Do you remember when they used to sell leaded gas?

I like my gas like I like my paint chips, extra lead!

Engines ran more smoothly on leaded gas.

Is it true that it made people insane and angry?

Evidence seems to point that way, r3. I'm not one of Datalounge's science professionals or statisticians, so I can't argue the points, but articles are easy to find.

Years ago, my 5 year-old brother heard our dad request "10 gallons ethyl," and yelled "Bye, Ethel!" to the attendant as we drove away.

“Ethyl” was gasoline with the additive tetra-ethyl-lead to improve the octane number. If your engine “knocked” when it was working harder (accelerating or going uphill) higher octane fuel was a remedy. Ethyl was often 100-octane. Cars nowadays are designed to use up to 92-octane gasoline without any lead. Some day the internal combustion engine will be obsolete too, but probably not for a long time.

Boomer cars would gag on unleaded petrol. And yes, they'd rather poison the world than change to new cars.

> And yes, they'd rather poison the world than change to new cars.

Er... in their defense, a car isn't exactly a throw-away casually-disposable item. From what I vaguely remember, leaded gas was phased out over ~10-20 YEARS. The feds banned NEW cars from using it, and THEN the countdown began.

Pre-phaseout, 'regular' was ENORMOUSLY cheaper... like,10c/gallon cheaper than 'unleaded'... at a point when a gallon of gas cost 50-60c/gallon. I think that after 5-10 years, a surtax that increased by 1c/year was added to gradually make it price-uncompetitive with unleaded.

After gas stations quit selling it, you could buy bottles of lead additive for old cars that needed it.

I drove a 1970 Chevrolet until the late 1990s when I couldn't get a converter for it but also couldn't buy Regular gasoline anymore.

There are studies that show that crime dropped when lead gasoline usage dropped but it is still just a theory that these two things are related. A pretty good theory but a theory nonetheless.

My mom used to drive a little MG and ask for “high test”.

Cars would usually ping at higher altitudes as well. When I was a kid, we used to have to manually adjust the carburetor to run more lean when going up into the mountains of Colorado. Computer-controlled carburetors fixed that.

OP, it wasn’t a choice any more than you would “choose” to put diesel in a gasoline Chevy.

It’s whatever the car required that dictated what you bought.

Muscle cars.

I definitely remember a service station sign in the early '60s that read "We Pump Ethyl".

R7, Boomers are the ones that got rid of ethyl. You dumb ass.

The Saudis started it by raising the cost of gasoline back in the 1970s. We added alcohol and every other damn thing to try to cut down the price.

Then some Texan figured out they could frack crude oil. Everybody bitched, but the price of crude dropped. The Saudis had lost their price edge.

Lead in petrol was added not only to stop "pinging" or pre detonation, but also to prevent valves and valve seats from burning out in older engines. Pre 1970's most cars had valve seats made of softer metal that would deteriorate over time without ethyl lead added to the gas. Hardened valve seats solved that problem, and you could get them retrofitted to an older car, not cheap though. I had it done to one of my V8's years back in the course of an engine rebuild

Leaded gas was the standard, OP. The new-fangled gas was unleaded.

People don't change unless they are forced by circumstance to change. So what gas do you suppose people preferred?

It took a while and people made the change. Eventually, leaded gas was outlawed. And the small number of people still steadfastly refusing to learn or to change screamed bloody murder about it. And then, eventually, they died and took their personal ignorance with them.

R17 sounds like the plastic bag people.

When I was a child in the 70s the attendant would ask "regular or unleaded?" before filling the tank.

When my mother would pull her HUGE 1970's Cadillac into the GETTY station my mother would say to the attendant fill it with regular-which in ca. 1975 meant leaded regular. Then he would start filling the car with fuel then clean the windshield. Cars were so huge in the 1970's that he could only clean one half of the windshield at a time. Does anyone remember that?

Yes I remember, R20. I loved my Catalina. The front windshield was huge.

That dust that forms by the curbside used to be filled with lead, as was the air. It was a major change that along with other changes, changed the environment to reduce lead poisoning and raise IQs. Whenever a Climate Change opposer says we can’t change the environment, or something similar, you can point to the elimination of leaded gasoline to show that we can.

Clearly, r20 doesn't own a SUV or pickup truck... you STILL can't clean more than half the windshield at a time.

I'm 6'1, have a Ford F-150, and can barely reach the middle of the windshield from each side... on tiptoes.

Your Ford F-150 is MUCH higher than Mama's old Lincoln.

R21- Beautiful convertible. Did your's look like that? GM in the 1970's was EXCELLENT at making the BIG AMERICAN cars.

[quote] Did your's look like that?

Oh, dear!

My mother had a Catalina.

But not fire engine red.

And not a convertible, either.

Ah, well.

Yeah I think 1975 was the final for tetraethyl lead in gasoline. By the time I got my first drivers license in 1981 you could no longer find leaded gasoline.

Lead causes brain damage and learning disabilities OP, we did it to make future generations more stupid than us, and it apparently worked.

City smog smelled a bit different back then, to what it does now. (at least in London and European cities). It was better for the engines.

R28 Yes, Americans gave it up MUCH earlier than the rest of the world. Not with paint though to my knowledge.

[quote] It was a major change that along with other changes, changed the environment to reduce lead poisoning and raise IQs.

IQs were raised? Did you somehow miss the 2016 presidential election?

R28- NOT TRUE. I worked at a William Penn service station from 1981 to 1983. They sold unleaded regular and LEADED regular.

Worrying about WuFlu has recently made me wax a bit nostalgic for the carefree mindset of my innocent youth during leaded petrol days of the past