Why Are Chevy Big Block V8s Called Rat Motors? – Jalopnik

To discuss the rat, we must first discuss the mouse. In 1954, Ford surpassed Chevrolet in sales by a margin of 2% (1,165,942 vs. 1,143,561), a reversal from the previous year when Chevy beat Ford by 7%. Part of the reason FoMoCo got a buyer boost was the new Y-block V8 that made 139 hp in Fords and 161 hp in Mercuries. Chevy’s Blue Flame six in the Corvette was no slouch with its 150 horsepower, but the future was clear. Make a V8 or stay behind.

And so Chevrolet’s small block debuted in 1955 shouting, “Here I come to save the day!” Sales turned around and Chevy outsold Ford by 15%. That was also the year that “The Mighty Mouse Playhouse” brought Terrytoons’ super caped mouse to TV sets across the country. He was small, as mice often are, but he was basically Superman with big, round ears. Sometime in the late 1950s, someone might have seen a few episodes of Mighty Mouse beating up evildoers, then went to the garage to work on a GM small block V8. That person may have thought, “This engine is small and strong, so why don’t we call it ‘Mighty Mouse?'” And bam, a nickname was born.

So when GM brought out the big block for even more displacement and power, of course that engine had to be called “rat” because, as any biology student will tell you, rats are like mice, only bigger. Small block V8 equals ‘mouse’, large block equals ‘rat’. It’s that simple.

But the origin of the “Mighty Mouse” is just a theory, even if it is supported Wired And Hagertyamong others. Finding references from that time is difficult, but many commenters on articles and forums tell different stories.

Coincidences are fun. For example, in “This is Spın̈al Tap”, the band accidentally created a Stonehenge prop 55 centimeters high. This was clearly a mockery of Black Sabbath’s Born Again tour, with Stonehenge sets so large they couldn’t fit most concert halls. Except, no, that Sabbath tour took place in 1983 and the “Spın̈al Tap” prank was filmed in 1982, so it was just serendipity. Another big coincidence? Chrysler’s 426 Hemi is nicknamed the “elephant”.

People online claim that Chevrolet’s mouse and rat engines were meant to scare away the big, bad Hemi elephant (I wanted to convert it to Hellephant, but you can’t, Dodge already did that). While it might work in terms of timeline to say that the Hemi was nicknamed the “elephant” after being defeated by cars powered by small and big block Chevys, that’s not where the name comes from. The Hemi was saddled with “elephant” because it’s just plain huge. That’s it, that’s the twist, nothing more complicated.

Furthermore, it would be strange if Chrysler embraced the “elephant” moniker, as that would imply that the Hemi is afraid of the competition. And elephants aren’t afraid of mice anyway. Elephants simply have poor eyesight and are startled when a mouse runs past. That can also happen to a snake, a cat, or a dog, so there’s nothing particularly scary about mice. Even “Mythbusters” had to adjust the “Elephants are afraid of mice” experiment after a little girl pointed out that the team used an albino mouse for the test, which would be unusual in nature, and that the strange color was likely the reason the pachyderm panicked.

Another theory says that the big block’s nickname “rat” came before the small block’s nickname “mouse.” The Chevy “Mystery Motor” 427s had angled valves aimed at the center of the cylinder bore, making the valves resemble porcupine quills. Porcupines are rodents, just like rats, so somewhere along the line “rat” stuck, while “porcupine” did not. Apparently “mouse” came later in this version of the story. The problem with relying on commenters’ memories is that people can be bad at remembering things. That’s why people on the Internet thought Nelson Mandela died in prison or that “The Simpsons” spawned “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells.”

In an attempt to confirm the timelines with hard historical data, I scoured the Internet for references to the nicknames “mouse” and “rat.” The earliest one I found online was a Hot rod 1970 article about the 400 small-block titled “Chevy’s Mini-Rat.” It includes the sentence: “One is based on the small-block ‘mouse’ engine, the other on the 396 ‘rat’ engine.”

Then I turned to my collection of vintage Hot Rod, Car Craft, Road & Track, Motor Trend and other magazines from the early 1960s. In that printed material, the earliest reference I have found to the Chevy small block as a “mouse” is in the June 1967 issue of Hot Rod, which features a story about Mickey Thompson’s three-valve-per-cylinder heads for the Chevy 350. At the end of the article, author Bud Lang wrote, “So maybe this will be the year the ‘mouse’ roars… and is heard by others than just the hot rod brotherhood.”

So we can say at least almost certainly that the terms ‘rat’ and ‘mouse’ existed before 1967. But getting definitive answers about when exactly they were conceived can be a wild goose chase.