Aerodynamics soar

Automakers toil to minimize drag and maximize fuel economy.

Decades ago, it was conventional wisdom that by now we would all be driving slippery, low-slung, low-drag transportation modules optimized for efficient consumption of limited resources. All the futuristic movies said it was so. Triumph-apparently unaware that the future would not include that marque-touted the wedgy TR7 as “The Shape of Things to Come.”

And so it seemed it would be, with the popularization of the sleek Ford Taurus family sedan in the mid-′80s. But then came a couple decades of cheap gasoline, the SUV boom, and the defiantly blunt Chrysler 300 sedan, and the notion of designing for drag reduction seemed to have been swept away in an eddy current of a Hummer's wake.