Corey Behrens found this Pacer parked in front of a VW Golf in Amsterdam. Given that the Pacer is only three inches longer than a current Golf, it rather fits in, physically, anyway, if not so much in some other ways. The fact that both the Pacer and the VW Golf arrived in 1975 led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, in comparing how two very different continents arrived at a vehicle designed to be the compact car of the future, anticipating a world where resources were expected to be scarcer, fuel more expensive, traffic denser, and families smaller.
And although the Golf obviously addressed those issues with more aplomb and to great lasting effect, the Pacer did anticipate one aspect of the future more accurately: with a waist 14 inches wider than the Golf, it anticipated a world where calories would be cheaper and more bountiful than ever.
Design work for the Pacer began in 1971 under the direction of AMC’s design Chief, Dick Teague, in anticipation of an increase in demand for smaller vehicles in the coming decade. This actually had already well started before 1971, but the small car was clearly on the ascendant. His goal was to make a very compact car, but unlike the narrow little imports, one that would be as wide as traditional full-size cars, giving Americans the sensation of driving a large car without the actual penalty associated with that, meaning the ridiculous overhangs at the front and rear.
Of course the issue of its drive train at that stage had not yet been really considered, as there appears to be little or no room for one anywhere. But a guy can dream, eh? The solution was to be the compact rotary engine, and AMC took a license from Curtiss-Wright in 1973 to develop their own. When that didn’t go so well, AMC made a deal to buy rotaries from GM. But that didn’t go well either, as the energy crisis killed GM’s infatuation with the thirsty Wankel. Just as well; one more Deadly Sin narrowly averted. But that left AMC no choice but to stuff their inline six into the stubby engine compartment.
There’s little doubt that Teague’s target was to essentially replicate the interior dimensions of the most popular class of American car at the time, the PLC such as the top-selling Monte Carlo. They’re both equally wide (77.3″ and 77.6″), but the Monte is a full 40″ longer.
All it takes is a look under the Monte’s hood to see that cutting most of that 40″ off the front alone wasn’t going to be really much of a challenge.
Here’s the Pacer’s big (3.8 or 4.2 L) inline six tucked away under its short hood. The firewall had to be re-designed to make room for the lengthy six. But AMC was well versed in such ways, having used its cutting torches to create the Gremlin from the Hornet.
Teague’s concept of providing an American-sized interior without the wasteful overhangs wasn’t actually all that new of a concept, as the 1959 Studebaker Lark trod that path some 15 years earlier. The Lark was a mere three inches longer than the Pacer, had a bigger back seat, and a good-sized trunk. And it didn’t need those bulging hips either.
Let’s consider briefly how the Pacer compares to the Golf/Rabbit. Or is that even necessary? The Pacer was 17″ longer than the US version of the Rabbit, with its 5 mile bumpers, and 27″ longer than the Euro version. It was 14″ wider, weighed 64% more, was 25% slower (0-60), and the (gas) Rabbit got 88% better fuel economy (all R&T test stats). Yes, front seat width was wider, but the Pacer’s rear seat, jammed between the wheel wells, was no bigger, if even that. And the high floor of its luggage compartment meant that it wasn’t very commodious either.
And I left out handling. Do I need to say something about that? I didn’t think so.
As mentioned in the opening, the current Golf is a mere 3″ shorter than the Pacer. And it’s put on some girth too, so now it’s only 6.5″ narrower than the Pacer. But there’s no point in even beginning to compare its interior accommodations as well as its dynamic qualities. That’s progress.
But then the Pacer’s claim to fame was never going to be in the numbers; it was its quirky styling. Which made it a brief fad in the US, but it turns out Americans aren’t so hot about riding in a stubby glass bubble that got mediocre mileage and had pokey performance. But the Europeans, especially the French, were all over it, as they are wont to do when America shows a bit of genuine creative spark. Well, not in real numbers, but more in the realms of mental masturbation.
But the Germans took it more seriously than that, and copied it in the form of the Porsche 928, which came out three years later.
So there’s my musings for today on this Pacer found in Amsterdam. It looks quite at home, and I’m sure it’s well appreciated; probably more so than from where it came.
Related:
Vintage R&T Review: 1975 AMC Pacer
CC 1975 Pacer X – The Spacer PN
One design feature of the Pacer that seems almost French is that the driver’s door was shorter than the passenger door. That made it easier for drivers to get in the car in tight spots and encouraged rear seat passengers to enter and exit on the curb side.
Was fuel economy really a goal of the Pacer design team? I suspect that rotary fuel consumption was already an accepted issue when AMC began the project. The promise of packaging, power and smoothness must have been the draw, and there was surely a hope that eventually they’d be much cheaper to produce than engines with more moving parts.
While I like the idea of the Pacer, the execution of it was bad. Like the Lark, the Pacer was based on a larger car and then had this pod built upon it, but like the Lark, the Pacer was just an intermediate car with an old engine in it. It might have looked futuristic in some kind of New Adventures of Flash Gordon, circa 1980 design, but like that version of Flash, the Pacer was more flash than dash.
The design wasn’t fast. The car looked like it was not moving, even when it was at expressway speeds. Look at that Porsche – then look at the Pacer. The Pacer looks like it was designed to be parked instead of driven. AMC spent too much time trying to be different instead of remembering what they were supposed to be trying to do. AMC sold as many wagons of the Pacer as it had the coupe, because the wagon was more useful, better looking and understandable as a vehicle than the coupe. The Pacer Wagon should have hit the market first. AMC never really needed the silly coupe.
AMC tried too hard. The Gremlin was easy to understand – it was a cut-offed Hornet. It looked like a doorstop, but the front 2/3rds of it was conventional. The Gremlin was sold as a cheap ride.
The Pacer design tried too hard to be unconventional. Worse, AMC already had a better car in that market – the Hornet Hatchback. Why would anyone choose a Pacer over the most attractive compact coupe on the market? AMC had everything it needed to modernize the Hornet, money-wise, but AMC spent that money creating the Pacer and the Matador Coupe instead. By the time the Pacer and the Matador Coupe went to market, the Hornet was really needing a completely new design, which AMC could no longer afford to have happen.
Seeing a Pacer in Amsterdam would be a bit of a shock.
The Pacer was an example of function following form, not form following function.
Making a wide heavy car with the back seat passengers stuck between the rear wheel wells so the hip room was less than in every narrow lighter car was kind of idiotic. Plus the live rear axle, drive shaft and transmission all eating up many more interior cubic feet, unlike in every far lighter and narrower FWD car of which there were multiple examples of various layouts around for years.
It’s kind of like the decades earlier mistake made by independents like Kaiser and Hudson pouring money into small cars that cost about as much as a normal sized car while offering much less room and everything else so not many were sold. This of course meant no money to come up with desperately needed new engines and bodies for their mainstream models.
Management should have just said no.
It would’ve worked with the spacious 3-across front seating they probably had in mind with the intended rotary powerplant. That went away when they were forced to shoehorn in the straight-6, because that was what they had, to recover sunk costs.
Pity a suitable FWD powerteam wasn’t available; looking anew at the Pacer in profile (3rd pic in this post, e.g.) I think it might’ve been much better that way.
I wonder if a Detroit Diesel 3-53 would fit. Hood might hafta be opened up a bit. Hooked to a five speed overdrive, that would be interesting.
It wouldn’t. The 3-53 is much taller, and weighs some 1000 lbs. More like leave the hood off. 🙂
The Buick (latterly Jeep) V6 sure would have fit better under the hood than an inline six. AMC would have done well to negotiate an engine supply deal when they sold the tooling back to GM, although I expect the timing was such that the Wankel was still the anticipated powerplant when that deal was done.
The front and rear bumpers on this example appear to be tucked in closer to the body than on a US/Canada version. I wonder if that is due to cars exported to Europe having the telescopic pieces omitted.
Biggest problem with the Buick/Dauntless V6 is it didn’t get a split pin crank until 1977 to solve the rough odd fire issue, and by that point the Pacers days were numbered. The Wankel promised to be extremely smooth running despite the configuration’s other faults, and the inline 6 used was inherently smooth, given the Pacer’s mission of compacting the big car experience the V6 would have just been another liability. None really would have solved the fuel economy issue, the V6 made A bodies and B bodies more fuel efficient but it’s doubtful it would have done any better than the AMC I6 in that department given the displacements
I see a lot of Pacer in this little 1980 Dodge Colt. I always thought these were attractive.
+1! Love those little Colts. We had one in the family and it was also a lot of fun to drive with its dual-stick manual. Funny how the very similar styling works so well on the Colt, yet looks so awkward on the Pacer.
True that. The Pacer that might have been. Or not…
The key on the design of the Colt being so much better than the similar Pacer are the C-pillars. On the Pacer, the quarter windows wrapping around the back (a la Studebaker) is what really emphasizes the fish-bowl look. I can only guess this was by design for an out-of-the-box appearance. It didn’t work, and had the opposite effect.
If AMC had simply skipped that wrap–around quarter window and used a conventional C-pillar like the Colt, it would have done wonders of making the Pacer look at least somewhat acceptable.
The Colt eliminates the unnecessary bulge along the Pacer’s lower haunches, below the beltline. had AMC kept the Pacer more trim, it might have garnered more sales.
I had not ever known the Pacer was the equivalent width of the Monte Carlo. If asked, I would have guessed at least an 8 to ten inch differential between the two, just notionally. I drove a ’73 Monte Carlo and it felt wide and large to handle in city traffic. I never had an opportunity to drive a Pacer however.
Can anyone tell if there is a relationship between the Dodge Colt and a Mitsubishi Colt? A friend of mine had two of these looking quite similar and he did like them so much though they quickly developed rust holes
Same thing. All Dodge (and Plymouth) Colts were re-badged Mitsubishis.
As the owner of a 7th generation Golf (current gen minus one) who briefly drove a friend’s parents’ new Pacer 40+ years ago, this perspective was interesting. My friend actually had a Rabbit (1st gen Golf) when his parents got the Pacer, and I recall it as feeling light, airy and sporty (it was gas, and German not Westmoreland). Everything the Pacer, despite its large glass area, was not. And although our 2015 Golf is smaller and “sportier” than our other two vehicles which are light trucks, it doesn’t really feel light or airy. On the other hand, it does feel solid and spacious. Yet another example how cars have grown in girth and weight, though not necessarily to their detriment. And the French ad: very eye-catching.
Companies should stick to their DNA. Nash genes were: Small light economical cars with more quality than you expect, more room than you expect, and more performance than you expect. The original 600, the Rambler, the Hornet, and the Eagle all expressed this DNA. The Pacer missed on all chromosomes.
Pacer was a GM-type error. Lots of technical OhWow that didn’t add anything to what people wanted from the brand.
Literally too, they deviated quite a bit in engineering too, they may have been ambassador wide but they shared very little with it, whereas pretty much every rambler/AMC/Eagle shared their basic chassis design DNA with each other, from American to Ambassador. AMC was able to sustain itself well enough with that formula, but a virtual clean slate the Pacer was must have cost them dearly as the initial sales surge trailed off, and it never went anywhere. GM at least had the luxury to milk the extremely costly GM10 for a few decades to get that deadly sin amortized, the Pacer underpinnings went nowhere
I have always wondered how much of the floor/suspension/etc structures of the Hornet (or even Matador) wound up as the underpinnings for the Pacer. I have always suspected that it was quite a lot.
The Lark makes an interesting comparison, but in a backwards kind of way. The 53-58 Studebaker was always undersized compared with the competition. When it was cut down into a compact the package it was just right (or at least as right as the aging architecture would allow).
The Pacer, OTOH, started with vehicles like the Hornet and Matador that were sized just right for their segments – they made a horrible subcompact that didn’t match up with any identifiable segment. “The first wide small car” proclaimed AMC. And the last, as it turned out.
It’s almost entirely different, it’s more like a Mustang II front suspension, down to the rack & pinion steering than any traditional AMC suspension, they don’t even have shock towers. Only parts shared are the brakes and maybe the spindles, the rest is pretty clean sheet, not sure about the rear suspension and pans(though I suspect the width similarity to the Ambassador/Matador is only in measurement)
Thanks for this. Now the Pacer is even more of a mystery to me. This structure as a clean sheet design is almost worse than this structure chosen for cost and expediency. The second would be kind of forgivable.
Were these ever raced ? Seems like it would’ve been a natural for NASCAR. The boys down at Holman-Moody could’ve really breathed some life into her. It looks like she’s pretty aero already. How about IMSA ? I guess the biggest challenge might be waking up that motor, and then there’s the weight distribution.
Nascar’s minimum wheelbase requirement was 115″ through 1980, which effectively restricted it to contemporary intermediates. The Pacer was raced in IMSA, however:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/uncategorized/trackside-classic-pacer-racer-the-real-thing/
As a piece of rolling sculpture, I absolutely love the 1975 – ’77 Pacers. I also like them as a cultural artifact from the decade in which I was born, as well a representation of what AMC tried to accomplish, botched though the execution was. I think they have great style, but I’m probably too introverted to own one as a classic as I’d feel the need to defend my love of them to pretty much everybody and I can only be so nice to jerks for only so long in one day. 😉
A terrific find in Amsterdam.
Some sites list the drag coefficient as .32, others .43 or so.
These cars fascinate me to this day, probably for all of the wrong reasons. I was thinking about the choice of engine after the Wankel experiments didn’t pan out.
I was trying to remember what V6 motors would have been available besides the Buick. There really weren’t very many good choices in the early 1970’s. I was thinking they could have bought the Ford Cologne 2.8 as installed in some Pintos, Bobcats and Capris, but the lower end of HP on those motors was 90 HP. A 232 AMC six put out 10 HP more, right from the box.
There were no four cylinders that could generate over 100 HP in the early 1970s, at least in federal emissions stock form. I didn’t consider anything like what actually took place in the later 1970’s, i.e. the Audi 2.0L because I think it would have been too expensive with exchange rates in the mid-70’s.
In the long run it made sense to run with either of the AMC sixes, as they were readily available, fairly torquey and were amortized. In a fantasy it would have been great to find a FWD drivetrain that would have worked in that space, but most of the ones that were contemporary with the car weren’t very powerful.
I have to agree. These outrageous, out-of-the-box designs definitely have a certain degree of memorable character, even charm. Reminds me a bit of the 1961 Plymouth with its Insect-That-Ate-Tokyo, angry front end.
In the long run it made sense to run with either of the AMC sixes,
Given that the huge losses of the Pacer (and Matador coupe) almost killed AMC and forced it to sell itself to Renault, I don’t think anything about the Pacer made sense, especially long-term. They should have killed the program when they realized just how badly compromised it was, before it ever went into production.
I really wasn’t debating whether the car should have been built. This was a mental exercise to see what else would have been available before the launch of the car to see what could be substituted for the AMC six.
It seems that there were few good alternatives.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/03/archives/amc-sees-4cylinder-engine-of-vw-audi-for-use-in-gremlin.html
But AMC did use an outsourced 4-cylinder at some point… I wondered if that would have worked in a transverse application, which would have at least freed up a ton of room inside the car…
Yes, AMC did use the Audi four banger in 1977, two years after the Pacer launched. Used in the Gremlin and later the Spirit, both of which were lighter than the Pacer.
That French ad made an analogy that had never ever occurred to me. But it did make me LOL quite literally.
Imho the Pacer was simply too far ahead of its time , yet not fully developed due to a lack of resources. Their goal, a logically packaged car was laudable. Big inside and smaller on the outside, as a design goal . Makes sense. No other American maker was doing this. With a few more development dollars, the Pacer could have been sensational.
Imho the AMC design team learned their lesson. Their next, and last clean- sheet design, the 1984 Jeep XJ came to market fully developed. Unlike the Pacer, there were no design compromises and imperfect development. The XJ became a 17 year long monument to excellent design, a fine legacy for the AMC design team
The XJ became a 17 year long monument to excellent design, a fine legacy for the AMC design team
Well, the XJ was designed under the direct supervision of Francois Castaing, who was sent by Renault to AMC just for that purpose: to make the XJ a world-class vehicle that Renault could sell in Europe. You could say that the XJ Cherokee was the Golf of SUVs, and certainly not the Pacer of SUVs.
They repeated the mistakes of Pacer with the XJ.
They tied themselves to GM for the engine that it needed. Yes they did have their 2.5 4cyl but it was a bit under powered in the application. So in short order they had to figure out how to shoehorn a new version of their old school straight 6 in it. Even then it wasn’t until Chrysler ditched the Renix system and did some tweaks to improve output that it became the engine of legend.
The other mistake that was shared was poor interior packaging.
The Pacer is a fascinating car for the “what if” sorts of speculation, what if it had a more efficient engine, what if it were FWD, heck, on the subject of what little thought was put into engines in the original idea , what if it were electric? Of course, AMC never had much chance of pulling any number of those things off, but then I can also wonder what if some other bigger company came up with it? I’ve never been able to disparage the Pacer because I see all that optimism in its design, and frankly I just think it’s cool looking. Pacers are extremely rare sights for me and always have been, so I’m always excited to see one.
The Golf is an interesting comparison, since it like the beetle before it was a sort of the idea of the car for the masses – IE something that does everything anyone desiring a car needs pretty good, even in looks with that excellent Italian styling – The Pacer by contrast was trying the classic rambler thing of finding a cozy gap in the market to nestle into, a refuge for customers to seek when they were turned off by the popular choices, but I’m not sure width alone was what full size buyers sought, some wanted a big ass trunk, some wanted the long overhangs and style that came with it “I sure love my wide dashboard with the whole family in the front seat” I’m not sure was a phrase often uttered for an LTD buyer, and it’s ultimately ironic that this would be AMC to champion the idea since their foray into “big cars” after Nash wasn’t exactly successful.
And just to take a dig at progress, I don’t imagine the Pacer needs a backup camera to see what’s behind it like the modern Golf most certainly does 🙂
AMC was certainly willing to gamble, even if against the odds. I’ve been thinking a lot about Nash’s huge gamble with the Rambler in the 50s. The prospects were piss-poor; the other compacts all failed (Kaiser Henry J, Willys Aero, Hudson Jet, Crosley). And Rambler sales dropped in 56, after a not very good ’55.
But then the odds changed, thanks to a sudden revulsion with the ever-bigger cars in ’57, compounded by a nasty recession in ’58. It could so easily have gone the other way, and by then Nash was all-in.
So I suspect the willingness to gamble on something utterly different is what drove them on. But the odds weren’t very good this time either, and this time the odds got worse, as the Pacer’s lousy fuel economy made it a loser compared to the Japanese imports and the Pinto and Vega.
Was just going to say. The Pacer looks like a Porsche 928 with an air compressor stuck up it’s arse.
I got a 250 mile ride & drive in one in 1980 coming home from college. The low beltline, invisible hood, high center of gravity, and huge glass at a distance make you feel vulnerable, the reverse of the SUV effect. GM gave their small cars the same proportions as their large ones, so they were always too short for comfort for tall people. The Pacer went to the other extreme.
I’m very suprised to see this here, I often see this Pacer with my very own eyes, I even used to live a few streets away from it. The Pacer wasn’t a rare car here according to my mother, I think that the short length but roomy interior convinced a few of us to buy one. I believe they were nicknamed ufo or flying saucer, not sure which one it was. After the Pacer the Eagle wagon and especially the Jeep Cherokee became popular here, but sadly I rarely see those anymore either. I own a 81 and 85 Chevrolet Chevette, even more rare here but honestly I’d trade them for a Pacer if I had the chance.
Don’t forget the Pacer wagon!
Image from the amcpacer site:
http://www.amcpacer.com/images/archives/greyred1.jpg
“But the Germans took it more seriously than that, and copied it in the form of the Porsche 928” Wow, that is a HUGE stretch. I highly doubt there is any truth in that statement. They might look ever so slightly similar if you squint, underwater, in fog.
Tony Lapine, chief designer at Porsche when the 928 was created, disagrees with you.
Wow, that underhood shot of the Monte Carlo… it’s like they needed the top half of a 55 gallon drum turned on its side so the air from the radiator and fan would actually reach the engine.
So was there room in that early prototype for a small rotary? Just as well for AMC as well as GM that the Wankel program was axed; it wouldn’t have felt torquey enough (especially at low revs) for the heavy Pacer. As well, if NSU, Mazda, or Citroen couldn’t figure out how to make a reliable rotary engine; I shudder to think how scary a rotary from the folks that brought you the Vega engine a few years earlier would have been.
I’m fascinated by the GM Wankels. I recall reading that they displaced over three liters(3,380cc), so I thought maybe they would have sufficient low end torque for the Pacer. The Monza was a surprisingly heavy car, and that was going to be the first of many GM rotary-powered cars. Then I did a little research.
I definitely wonder about the dimensions of the GM rotary. NSU built rotaries that were about 500 cc per rotor. Mercedes-Benz built a few that had 600 cc rotors. Mazda’s rotaries were comfortably between 500 and 700 cc per rotor. Did GM really build one that was 1,690 cc per rotor? If they did, maybe that would have offered up enough torque to work with an automatic transmission and a loaded weight of two tons. Then I looked at the specs for the near-production spec GM Wankel: 125 lb-ft of torque at 4,000 RPM and an engine weight of 255 pounds. Those numbers are very close to those of some contemporary Mazda 13B specifications. GM was claiming 150 horsepower, which might have been one of those optimistic numbers that would shrunk when emissions certification was achieved.
Can anyone definitively say whether or not the displacement of GM’s Wankel was being measured by the same standards as everyone else’s? I’ve long thought that rotary displacement should be calculated based on the three chambers defined by their rotors rather than the one chamber being formed by each rotor as it passes by. Doing so would equalize them with piston engines for fuel consumption and horsepower, although their expansion stroke doesn’t result in as much torque. Was the GM really similar in size to everyone else’s Wankels all along?
A bit of social psychology here: I was born in 1960 and in my memory when the Pacer was introduced AMC already had a horrible reputation as a car maker. We’d lived through the lemon years of Detroit and I think Americans had become pretty wary of their native auto industry. I feel like many people saw the Pacer has a Hail Mary and probably not likely to be a successful one. But my memory could be faulty because I have no recollection of ever seeing a Pacer Wagon.
I wouldn’t say that AMC had a “horrible” reputation in 1975. The Pacer actually sold well for its 12 months on the market. The problem was that, by the summer of 1976 (the Pacer had debuted in February 1975), virtually everyone who wanted a Pacer had one. Sales began dropping quickly, and the debut of the wagon for the 1977 model year ultimately could not reverse that trend.
By the summer of 1977, with the failure of the Matador coupe and Pacer to gain traction in the market, and the tired appearance of the Gremlin and Hornet, the company was increasingly seen as irrelevant by many potential customers. People who wanted a traditional American car bought one from the Big Three. AMC tried to position itself as the “small car expert,” but the imports (particularly the Japanese) were doing a much better job of fulfilling that role.
It just now occurs to me that there is a parallel between Dick Teague at AMC and Virgil Exner at Chrysler – each had a unique idea on “the next big thing” in styling and took their companys’ products in directions nobody else was going.
Exner’s Chrysler offered us the 1960 Valiant and the 1963 Chrysler, probably the purest indications of his vision (as opposed to the hacked up 61 models or the truncated 62 Plymouth and Dodge). Teage’s AMC gave us the Pacer and the 74 Matador coupe. In both cases the rest of the industry had other ideas of what a car should look like and those ideas won in the marketplace, leaving these very noticeable outliers.
Teague was also trying to attract a completely different type of buyer to AMC with the Matador coupe and Pacer.
Teague tried to push AMC in a new direction by building unusually styled coupes. AMC had been primarily known for building practical sedans and wagons.
For another story, a poster provided the percentage of each brand’s intermediate sales claimed by two-door coupes for the 1969 model year. AMC/Rambler was the only brand that sold more four-door sedans than hardtop coupes in its intermediate line.
Buyers weren’t visiting their AMC dealer to buy high-style coupes in the early 1970s.
The Matador coupe and Pacer had too many shortcomings – a reflection of the company’s limited financial resources – to make any headway in attracting those new customers. There was too much of the same old AMC under those new skins, and customers soon noticed. Particularly with the demands for better fuel economy, along with increased import competition, driving customer expectations.
Ford created the Fairmont.
AMC created the Pacer.
What AMC needed was a new Hornet, based upon the same design as the Fairmont, which was at AMC’s hand and budget. I would have loved to see how well Dick Teague would have made AMC’s version of the Fairmont.
Ford got a decade of mileage out of the Fairmont; the Mustang, Lincoln Continental, the LSC.
AMC would have gotten even more out of an AMC version of it. It would have been the new Gremlin/Spirit. It would have been a better Matador. Imagine an AMC Eagle with a more modern design? All attainable.
Someone at AMC lost the Romney thread and instead channeled Abernathy’s disastrous attempt to match the Detroit three in the market. The personal luxury car market was a cash cow, but not for a Matador Coupe design. Lord, why did AMC go in that direction?