500″ lift cam loping sweet melodious staccatos through 1 3/4″ equal length hooker headers.

    Anyways, Chrysler did shutdown their 426 Hemi block production after their first bailout in the 70’s. Some 20 years later they did eventually start producing brand new bare blocks. Not that it stopped Keith Black motors from producing their own Hemi blocks during those lost years.

  2. This must be for production vehicle use, big block crate engines are still available and AFAIK aren’t effected by this. I hope.

  3. From reading comments elsewhere, the performance people will still make them in Mexico as crate motors.

    And, really, who cares? The big blocks haven’t been used as anything but truck motors in production use in 20 years, as near as I can tell.

    The big block has sentimental value, not real current value. And with crate motors still available, or aftermarket production, for that matter, GM stopping the main line is irrelevant.

    Small blocks appear superior in every way for pretty much every purpose, outside of the commerical truck/bus line, and I don’t know that GM needs to be building their own engines for that, business-economy-wise.

    (I’m also not going to blame the State or “Bailout dollars” – if GM hadn’t been planning this in advance, they were incompetent not to.)

  4. Titus, the huge engines are no longer being made because nowhere near enough people want them. You know, that free-market “supply and demand” thing?

    Josh, that’s a matter of taste, isn’t it? I actually can’t afford a performance car and due to health problems would probably kill myself in one if I could – but personally I prefer the demon-snarl of the exhaust from a turbocharged 24-valve V6 getting 200 BHP from 2 litres. The difference is, of course, that with such a vehicle when you’re just tootling around (i.e. most of the time) it sips fuel instead of gulping it. In addition, European performance cars can actually go around corners.

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