American Motors, Rambler, Nash, etc

In My Humble Opinion
1

Let’s talk about the defunct American Motors Corporation, which gave us the Gremlin, Pacer, Matador, etc., each of which garnered at least one mention in the Ugliest Car thread. I never owned one but they always intrigued me.

First of all, I worked with a guy who said that back in the early 1970s he was graduating from college and needed a vehicle. He wanted a Japanese car. His credit union didn’t have enough confidence in a Japanese car’s quality and wouldn’t loan him the money. That’s how he ended up with a loan for a Gremlin.

AMC was trying to compete with the Big Three—at least the Japanese invasion hadn’t happened yet. So naturally they had to innovate or do something different or have a more appealing design or something.

states of the funky AMC Marlin,

“The feedback came that the headroom in back was insufficient,” Geraci said. “They wanted 1.5 inches more of headroom [for the rear seats]; We hated that, thought it took away the sleekness.” Nevertheless, Geraci’s studio went to work on Abernethy’s request for more headroom.

And

“The '65 Marlin is still an attractive car,” he said. “When you take it to a car show, in a sea of 150 Corvettes, people always gravitate toward the Marlin.”

I read an article, probably in Car and Driver, that said that in Japan they taxed cars based on width. So was that why the Pacer was small but wide? That would give more shoulder room. If form follows function, is it totally appropriate to call it ugly?
Second of all, they had some pluck. On this page…

Want to buy a tent you can pitch on the roof of your car? Note: the Element offered a tent that you attached, opened the tailgate, etc. but it sure wasn’t on the roof.

Farther down, hey, there’s a limousine version of an AMC product.

Next page,

And a Rambler Ambulance…a Rambulance. As I mentioned in the other thread, this page also has the Gremlin/Jeep “Cowboy” pickup and a Nash station wagon.
I also recall that a guy in high school said his AMC’s front seats made into a bed (nudge nudge, for date night). This refers to a Rambler, but they were owned by AMC and referred to as AMC Ramblers so…?

My Honda Element was similar, although the contours weren’t friendly to those who toss and turn and there was a gap between seats.

By virtue of the fact that AMC bought Jeep, they also made the US Mail Trucks for a time. Not necessarily photogenic but apparently durable…and AM General cranked out some buses, as see on one of the above links.

It’s interesting to me how far they got yet failed. Anybody with personal experience want to sing their praises or condemn them to hell?

2

I am one of the people who mentioned the Matador in the other thread, but honestly I kind of like like AMC vehicles of the 1970s, in a “so weird they’re kind of cool” way.

It’s not so much that AMC “owned” Rambler; AMC just decided to brand all their cars as Ramblers from around the late 1950s to the late 1960s. IIRC because the previous Nash Rambler was one of their more popular models, so they wanted to capitalize on its popularity.

IMO the mid-60s Ramblers were quite handsome. I found this '64 in my neighborhood a few years ago:

Imgur
Imgur
Imgur

3

Thanks for the clarification!

When I was growing up a guy across the street from me had one. Nice lines! The front end is reminiscent of the Impala.

In the early 80s I thought the Eagle models were getting some good reviews. I found this from Car and Driver.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a35521676/1981-amc-eagle-sx4-sport-by-the-numbers/

Check out some of the (recent) comments that follow the article. It seems they were ahead of their time.

4

When I was in auto mechanics’ trade school (Albuquerque Vo-Tech) in the late 1970s, a lot of the students had hopped-up performance cars. Lots of Chevys and Fords, as you’d expect, but an impressively high turnout of Plymouth/Dodge and one unapologetic Gremlin with (if I recall correctly) a 401 CID engine that had been milled to 11:1 compression. That somewhat silly-looking hatchback car could smoke Plymouth Dusters and Chevy Camaros and Ford Mustangs that weren’t used to being shut down.

5

I had a Jeep with an AMC 360 that would destroy the distributor drive gear with such depressing regularity that I mastered the art of changing it on the trail with a bucket-full of used ones I scrounged using a rock and a nail, hand-timing it and driving home.

I eventually found a new matched set, and plumbed in a direct oil-feed that sprayed right on the gears and solved the problem.

Added: I’d LOVE to have an AMX. That’s a Bad-Ass car!

6

If it wasn’t for the Nash Rambler, we would’ve missed out on a classic '50s hit.

Actually they were pretty cool cars, despite resembling a bathtub on wheels.

https://www.hemmings.com/classifieds/dealer/nash/rambler/1620863.html

7

Not to mention this one. Norman the gambler rides around in a Rambler.

8

The thing about, say, the '74 Matador (and astonished it hasn’t been mentioned yet in either thread), is that it might be one of the very, very few cars out there that was aesthetically errant simply by virtue of the head and tail lights, especially the back duals.

9

Plus Rambler had one of the best names around.

Remember the Super Coupes, abbreviated S/C. Well Rambler came out with one which they called ---- The Scrambler.

10

To me, the Gremlin looked like a Hornet that was chopped off at the rear. AMC’s attempt to enter the subcompact market without spending too much on new tools. Maybe AMC fans would know if front-end parts were interchangeable.

I believe the AMC Eagle was also on the Hornet platform.

And the Pacer looked like every Popular Science article on “The urban car of the future.” Not in a bad way. For all of the people who sneer at it now, it sold VERY well in the beginning. If the quality had only matched the concept…

11

My father’s Rambler was a very reliable car for the family. The city he worked for bought AMCs for city-to-city transportation and he never had a problem. So when I totaled my first car in 1980, I agreed with him to go to the AMC dealer the city purchased cars from and look at what used cars were on the lot. I ended up with a 1978 Gremlin that was Mountain Dew green and had 26,000 on the odometer.

At 29,000, the transmission went out. We had it rebuilt but that lemon suffered problem after problem after problem, until with it’s heavy front end and rear-drive wheels, it slid on the highway in unexpected icy, snowy conditions, hit the guardrail and bent the frame. I actually had the car until 1985.

That same year, our neighbors, noticing that the car was lasting quite long went out and bought a Gremlin for their son. A couple of months after their purchase, the neighbor came knocking on our door to ask about the reliability of my car. We all burst out laughing and gave examples of it’s shittiness. He asked why I still drove it. Simples, first, I had a loan that needed to be paid off, then all my money was going to college so I couldn’t afford to replace it. I told him, in all sincerity, that when I saw a Gremlin in their driveway that I wished they had come to ask me about it before the purchase.

12

I had always understood that that was exactly what the Gremlin was.

From what I understand by the late 1970s, after spending a lot of money developing the Pacer and not getting the return on investment they’d hoped for, they couldn’t really afford to spend much on developing new models. So they gave the Hornet a facelift and called it the Concord. Then they gave the Concord all wheel drive and called it the Eagle. And the AMC Spirit coupe was more or less a Gremlin with a more traditional fastback design.

13

From MASH:

  • Radar : [looking over Jeep engine] Nothing’s where it is in my mother’s Nash!

Did you see the prototype on this page, with the Rambleseat? Or further down, the AMXIII prototype wagon?

But Wikipedia says:

Using a shortened Hornet platform and bodywork with a pronounced kammback tail, the Gremlin was classified as an economy car and competed with the Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto, as well as imported cars including the Volkswagen Beetle and Toyota Corolla.[5][6] The small domestic automaker marketed the Gremlin as “the first American-built import.”[7]

One thing that strikes me as interesting is that you could get a V-8 in a Gremlin. So economy wasn’t at the forefront of our considerations just yet.

14

Allow me to share some memories of my 1972 Gremlin.

  1. It was cheap, and I got the base model. The inside was vinyl. The “carpeting” was vinyl, the seatbacks were vinyl, and the upholstery was the most uncomfortable vinyl ever made. Eventually the vinyl on the front seat split, leading to a duct tape repair.

  2. Great gas mileage. OTOH, it had a huge fuel tank (>20 gal.) so maybe that’s why I didn’t have to fill up very often.

  3. Poor rear visibility, with blind spots on both sides. The right rear view mirror was optional, but even adding one didn’t help.

  4. Painfully small back seat. When I drove my friends back and forth the 100 miles from college to home, whoever got stuck in the back had to be helped to straighten up when they got out at the end of the trip. For that matter, the front seat was pretty uncomfortable, but at least there was head and leg room.

  5. Mechanically not so good. The engine broke a connecting rod, the radiator had to be rplaced, and the transmission started leaking. There were no minor problems on a Gremlin. When something went wrong, it went wrong big.

  6. Ventilation was good, which was important because mine wasn’t air conditioned.

  7. The car was a death trap in snow. With no rear, there was no rear weight. When you hit a frozen patch on the road, the car would fishtail even at low speed. But it was so light that a human with normal arm strength didn’t need power steering.

  8. The lift up rear window (not a tailgate) was really not made for cargo. If you tried to put anything heavy in the rear, you ran the very real risk of throwing your back out. The Gremlin’s replacement, the Spirit, had a genuine, functional, hatch on the back, which was infinitely better.

I hung on to it for six years, three moves, three damned expensive repairs, and almost an entire marriage. For someone who was young and broke, I can say “it got the job done.”

15

At one time I had 7 1965/66 Marlins. Now I am down to 2, one restored and one finished as far as still needing the interior done and final paint, plus a bunch of parts I removed from the ones that were scrapped. I guess I am into “weird” cars as I also have 2 Chrysler K-Car convertibles, one of them is a Town and Country “woody”.

16

The Eagles were, IMO, the moral predecessors of the Subaru Outback.

17

This is correct.

18

A friend of mine raced an ex-TransAm series Javelin for many years before he sold it, due to his own aging, not the car’s. A lot of club racers liked the cars for being rear-wheel drive as FWD was gaining in popularity on the streets. It had a lot of room under the hood which made it easy to work on the car. But other than the Javelin/AMX, they were not reliable race cars.

19

My father had a '64 Rambler classic 660. Dark blue with trim just like the pics of the red one above 196 CI 6 cyl, cast iron block, aluminum head. Standard trans. He got a “deal” on it late in '64 used with just a few thousand miles on it. In the 6 years he had it, he had to put a differential in it (howling), the syncros in the trans were noisey, the engine developed low compression in one cylinder and started to huff a little oil and fowl one spark plug. Twice, the distributor shaft broke, once on the highway and the family had to take a bus home and once (fortunately) in the driveway at home. That was by far the worst car I’ve ever been associated with (I’m nearly 70 now). A total POS!

On the other hand, my uncle (by marriage) had the same car that year but with a 287 v8 & auto trans. TOTALLY different car. He had nearly no trouble with it.

20

I was given a '65 Ambassador — same platform as the Classic pictured above, with upgraded exterior & interior — by a friend who was off to work in the Wyoming oilfields. 232 CID (approximately 3.8ℓ) inline six, three-on-the-tree with overdrive. I drove it for several years, and outside of having to replace the clutch and installing a manual choke because I couldn’t get the automatic choke unstuck, the biggest problem I encountered was that when I replaced the coolant I somehow got a bubble in the heater* line which effectively disabled it. Not a lot of fun in a Montana winter, but I was young enough and foolish enough to regard it as an adventure.

Just MHO, the AMC 232/258s were pretty much on a par with the Chrysler slant-sixes: engines you could hit with a bazooka and they’d somehow keep running.

ETA: as @carnut mentioned, especially with the inline six there was plenty of room under the hood. Seemed like enough to have a nice game of hockey.

* Side note: At this time the heater was an option with AMC cars.