The Unfortunate History of the AMC Pacer - Documentary Film

Cars have become icons, we remember them for being fast, fun or beautiful, but not all cars were built to be famous. Some of us remember them because they were too rare to forget when they first came out. I was in high school and I loved cars. I knew I had to have one. I like the style and it's something you don't see every day. It was a strange looking car any way you drove it. I guess they feel self-conscious driving it. There is a fine line between uniqueness and It's strange, a very fine design line and naturally you want to be on the unique side.

The pacemaker built by American Motors Corporation was certainly unique. Critics said the exterior looked like a pregnant elephant and the interior felt like a fish tank on wheels, but that's just one side of it. Now we make fun of the story, but the car caused quite a stir on the day it first came out. time. Everyone loved them. Everyone wanted one. Every magazine that tried it. One loved it. It was different. It was exciting. It was thinking outside the box. all the things we had accused Detroit of not being able to do and here there was little that AMC did often

history

is unfair maybe there really was more to the AMC Pacer after World War II America had over 10 different car companies , but as the economy grew so did competition among them the three largest general motors ford and chrysler dominated the business these so called big three could afford to sell cars for less because they built many smaller companies soon joined forces in a desperate attempt to stay alive in 1954 Nash Kelvinator Corporation merged with Hudson Motor Car Company to form American Motors Corporation or AMC.

He managed to stay in business by offering small, economical cars that got good gas, something the United States didn't have much of despite poor management and some on the brink of death. experiences amc survived the 1960s in 1970 bought the famous jeep brand from kaiser corporation making american motors the fourth and last automobile manufacturer in the united states in the early 1970s amc's small factory in wisconsin produced a line very complete hornet, a well thought out compact car and one of the company's best sellers it is a popular family version of the hornet despite the somewhat sexist advertising gremlin a small car based on the hornet this was the first subcompact in the United States debuted on April Fools' Day 1970.

Javelin, a big, bad car whose days were numbered by high gas prices and insurance, the somewhat scruffy family car that made up for its looks by offering good value for money and an ambassador of an affordable luxury car and the first American vehicle with air conditioning as standard equipment. AMC saved a lot of money by using smart cars to reduce costs. It used the same engines, body panels, electrical systems and even door handles, being a small company had its advantages too, the culture was we all row this boat together, we are the underdogs, let's show them what really good people can do. do in a broader perspective. variety of job classifications I wasn't pigeonholed into doing one thing, so that was important after this success.

AMC management began work on a new car in 1971. Under the direction of vice president of design Dick Teague, the design department presented over 20 different ideas AMC decided on a radical looking compact, they knew Americans wanted maybe something smaller or more fuel efficient, but not necessarily small, so they set out to develop what they called a small, wide car called a

pacer

. The design was two and a half inches short of a Cadillac El Dorado, but was almost four and a half feet shorter, yet it had more glass than the Eldorado, a whopping 16 percent more, in fact, it had more glass than any other thing on the road with 615 square inches for easy rear seat access.

The designers made the passenger door. 4 inches longer than drivers to improve handling the pacemaker had advanced rack and pinion steering in this system the steering wheel connects to a small gear or pinion the pinion sits on a rack of teeth when the driver drives the rack moves left or right and turn the wheels provided very responsive and precise steering and only a handful of other American cars had it, not all the great ideas made it to the final car, however, we first started with LEDs as readouts in comparison with the normal analogue, but there were problems with cold deceleration. lowered the LEDs and such, so it was in the amoebic stage, perhaps the biggest innovation was under the hood to keep the pacemaker fast and light.

AMC planned to give it a Wankel rotary engine named after German engineer Felix Wenkel. Instead, the rotary engine has no cylinders. The combustion cycle is carried out within an oblong casing using a triangular rotor. Wankel engines provide smooth, high-revving power and generally weigh much less than conventional ones. This design would keep the pacemaker lightweight and athletic engineers also considered making the car front-wheel drive. Well, instead of producing the engine itself, AMC agreed to purchase it from General Motors. Unfortunately, General Motors canceled the program at the last minute citing concerns about poor fuel consumption and problems complying with pollution regulations.

Japanese automaker Mazda was encountering similar problems with its own rotary-engined cars during AMC. The timing couldn't have been worse at the 11th hour, just before the pacemaker was supposed to go into production. gm announces you know we're not going to build this engine after all and amc was stuck with a design built around one in particular. engine they just didn't have a backup plan that was foolish amc spent almost $60 million developing the pacemaker the company couldn't afford to cancel it now engineers somehow managed to shoehorn amc's existing six-cylinder engine under the hood The huge block barely fits in the car, certainly not one of the easiest cars in the world to work on the engine.

It was positioned behind the hood, so the windshield came out and covered half the valve cover and a valve cover gasket needed to be fitted. It was an important operation. The old engine added a lot of weight to the new car, but AMC didn't really have a choice. The small company had high hopes for the pacemaker. Auto sales in 1974 were down 23 percent from the previous year. The fuel crisis hit the industry and rising inflation didn't help with the engine problem finally resolved. Amc boosted production and prepared for an uphill battle. Ok, introducing the Amc Pacer, the first small wide car. , the amc

pacer

, the first small wide car i didn't do What I know is that quietly the pacemaker took the automotive world by storm, suddenly all eyes were on American motors from 1975.

I drove one of the post office when I just left, I think they were just out of the week and I walked out and there was a crowd. Around the car they thought it was something from outer space or something so modern and futuristic. Magazines like Car and Driver and Road and Track had some very positive things to say about the car and you would get in it and feel like you were almost outside. We were in a bubble and that was really cool, so I think it was a very positive reaction. They said it was the car of the future.

Suddenly it's 1980, it was the best thing on four wheels and they were selling like crazy and the traffic in the showroom was just incredible, people were constantly coming to look at the car and there was a waiting list for cars and we couldn't keep them , we couldn't keep them on the lot and now faced a new problem that the factory couldn't build. pacers fast enough to meet demand original predictions of 80,000 cars for 1975 now looked modest by the end of the year amc built a whopping 145,528 pacers beating the odds the pacer would become the small car that could 1975 was a year record for American engines, but In the pacer's second year, AMC employees began to notice something.

One of the plant managers came to my office and I told him: how are we doing with the pace? and he said, "I'll tell you the truth," I didn't think it would be that good. but it was done very well maybe less than a year and so on he comes back for another visit I told him how things are going with the pacemakers well he says oh my god he says probably everyone who wanted one got one the initial love from the public started to grow They wore out from the beginning, we had problems with the electronic ignition because the electronic condition was rushed to market, they increased production too quickly and when you do things like that you speed up the line, mistakes are made as they say and the quality of some of the pacemakers is not was as high as it should have been, particularly in the area of ​​interior fit and finish, the trim pieces literally disintegrated over time, as the car's huge windows allowed UV rays to penetrate the plastic in the past.

Amc's quality often surpassed that of the big three, but since they were the underdogs it was easy for the public to pick on them now overall quality wasn't very good among domestic automakers in those days, in fact , it was downright poor everything was leaking oil everything had suspension issues the brake systems were crude at best but that was it, owners also started complaining about the pacer's fuel economy or lack thereof. Gas mileage was very important back then because gas prices had gone up you know people were looking for 20 to 25 miles per gallon in the city and you know the pacer just couldn't do that so people started to back off when they heard these claims that you know this is not a real gas guzzling car.

AMC should have fixed these issues during the design phase, but some of them were out of the company's, government's, and government's control. The public pressured automakers to improve their fuel economy in the 1970s. Ironically, the government also made it very difficult to do so. In the 1970s, automobile emissions regulations arrived. Manufacturers scrambled with new equipment to clean dirty exhaust gases from their cars. most of it didn't work long term, it was difficult to deal with and made the cars almost impossible to keep running properly. The first smoggy cars were miserable when it came to their performance and fuel economy - it was non-existent in the real world, with real drivers behind the wheel, fuel economy was often reduced by up to 50 percent.

The government also began investigating safety standards for cars, causing legal departments to panic. The lawyers come and say we don't know what the security is. the regulations will be for 1975 1976 1977. We know they will have rollover regulations, there may be roof crush resistance, there will be side impact regulations, we don't know what they are, so you have to reinforce the hell out of it. of this car to make sure it meets any standards, the large bumpers and heavier body panels added extra weight to the pacer, further hurting gas mileage now that the excitement had cooled, the The pacemaker's weight problem became obvious, but those who were unlucky enough to crash a pacemaker found it to be quite safe, rolled off the edge when the car spun five times, and said that any car she sold would hold up.

American Motors had always survived with the philosophy of doing more with less, but the high costs of the Pacer program meant the company could barely afford to do anything with the rest of its cars; the Javelin and Ambassador died in 1974, leaving the Matador as the only big car, the Hornet and Gremlin lines which are now over five years old both seemed obsolete next to the competition, how little money AMC had invested in making the cars more fuel efficient, They introduced a four speed transmission to help with fuel economy, they modified the carburetor which improved it quite a bit, they changed the axle ratios on everything to try to increase fuel economy.

Now the Pacer's futuristic styling was no longer captivating the public, it's just that many people wanted to buy a two-door hatchback with sales falling across the board. amc launched a second pacer model for 1977. Introducing the new amc pacer wagon, the wide wagon with room to pace and ride plus something new ininstead of a narrow cargo space we turned our space sideways so everything is easy to reach amc pacer the wide truck there's more to an amc the pacer truck offered more space and a more conventional look it sold better than the hatchback but production combined still only reached 58,000, less than half compared to the previous year, but AMC employees had a habit of stepping up when the going got tough, so they made big plans for 1978.

Under the direction of Dick Teague , the design department achieved a miracle that transformed the old hornet. In a new luxury car called the Concorde, the stylists also revised the front of the Pacer to give it a more orthodox appearance. The hood now had a strange bulge in the middle with more room. The AMC engineers somehow managed to fit a larger V8 engine. In the car this certainly solved some of the performance issues but the 5 liter engine didn't provide anywhere near the fuel economy people wanted, however the Japanese and German imports did have fuel efficient cars and They continued to eat into the American engine market share.

Slow sales made things much worse. Expensive engineering work was done on the v8 model, as few parts could be shared between it and other AMC vehicles. At the time I read an article that said the cost of converting to v8 was never recovered. American engines couldn't afford more costly mistakes like this. Fortunately, the Jeep division's sales continued to grow, but it wasn't enough money to create a new car design that AMC desperately needed. Help came from an unlikely source. American Motors announced a new partnership with French automaker Renault. Renault would sell French cars through AMC. The dealers and amc would build a new Renault designed compact in their American factory, as it turned out that the French loved the pacemaker, perhaps it was this admiration that helped foster their partnership.

They kept reminding us that the pacemaker was the one you know, the resistance and the beauty. I mean they really love that car either way, no amount of love could rejuvenate the pacemaker's sales figures, whether it was its awkward shape, poor performance or mediocre gas mileage, the public had talked about part of the problem with a pace for any car that is as revolutionary as that. It's you. I can't change the car enough from year to year to keep the interest alive. We've seen it with many other cars of this type and everyone who really wants one gets one, so what do you do to maintain interest? 1979 brought a second fuel.

The crisis in the United States, rising inflation and unstable economy caused domestic car sales to sink like a stone. The success of the Concorde helped paint a brighter picture. It sold modestly well and the designers modified the styling to give it a more modern look. It became the company's main car. While the old matador was quietly put out to pasture, the team also improvised some existing designs to finally replace the gremlin called spirit. The new subcompact looked good but failed to catch up like the Concord. The pacemaker lineup persevered with few changes. Obviously sales would never recover, as a result 1980 would be its last year on the market, five years after it shook the automotive world the pacer disappeared.

A total of 1,746 pacers were built in 1980. AMC stopped production in late 1979 to free up factory space. American Motors used that space to build an entirely new type of automobile by combining existing bodies with a four-wheel drive powertrain. He created the amc eagle. The eagle took off in 1980 as the first vehicle with car-like comfort and suv capability, apparently amc. Once again ahead of its time in the mid-80s it seemed that the company's fortunes might finally change. The American factory began producing the appropriately named Renault Amc Alliance, but like so many partnerships in the automobile business it soon became apparent who was in charge, but with Renault playing a bigger role in AMC's future, the French way of doing things is becoming more and more dominant, new management came in and AMC's tired old designs moved into a background, despite Renault's efforts, I guess America failed to fall in love with French cars.

The reason it wasn't successful was perhaps because Americans had had some bad experiences with Renault before as they weren't particularly known as very reliable and some of those cars didn't perform very well. Political problems in France led to problems at Renault, the company needed to cut costs, so in 1987 management put American Motors on the chopping block after a wave of success, Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, He enthusiastically bought the small company, mainly for the lucrative Jeep brand, integrated AMC as Chrysler's Jeep Eagle division and sold Eagle wagons until the parts to build them ran out and with that American motor corporation disappeared forever.

Amc's

history

is full of wudakura moments should in the end the pacer program was too expensive for the small company, it went against amc's tried and true shared designs strategy. and cost cutting, but AMC also faced numerous problems beyond its control between fuel shortages, foreign competition, government regulations, and GM's cancellation of the rotary engine. The program may have been doomed from the beginning. It's a sad reminder that the underdog doesn't always win in retrospect. I can only say that amc can never be replicated, that it was a wonderful place to work, just a great place to work, but even though the company died, the pacemaker lives on, I actually special ordered it from the factory Kenosha in '77.

Been a daily driver until I retired, that was around 2003, they are unusual, you know, you go to car shows, you see corvettes, you see mustangs, you don't see many pacemakers, the pacemaker in particular is very strange , but it's still a car that's easy to drive, it has all the amenities you'd want and my wife and I have always liked that kind of weird car and ball people look at the car the first thing they do they start to smile we're browsing America laughing in general was it was a revolutionary car that's for sure I don't think it will go out of fashion I will never get rid of them in fact I am looking and buying a third one I am going to start hogging in your eyes the pacemaker is not a failure, it is a car who stood out for being a little different and that's what being an icon is all about.

Well, one day I was at an auction and it was getting close to the end of the auction and this pacemaker showed up. on the block and almost everyone was gone. I looked at it and I thought it was a nice car, it was white, it had brown or burgundy on the bottom and I saw that it was in very good condition and no one was bidding on it so I started bidding and I think I paid like 300 dollars for it or something like that and I didn't think I was going to make any money off of this, so I took it back, reconditioned it and put it in the used car.

I drove it and couldn't get anyone to drive the car. I drove it, used it to move things and one thing after another, but I couldn't get anyone interested in buying it and they had the car for almost three years in inventory. and I kept lowering the price and lowering the price until one day I got tired of looking at it and I took the car to the auction and believe it or not, a 300 car, I took a loss, how much did it cost? I think it was 138 or something like that.