Talking about the upcoming Renault-Nissan-Daimler alliance trainwreck got me to thinking about American Motors. I used to love how AMC was never all that great, but it always tried so damned hard. You always had to admire it's spirit. It was like a old punchdrunk boxer who was long past his prime fighting against impossible odds, completely beaten but always managing the get up off the mat before the bell rang. You cheered even as you realized how pathetic it all looked.
I have many fond memories of it and it's vehicles. Who else here has any? My own is that in 1988 I went to see about buying my first car, a 1977 AMC Hornet AMX. It didn't have an engine, but the guy would install a 401 V8 and auto for a small fee. I ended up not buying it, but the car had always impressed me. It had big meaty Cragar S/S mags in the back and skinny ones in the front, along with Hijacker shocks to "jack" up the rear end as was popular in the late 70's. The car had originally been yellow with a black interior, but later painted red in a kind of half-assed manner. Weirdly, the yellow engine bay, red exterior kind of looked nice.
I also remember visiting a dealership in 1986, towards the end when things had gotten especially bad for the company. There were no salesmen inside the building and the lot was full of "new" two-three year old cars with huge markdowns. One nice one was a black 1983 Spirit GT with a manual tranny. I also remember a lot of new Renault 5's there as well. Cute cars, but all wrong for this country. I was only 13 at the time, but even then I knew they were doomed.
AMC 1954-1988 - You are missed.
When I was 17 in 1998 I had a 79 spirit amx it was a factory 304 4 spd car. It was black with black interior and orange/red graphics. I swapped in a built 360 and that lil car screamed. I think I only paid $400 for it it and it was all original and in decent shape.
My friend at that time had a grandma fresh 77 hornet woody wagon with a 258 and it was a great cruiser
I'd love to have another amx, sx4, or an eagle wagon to cruise in someday. A 5.3 ls motor would be nice in one....
I was an AMC-Jeep-Renault employee in the 80's, right on up to the buyout by Chrysler. What a wild era! I miss them too
Bill Hahn Jr.
Hahn RaceCraft
World's Quickest and Fastest Street J-Bodies
Turbocharging GM FWD's since 1988
www.turbosystem.com
9 yrs ago I spotted a 1980-81(?) AMC AMX on a country road. It was Black with gold AMX lettering and striping. By the time I made it back to that road after work it was already sold. Never seen one before or since though except in magazines and online.
If AMC had better designs in the late 70's early 80's they'd probably still be around. From the mid 70's onward they made some Butt Ugly cars. If it wasn't for all the money Jeep made them then they probably wouldn't have made it to 1980 even.
My dad moved us all to Kenosha Wisconsin back in 86/87 to be a foreman for ANC. Then Chrysler bought them, fired my dad....back to Michigan we went.
“Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!” -Jon Stewart
Garbage that should have gone out of business years before it did, cant remember a single car of theirs that wasnt a complete eye sore
1989 Turbo Trans Am #82, 2007 Cobalt SS G85
I don't think your dad would have been happy in Kenosha at the time Scott. AMC's assembly lines were so antiquitated that he probably felt he was in the Flintstones. Also, I've heard stories of workers so angry at the company that they were sabotaging cars. It was a bad time.
Heh... did you all know that the Eagle Premier came with AMC stickers on it? That was the direct replacement for the AMC Eagle. That's why, in a way, you don't see me going on about how AMC could have made it. I liked the company a lot, but they were doomed. What's funny is despite all that AMC kept Chrysler going. The LH cars and the Neon (and I think even the Ram and Grand Cherokee) were all direct AMC designs or derived from them. Ask anyone who worked for the Pentastar and they'll tell you that internally it felt a lot more like AMC had taken over Chrysler than vice-versa. Lot of familiar faces in the design and devellopment teams. Not to mention that a lot of small things like the 2.5 liter L4 found in the Dodge Dakota was an AMC engine.
I've always thought there was a great documentary in the story of AMC. It certainly would be a good cautionary tale in today's iffy car market.
My own views about what killed AMC:
1. The Hudson-Nash merger that formed American Motors was well intended (Packard-Studebaker happened the same year for the same reasons) but too short sighted. The idea was to ally together all the little indie companies into a "Big 4". AMC mostly did that, but if it could have gotten Kaiser, Packard and Studebaker and Checker right out of the gate it might have been big enough to weather more storms. Would also have meant that they wouldn't have had to nearly bankrupt themselves trying buy Jeep in 1970.
2. Buying Jeep in 1970. Yes it helped them a lot towards the end, and the idea behind the purchase was sound. Jeep was a name brand and it's General Products division (AMC renamed it AM General) was a HUGE and profitable defense contractor, but it also cost them so much that it robbed them of any devellopment money.
3. The @%$! Pacer. Ask anyone who worked at AMC what they thought of that car and they still exhale hard and go "AHHH... don't wanna talk about it." Lots of money thrown on a car that never went anywhere, never shared a part with any other AMC vehicles and ended up being laughed out of dealerships. Not to mention their stupid idea of trying to put a rotary engine in it. They should have spent that money making a four cylinder. Would have made their "economy" cars (like the Gremlin) actually economical.
4. The triple punch of the 1972 pollution regulations and 1974 and 1979 oil crisis. On top of that there were a lot of subtle other regs in the 70's like rollover standards that everyone thought would kill convertibles. AMC simply didn't have the budget to build a small car or a small four cylinder engine. They had some designs but no money to implement them.
5. The Japanese car industry essentially taking the place of the small affordable car in America. They just couldn't compete and their ideas of what the public wanted was... quaint. I always said that if they'd allied themselves with Subaru in 1971 when the Japanese company was shopping around for a distribution network that the company could have survived despite everything else I've listed here.
6. Corporate infighting that would make most modern reality TV shows look tame in comparison.
Sad end to a sad company, but they had guts, and I liked their cars. They looked a helluva lot better than most other cars on the road - sorry Rodimus
Hell yeah, AMC eagle SX/4!
Knoxfire wrote:I don't think your dad would have been happy in Kenosha at the time Scott. AMC's assembly lines were so antiquitated that he probably felt he was in the Flintstones. Also, I've heard stories of workers so angry at the company that they were sabotaging cars. It was a bad time.
Heh... did you all know that the Eagle Premier came with AMC stickers on it? That was the direct replacement for the AMC Eagle.
Not true. By this time, the Eagle had been out of production for some years. The Premier was introduced as a Renault product, sold through AMC-Jeep-Renault dealers. It was actually an amazingly advanced vehicle for its time, Renault being a technology leader of that era.
One of the most valuable assets Chrysler received in the buyout was the brand-new state-of-the-art Canadian factory where the Premier was manufactured.
The Eagle nameplate was revived by Chrysler to replace the tarnished Renault brand name, which had deservedly gotten a black eye in North America at that time. They also brought in Mitsubishi and DSM cars and sold them under the Eagle nameplate as well, including Talon.
Knoxfire wrote:
What's funny is despite all that AMC kept Chrysler going. The LH cars and the Neon (and I think even the Ram and Grand Cherokee) were all direct AMC designs or derived from them. Ask anyone who worked for the Pentastar and they'll tell you that internally it felt a lot more like AMC had taken over Chrysler than vice-versa. Lot of familiar faces in the design and devellopment teams. Not to mention that a lot of small things like the 2.5 liter L4 found in the Dodge Dakota was an AMC engine.
The LH cars used the PRV (Peugeot-Renault-Volvo) engine and driveline configuration, borrowed from the Premier, but again...it was a Renault product, not AMC, per se.
The Neon has no direct correlation with any of the AMC-Jeep-Renault assets acquired in the buyout.
AMC had no pickups; thus the Ram is not related. Cherokee is a Jeep design, and was always Jeep, not AMC.
The 2.5 Chrysler is not an AMC design, nor is it a Renault design. It is a Chrysler engine, and always was.
What ultimately brought AMC-Jeep-Renault to its knees was a series of horrific quality control issues on the supremely popular Alliance and Encore series, which were built in Kenosha using the Renault R3 as a basis. While they did nab Motor Trend Car of the year honors in 1983, by 1987 warranty costs of blown engines, due to massive cooling system defects, had decimated A-J-R. The same car was also wildly popular in Europe, but did not experience the same warranty issues there. European owners took much better care of theirs, and kept up with the massive coolant leaks that plagued the series. By the time AJR made significant improvements to the car in MY 1986, it was far too late...the damage to their finances and reputation was complete. Renault's management had failed to understand that American car owners rarely even lifted the hood, much less ever checked critical fluid levels. Americans drove the crippled cars until they just blew up from low coolant.
By 1987, I was purchasing one or two-year old Allances and Encores for between $100 and $300 from disgusted owners, and shucking fresh engines in them built form surplus warranty repair parts I'd accumulated. I'd move them for $2000 to $3000 apiece. I went through about two dozen of them in this period. It was like printing money!
In the end, Renault almost completely destroyed the company it had purchased many years before (AMC-Jeep), and sold it at pennies on the dollar to Chrysler. It never returned to this nation, even though it's been one of the world's largest automakers for years. Finally, it had learned its lesson, and it missed the best days of auto sales ever to come not long after. Sad, but true. Blame the Frogs!
Edited 2 time(s). Last edited Wednesday, April 07, 2010 7:29 PM
Bill Hahn Jr.
Hahn RaceCraft
World's Quickest and Fastest Street J-Bodies
Turbocharging GM FWD's since 1988
www.turbosystem.com
Yeah, the Premier was definitely a Renault, and not a very well disguised one at that. But didn't they start printing AMC emissions stickers before the buyout was finalized? I'd heard that they did and that's why you saw them on the car. Could be wrong since I never saw one myself, but I always thought it was a good story. I got most of the info I mentionned at www.allpar.com, can't vouch for it personally, but I thought it was legit. Then again, any info about AMC is bound to get muddled through time. People today still think they had Ford engines.
Knoxfire wrote:Yeah, the Premier was definitely a Renault, and not a very well disguised one at that. But didn't they start printing AMC emissions stickers before the buyout was finalized? I'd heard that they did and that's why you saw them on the car. Could be wrong since I never saw one myself, but I always thought it was a good story. I got most of the info I mentionned at www.allpar.com, can't vouch for it personally, but I thought it was legit. Then again, any info about AMC is bound to get muddled through time. People today still think they had Ford engines.
The Premier was originally badged as a Renault, and some were actually sold as Renaults before the merger was consummated. It was the US-spec version of the Renault 25. No AMC-badged vehicles existed at that time; AMC was akin to GM in that it was an umbrella company with numerous nameplates. As for emissions stickers, all AJR products would carry the AMC name on such stickers, as it was the mother company (again, like GM).
The Premier was really a treat technically. Renault was reponsible for many firsts in automotive technology, such as throttle-body fuel injection, electronically-controlled tranmissions and distributorless ignitions. This was at a time when the other domestic automakers were still using antiquated designs. Premier took it up a notch, with really slick stuff like multiplexing of electrical signals...there was one wire from the front to the rear of the car. No, not one harness...one WIRE! That sigle wire carried all the information for fuel pump, taillights, and other items. Encoding and decoding boxes at each end of the wire were responsible for the process being consolidated into a single conductor, and then discretely translated and distributed to the different actuators and lamps.
Feel free to tell the allpar.com posters you got some accurate info! And I never thought this information would ever be useful again, lol!
Bill Hahn Jr.
Hahn RaceCraft
World's Quickest and Fastest Street J-Bodies
Turbocharging GM FWD's since 1988
www.turbosystem.com
