“This nation’s car market has always supported a handful of what seem to be ‘protest cars.’ There were a lot more of them before World War II, but the post-war era has had it share: […]
Patrick Foster (2005) once lamented that he couldn’t find a publisher for a book on George Romney. “A typical rejection goes something like this: George Romney led an exemplary life, was honest in business, never […]
(UPATED 3/9/2023) A few years ago Lotus Rebel (2021) drew upon our AMC Pacer story to suggest alternative approaches for that car’s design in a comment at Ate Up With Motor. That website’s publisher, Aaron […]
When writing a story about the 1974 AMC Ambassador, I came across American Motors car brochures for 1979 and 1980 that took the unusual step of picturing the company’s headquarters in Southfield, Michigan. In the 1979 […]
Joe Rogan’s (2018) podcast with Elon Musk may very well be the most infamous — and high-visibility — interview of an automotive executive ever conducted. Alas, the event received so much attention for the wrong […]
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 […]
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 […]
(EXPANDED 10/28/2022) A few years ago Richard M. Langworth argued that Ford’s aggressive attempt to overtake Chevrolet in 1954 received more blame “than it deserved” in undercutting the viability of independent automakers (2019, p. 16). […]
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 […]
“The Rambler will never get credit for all it did. It never will. And the reason it won’t is because those who followed me, as (Patrick) Foster (1993) points out in his book, didn’t believe […]
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