The 1974 Ambassador’s ZiL-like styling shows how AMC had succumbed to “GM envy” in the 1970s. This car was so big and ugly that it was doomed to failure. Yet American Motors wasted scarce resources […]
First-person accounts by lesser-known auto industry leaders can add to the historical record in surprising ways. This is why the SAH Press, which is an arm of the Society of Automotive Historians, should be lauded […]
George Romney may have been one of the U.S. auto industry’s best post-war leaders, but he made eight big mistakes while leading AMC from 1954-62. Some of his bad moves were costly enough to almost […]
“I went to American Motors as assistant director of styling in September 1959. I saw the ’60 Rambler, and I almost walked out the front door. It looked like it was chiseled out of marble […]
Hemmings’ current “Find of the Day” (2020) is a 1968 AMC Javelin in a lovely metallic blue. Unfortunately, this car — like all too many surviving sporty coupes from the 1960s and 1970s — does […]
Joe Ligo shows the value of auto history films in a 10-minute piece about the 1954 Kaiser Special. He mixes historical footage and scenes from a test-drive of a restored Kaiser as the visual backdrop […]
The most strikingly quality of American Motors’ car designs developed in the mid-60s was how quickly the automaker ditched the Rambler look in favor of styling mostly indistinguishable from the Big Three. This was a […]
A tendency toward groupthink has been a chronic problem in the American automobile industry since the mid-50s. This was a key driver of the domestic automakers’ dramatic decline from the late-60s onward. More recently, foreign […]
Some of the American automobile’s more significant design changes have been reflected in the pillars of a greenhouse. For ease of discussion, pillars have been alphabetized. An A-pillar is on each side of a windshield. […]
“AMC could be regarded as the mother of ‘flexabile manufacturing’ due to the wide variety of products, with limited facilities to build them. I took a tour of Kenosha assembly in 75. As I recall, […]
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