(first posted 11/2/2016) Perhaps we need to start an AMC Deadly Sins Series, as the Pacer certainly qualifies. Like so many things at AMC, it started out as pretty radical idea to repackage the American car; lots of passenger comfort in a compact package. But any serious effort at that would have had to include FWD and a compact engine, rotary if possible. Instead, the Pacer came out to be more like something of a re-bodied Matador, with a whopping 77″ width and yet a very compromised rear seat. Road and Track takes a closer look at its development and execution.
The surprising success of the goofy Gremlin gave AMC design head Dick Teague the confidence to do something outside of the usual comfort zone for a follow-up. And strictly from a design point of view, there’s a whole lot to like about it. It was pretty radical for 1975; think Ford Granada as a counterpart. Teague wasn’t imitating anyone here; in fact his Pacer would go on to influence a wide range of cars, both in Europe and Japan.
The wider/longer passenger side door was one of the many unusual solutions to what he called the “Urban Concept”. And of course both the rotary engine and FWD were contemplated. The first mule was made by cutting down a Matador by 30″ in front and back. The Lark of the mid 70s. And like the Lark, it had a great first year and a half. In its shortened 1975 MY, a healthy (and above projections) 72 k were sold, followed by 117k in 1977. But then the Pacer crashed, by over 50% in ’77, and then just shriveled away to almost nothing in the painful subsequent years.
As long as a Pinto and as wide as a Chevelle. How’s that for an odd approach?
A Pinto on sideways steroids. I rather suspect the Pinto influenced Teague’s thinking quite a bit, as it really does have a number of similarities.
The Pacer ended up with the usual shortcomings in this approach, like a super-slow manual steering ratio with six turns lock-to-lock. In that regards, a Pinto had it beat hands down.
With the Rambler six under the hood and all that glass, weight was a rather hefty 3,000 lbs in the most basic stripped version. But there were folks who liked the idea of feeling like they were sitting in the front of a roomy big American car, but without all the unnecessary length. Well, at least for the first year or so. It was not a recipe for lasting pleasure or success.
In 1976, my mom traded her ’74 Hornet Sportabout for a new Pacer.
She regretted it after a few months. I don’t remember too much as I was a little guy back then, but I remember the A/C would make the engine make a “grinding” noise when it was on.
The next year, she traded it for a ’77 Buick Electra 225 sedan.
Wow talk about a change, Pacer to Deuce and a Quarter.
PDan, sometimes you have to go with who will give you the best deal, like me going from a Subaru Justy to an Olds Ciera in 1996.
Paul, that would be a cool CC topic: ‘Weirdest CC Trades’
That wasn’t as uncommon as you might think. Any number of people panicked after the ’73 oil price spike, and bought cars they hoped would give them good gas mileage and keep them out of gas lines. When the cars failed to deliver on mileage, or proved to be penalty boxes, people upsized in droves.
The top sellers of 1974 and 1975 were some of the most ignored cars of ’77-’79.
Soo soo true!!
The table at the end tells the story. The purpose of width is to be wide. Pacer was wide without being wide. It was narrower than the Gremlin.
This is the kind of mistake GM normally made. Boss has a bright idea; by the time it’s all committeed out, the bright idea is turned upside down. GM had the money to survive such ego trips. AMC didn’t.
The table clearly shows the Pacer to be the widest of the 5 vehicles referenced –
Check the hip room numbers, though. It was wide on the outside and narrow on the inside.
The back seat is between the wheels instead of being in front of them – a car designed from the outside in. And behind it a small uncovered luggage area. And inch of width is fifteen feet long so is a dumb place to add dimension (and a lot of weight).
Form over function I guess, which is the opposite of what you’d assume of this design.
I’d love to see a small car with good legroom and enough width to comfortably seat 5 people. But of course with greater width comes less fuel economy so it probably doesn’t make sense.
I see this in a lot of modern cars. They are quite wide but the cabins are much narrower than you’d expect given the overall width.
Doors are much thicker than they used to be.
Will six seats do?
exterior.
That interior is awesome! More cars should be like that instead of having giant consoles.
That exterior though…
A guy down the street bought one of these when they were new but kept it less than a year and traded it off for a Dodge Dart hardtop. I asked him if he had problems with it in replacing it so soon. He told me he couldn’t take the jokes, laughter and ridicule he got from his friends and relatives. One of the ladies I worked with had one as well and the door hinges wore out in just over a year. It was gone as well in about three years and replaced with an Olds Cutlass.
AMC used nylon bushings in the door hinges. Sagging doors were a problem even on Gremlins and Hornets. With those heavy Pacer doors you didn’t stand a chance.
I want to read about that IROC Fiat 131!
Yes, please share that story
I was immediately attracted to the look of the Pacer on first view via a tiny photo on a teaser magazine cover. Very clean design, not a line out of place, airy cabin. I reacted as I had to the first image seen of the ’66 Olds Toronado. It seemed to have a platonic air about it, a body designed by nature to move through a fluid. It’s clam shape was already familiar, given the thousands of Pintos aready on the roads, but seemed burdened by fewer gratuitous details, like the latter’s six sided headlight surrounds.
Then came the shock. I had imagined it to be Pintoesque in size as well, and didn’t know what to make of the incredible bulk. Talk about gratuitous. The Pacer suddenly went from nifty to hefty. Those were years of seismic gas prices, and I was about to take a leap into the unknown with purchase of a new FIAT 131 (now that you mention it!), so my mindset was on a different cloud. The Pacer seemed to be designed for a fantasy of comfort and small parking spaces for people who weren’t economy minded, had no children, and not adverse to leaving expensive stuff in full view in its cabin.
The FIAT looked to be a winner, until it started stopping., so it was traded in a year later. The ambivalence that many of us felt car shopping in those days of pogo stick pump pricing caught me out, as I returned to the fold with a sparkling new Dodge Aspen. It turned out to be no more than a fat Valiant. A Pacer with a trunk.
The Pacer wasn’t really a rebodied Matador as far as the platform was concerned. The cut-down Matador mules were only used to test the basic concept. Production vehicles were very different.
That was the problem. The Pacer cost a fortune (by AMC standards) to develop and aside from the drivetrain it did not share much of anything with the other vehicles in their lineup. Tooling costs were through the roof. The front suspension is completely different from anything else the company ever built, and of course none of their other cars had a front subframe or rack-and-peanut steering. (The entire Pacer front suspension unbolts from the car as a single unit. You won’t find that on any other AMC product.) Nothing else in the AMC lineup even used a crossflow radiator. So when the Pacer failed in the marketplace they didn’t even make enough from it to pay for the tooling, let alone earn a profit. Oops.
Of course as far as the drivetrain is concerned the Pacer was the same as any other AMC car. From that standpoint it is little different than a Gremlin, Hornet, or Matador. Except that shoehorning those bulky engines under that short hood made the car a nightmare to work on. (Some crazies were known to stuff the 401 V8 in there!) Another problem was that given its weight and the emissions-choked engines of the day, the Pacer was dog slow and used nearly as much gas as a traditional full-sized car.
We’ll never know how things would have turned out if the GM rotary engine had actually gone into production. Given GM’s track record with new engine technology at the time I would fear the worst. At least the bog-standard engines used in the Pacer were reliable.
It is fascinating that AMC used so many unique parts in the steering and suspension, yet made it ride and handle just like almost everything the company had ever made. You give a car market-leading rack and pinion steering, but with a ratio that made 6 turns lock to lock? Really? With all that width and some fat, sticky tires, the Pacer could have been a real handler. But AMC didn’t really build those, so it wasn’t.
And power? The Studebaker Lark offered V8 power in a compact, something nobody else had, and the car was a credible performer. Had this car offered a V8 right off the bat and some handling to back it up, perhaps it might have earned some respect.
The Pacer gave only one thing that was unique – width, and most of it was unusable, as a practical matter.
Had the car really been just a cut-down Matador the Pacer’s ultimate failure in the marketplace would not have been nearly as bad for the company.
As with other AMC cars you had to get power steering with the Pacer to get a sane ratio for the steering. Of course since the GM rotary engine was a no-show, the Pacer wound up with much more weight over the front wheels than originally planned. As I recall the power rack was made by GM/Saginaw but was never used in any GM vehicle, or anything else but the Pacer for that matter.
AMC was late to the V8-in-a-small-car party. Starting in 1966 you could get a V8 engine in the Rambler American. (There had been earlier V8 Ramblers of course, but those were really intermediates.)
“And power? The Studebaker Lark offered V8 power in a compact, something nobody else had, and the car was a credible performer.”
Ahem. Rambler also made occasional stabs at V8 power in their small cars – remember the 1957 Rebel, which clocked faster at Bonneville than a stock Corvette off the showroom floor? – as well as through the 1960s with the American. I owned a ’66 American 440 with the 287 V8, and a ’76 Pacer with the 258 I-6. The Pacer was a slug. The American seemed far roomier, definitely was lighter and handled better even with its ancient suspension, and had way more cargo capacity. Also, it ran like a raped ape. Fast enough to get me in trouble a few times. AMC didn’t know a good thing when they had it.
AMC might have done better had they committed to buying their engines from Mazda – who already had rotary engines on the road for almost ten years at the time – rather than from GM, who merely licensed permission to build the engines and would have charged a fortune for them. The market prestige Mazda would have gained by supplying AMC with engines would have been a win-win for both companies.
From what I’ve read AMC looked at sourcing Wankel engines from Mazda and even Comotor. They were too expensive. AMC also paid for a license to develop their own rotary engine but lacked the resources to do so.
The last-gen Rambler American had a lot going for it. In a lot of ways I think it was better than the Hornet that replaced it, even though the Hornet was very similar under the skin. (The only major chassis difference was finally getting rid of the trunnions in the front suspension.)
I am well aware that AMC had been building V8s since the 50s. But they wouldn’t put one into the Pacer until a couple of years down the road, and only then with an ugly hood/grille revision to make it fit. My only point was that the Pacer gave a new car buyer in 1975 pretty much nothing (of use, anyway) that he couldn’t get elsewhere. All you got was an overweight underpowered car that was funny looking and sucked gas like the dickens. A version with a 360 and a handling oriented tire/wheel/suspension package could have gone a long way to offering at least something unique.
Point taken, JP; however, I was pointing more to your tendency – whenever AMC or Rambler are the subject – to bring up the terror of South Bend in a reply. 🙂
True enough, I enter a guilty plea.
I guess AMC just gets to me for being so . . . average. Im just a sucker for those companies that swung for the fences against all odds. AMC seemed to go out on too many called strikes.
Either that or it’s that I grew up around them in northern Indiana and not around AMC stuff in Wisconsin.
Truth be told, I grew up in western Massachusetts. We got the full brunt of all lake-effect storms from Buffalo, once they cleared the Berkshires and roared eastward near ground level. The snow we got, every winter, oy gevalt…
A Studie with a standard transmission and the Hill-Holder wasn’t too bad on our hills, if you started in second gear in snow. Dealerships were rather few and far between, though, so we didn’t see that many. Nash and Hudson both were popular marques for years there, so once they merged there was a Rambler dealer everywhere. They were excellent in snow even with the automatic transmission, as you could lock out first gear. The transmission was a Borg-Warner design, also bought by Ford and marketed as the Cruise-O-Matic. I never figured out whether AMC bought theirs from Ford or direct from B-W, but theirs was called Flash-O-Matic. (Really original.) They used that until 1969 or ’70, when they started buying the TorqueFlite from Chrysler Corp.
I grew up with a few kids whose dads owned Studies, and they loved them. They were the same type of people who loved SAABs and Subarus. Nothing against that; they just were a bit different, that’s all. I temper my opinion, as people tend to look at me oddly and move away a few feet when I tell them I loved Rambler/AMC products. 😀
There were a # of S/bakers still running the streets in my small wstrn PA town. ( well into the/mid late “70’s”.)
I remember two of them being “p/u trucks.”One of them was the “roughest looker”. It ran on though.
AMC did offer the 304 V-8 as an option beginning with the 1978 model year. That is why 1978 and 1979 Pacers have a new egg-crate grille and hood with a raised center area. It was necessary to clear the added height of the optional V-8.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere but it was pure stupidity for AMC to design the Pacer around a “vaporware” competitor engine like the GM rotary, & abandoning (several years before) the perfect engine for it: Buick V6, perhaps the most farsighted design GM ever did.
I cut AMC a little slack in overbuilding the Pacer to a standard of safety higher than ultimately demanded by regulators.
Lets not let the facts get in the way of a good bashing. Because the test mules were cut down Matadors obviously the car was just a cut down Matador. Just like the LH was based on the Premier since they used Premiers with stretched wheel bases for the LH mules.
Living in a town where there were literally two AMC dealers across the street from each other, seeing lots of AMC’s growing up was a common sight. Pacers were quite common; in fact, one of the dealers would advertise a stripped down version in the newspaper and had a white one on ramps in front of the dealership for what seemed like an eternity. I think that same white Pacer was on the ramps for over a year! Finally it did sell, and I remember the little old guy that bought it. He would putt around town, going to the market and pharmacy and such. One time when I was working at the local market he came in and I peeked a look inside that stripped down Pacer. It had to be at least 6 or 7 years old by then, and it had only 10,000 miles on it! I always thought how ironic it was that a car that was so hard to sell finally got sold and was kept in such amazing condition.
There must be an interesting story behind two AMC dealerships across the street from each other. Were they once separate Nash and Hudson dealers?
I know. My town barely supported one..lol It did hang in till about 1977 though.
I hope he got a decent price if it sat for a year!! Sounds like he had a garage to keep it in.
I thought the Pacer was kind of cool when it first came out… It was new thinking from Detroit, and (don’t tell anybody at school, okay?) I had become a kind of secret AMC fanboy. I really thought that they were turning the company around in those days. The Javelin and the AMX were pretty cool looking, and I thought the Gremlin was a stroke of genius. Of course, the few AMC products belonging to people I knew were real POS (vacuum operated windshield wipers that slowed down when you went uphill?) but I naively thought that the Pacer was going to be better, being a fresh new design and all.
Then my uncle, who was kind of weird and cheap anyhow, bought one. It was a year old when he brought it to Thanksgiving dinner at grandma’s but all the men still gathered round it to gawk. Being a kid, I was allowed (or pushed, I forget which) into the back seat. It was tiny back there and uncomfortable, and you could already see the sun rot eating the plastics. The engine bay… well somebody quipped it looked like his old Nash in there. The dream was shattered…..
As for the rotary engine? That would have just made things worse. Rotaries don’t have any torque, are gas hogs, and -in those days anyhow- eat rotor seals like potato chips. Next imagine taking your revolutionary new engine to Joe’s Garage for service. Joe is not just going to say no, he’s going to lock the doors and grab the shotgun to make you go away. Fortunately it’s only 30 miles to the dealership where AMC’s highly trained factory mechanics will be happy to poke around confusedly under the hood long enough for the salesman to sell you a Gremlin…..
I remember seeing a print ad for the Pacer with the headline “the first wide small car.” Struck me as a case of making a virtue out of necessity.
What a misfire. As I look at this car now, it strikes me as the Colonnade Compact. This has all the hallmarks of GM’s colonnade A bodies of 1973: extreme curvature of the bodies, lots of glass, and gobs of road-hugging weight. And the negatives too, with cheap interior plastics.
I drove one once. In my mind, the greatest sin in the entire design was the way the window glass was too tall to roll all the way down into the door. The solution? Mold a 3 inch lip that jutted up from the door panels. Back then, it was fairly common to drive with the windows down, and one arm resting on the top of the door. This was impossible to do comfortably in a Pacer.
It was a fascinating concept, and I agree that it was sort of like AMC’s Lark. Only the Lark was decently styled and used off the shelf components to keep costs down. This car might have been a hit in 1971, but this space-orb styling was past its best-by date, as the 75 Granada and Cordoba proved.
LOL I never correlated any similarities between a Colonnade and an AMC Pacer but whatever. All 4 divisions at the time used what can be described as cheap interior plastics by today’s standards especially the test tube wood grain finished dashes. The cloth seat material was nicer than today’s rough sand paper like material however.
It’s the fairly radical tumblehome that the Pacer shares with the Colonnades, and GM’s ’71-’76 full size cars. That fat body look did indeed make cars heavier, and interior space efficiency was hurt by the comparatively narrow roofs over the bodies.
The Pacer one upped the GM cars in the fat hip department, resulting as JPC notes in a car so round that the windows wouldn’t roll down properly.
In this regard, the Pacer was completely out of step with where car design was heading. Ford’s very traditional Granada, introduced the same year, had slab sides and little tumblehome. Within two years of the Pacer, GM’s big cars went on a diet and got their beltline muffin tops worked off.
This window concept is not unique to the AMC. Some trucks, like the Isuzu N-series have been diong the identical thing for decades. It’s the price to pay for visibility, and beats windows that don’t roll down at all (looking at you, GM)
The Pacer was the inspiration for the Porsche 928.
Look at the windows.
The Corvair had a flat six years before the Porsche 911.
I see a pattern.
The Pacer had influence on subsequent car design. As an example, there are evolutionary styling similarities in the greenhouse treatment with the Porsche 928 which was introduced in 1978. Chrysler also likely recycled these concepts from the Pacer and 928 into the Chrysler Laser and Dodge Daytona in 1984.
How ironic:
Above the Pacer on the front cover is the headline, Small Cars For Economy, Ecology and Fun. And the Pacer while being sold as a small car….embodied NONE of those 3 features.
The Pacer was a spectacularly advanced project and deserves far more respect from the general public than it got. It’s one of very few American cars that truly predicted the future. I could not understand how people ridiculed the appearance of it, when, in 15 years they would happily drive cars that look just the same. Look at an early 90’s Civic, its got the Pacer look all over.
We can kick AMC around all we want, but the Pacer concept was too good for them and their limited resources. Sure, the Big 3 had the money to develop a better product, but their styling priorities were too conservative. They never would have made such an advanced package. It took the desperation of AMC to do so. In this regard, the Pacer was more similar to the Studebaker Avanti, and not the Lark.
I really wanted to like the Pacer when it debuted, but there were so many compromises that were apparent even to my young eyes.
AMC also shot itself in the foot by failing to make the performance match the looks. As J P Cavanaugh notes, AMC spent a fortune on unique components for the Pacer, only to ultimately end up with a vehicle that rode and handled just like every other AMC car.
AMC made one big mistake with the Pacer, similar to its retention – for far too long – of standard vacuum-powered windshield wipers. Manual drum brakes were standard on the Pacer, which was completely unacceptable for a car that was supposed to represent the future in 1975.
The magazine Road Test put a Pacer through thru the paces, and ripped the standard drum brakes. If I recall correctly, their performance in a panic stop was almost as bad as the performance of the drum brakes used by the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado.
As the magazine put it, “What happens when your Aunt Bea hits the brakes on the freeway?”
I’ve never quite understood why drum brakes ever remained in production anywhere, once inexpensive floating-caliper disc brakes were developed. I can’t imagine drums were cheaper to make, what with the much greater number of parts to make and assemble.
The only reason I can see is to help upsell optional disc systems for extra profit. What would Aunt Bea say if she knew she was being soaked like that?
Yeah, drum brakes have problems, but they work OK if they’re engineered with enough swept area. I mean in a 1971 test of a Comet GT with a 302 with front/rear 10 inch drums, it stopped from 60 in 113 feet. Thats modern day performance. Of course after a couple of stops, they’re going to fade. That’s the major downfall. Well that and water in the drums. I have 5 cars with 4 wheel drums that do just fine in normal use. BUT I am well aware of their limitations. I don’t push them. I don’t feel the need for a disc conversion. Also another thing in drum brake favor is no power booster is needed. That had to save some money for the manufacturers. Some disc brake jobs don’t need a booster, but most do.
The issue, though, was failing to meet customer expectations for what constituted a “modern” car. In 1975, people expected brand-new cars – particularly cars that were sold as a cut above basic transportation – to have standard front disc brakes.
No doubt drum brakes could still work if engineered properly (although, given the results of the panic-stop test conducted by Road Test reviewers, AMC didn’t even meet that threshold), but most buyers thought front drum brakes were old-fashioned in 1975.
No arguments from me. Your absolutely correct.
Most people, particularly AMC buyers, in 1975 didn’t really know the difference between disc and drum brakes. Sure they may have heard about them but didn’t know what, if any, the benefits were. You step on the wide pedal and it stops what more do you need to know. A lot of buyers were probably trading in cars with 4 wheel drum brakes that has always got the job done. Sure there were cars in the 60’s and early 70’s with disc brakes but they were not on the kind of cars a person was likely to be trading in on a Pacer.
With the Pacer, AMC was trying to broaden its customer base beyond regular AMC buyers. And, yes, plenty of people were aware of the benefits of front disc brakes by 1975. Aiming a brand-new vehicle at the people who weren’t aware was not, in the long run, going to be a lucrative endeavor.
As AMC ultimately discovered.
“The magazine Road Test put a Pacer through thru the paces, and ripped the standard drum brakes. If I recall correctly, their performance in a panic stop was almost as bad as the performance of the drum brakes used by the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado.”
Actually, more like those of the 1958 Pacer – from Edsel.
I had no idea that the Pacer was a chopped and re-bodied Matador. But, I guess that is sort of a duh moment. Where else was cash strapped AMC going to get the first “wide-bodied” compact?
Ironic. It’s been said on the pages of CC many times that the appropriately sized, but rather ugly and dated Matador sedan and wagon needed a complete overhaul to compete with the popular cars of the ’70s such as the GM A and late B bodies.
AMC did it not once, but twice! The Matador X coupe was a nice try for the personal luxury market, but a complete miss as far as styling. And, the Pacer – take the one thing the Matador got right – its proportions – and come up with a car so proportionally screwed up it weighs 3,000 pounds, but has a crappy backseat, and the windows don’t roll down properly.
In hindsight, the Pacer really should have been cheaper and easier redo of the aging Hornet / Gremlin – cars in a hot size category that ended up having to soldier on for about 15 years in their 1970 bell bottoms.
The Pacer isn’t a chopped and re-bodied Matador but the facts wouldn’t lend to a good bashing, so something had to be made up.
It is probably closer to the situation than not.
AMC’s stock-in-trade was the clever re-use of parts to make new cars. It was what the budget could afford. Page 40 of the article talks about AMC planners hoping for a new platform, perhaps with front-wheel-drive, but concedes that the chassis was going to have to come from stuff already in production. And, they chopped up a Matador for an engineering mule.
The front and rear tread of the Pacer and Matador are awfully similar, and both exceed the compact AMC cars by a number of inches. The Pacer and Matador are basically 60 inches wide while the compacts were 57 inches. Inspector Gadget, in the comments above, makes an interesting statement on what was new, and a lot was, but even the article condemns the car as a new body on an old chassis on page 44.
Sort of like the 1977 GM B body was not exactly on the 1973 A body chassis, but it used the basic engineering that had been worked out for that car. The push in ’77 was CAD driven space utilization design to build a lighter, but more spacious car body. The chassis was updated carryover.
Take a look at the suspension and steering gear on a Matador versus a Pacer and get back to us on that.
I was going to say the same thing.
Matador: unequal length control arms with the coil and spring on the top arm acting against the inner fender wells.
Pacer unequal length control arms with the spring and shock on the lower arm working against the subframe.
Yes they used the Matador rear axle housing which fit into their wide small car shtick and the front track width followed.
I’m a big fan of the 1963-1968 Rambler/AMC cars. They had everything right during those six model years. Size, styling, and utility. Earlier models were just as good, but ugly; later models had few redeeming qualities. As far as a re-do of the Hornet? – AMC should have updated the American and brought it back yet once again. (They did it before, in 1958!) A bit of sweep styling and that car would have been right in the thick of things in the USA automotive market. Heck, the original body was produced as the Torino in Argentina until 1982, and its styling updates were excellent – while retaining the obvious Rambler design origin. (See attached photo, I think it’s a 1979 model.)
Honestly, AMC would have served themselves far more profitably by never having intrtoduced the Hornet, and simply continuing the roomier, far-better visibilitiy, and easier-to-work-on 1960s American. Yeah, it was dull. Guess what? – the Hornet was dull, smaller inside and harder to work on – and it cost more.
Cut to Argentina in the 1980s…guess what the best-selling local vehicle was? – the IKA Torino. It was a 1960s AMC Rambler American, with a Continental F-head six, hopped up to the max, mated to an AMC 4spd manual transmission. AMC sold them to IKA as crate cars and they were assembled locally. Argies loved them. They were marketed there until 1983. There are thousands of them still roaming the roads of Argentina to this day. Beware…should you find yourself following one with twin tailpipes, don’t bother trying to pass it. You won’t do so.The Torino was the Boss 302 Mustang of the Argentine car hierarchy – nothing else could touch one.
When AMC converted the Pacer to right-hand-drive for the UK market, the Britons had a quick look and thumbed their collective noses up.
The passenger door was longer than the driver’s. In the right-hooker version, that meant the drivers finding themselves in embarrassingly tight situation when trying to open the right side door.
AMC performed the ‘half conversion’, meaning the top half of steering column was cut and moved to the right side. They were connected by, gasp, bicycle chain! The brake booster remained on the left side with a long steel rod connecting it with the brake pedal. Torsion galore!
Incredible that they even tried to market the fat Pacer in a country with many narrow roads & lanes, in addition to its excessive weight & fuel consumption.
Oh ya 18mpg same as Rover V8!.
Auto car mag named as the worst car they had road tested.
I wonder if AMC had dropped passenger car’s after say 79 and concentrated on Jeep only could they have survived. Any thoughts?
They mostly did. The remaining US designed cars after 1979 were just variants of the 1970 Hornet that they churned out as long as they could find buyers. Some of these probably guzzled enough gas that they may have needed the Renault designed Alliance to keep their CAFE numbers in check.
The real development money at AMC was used toward development of the 1984 Jeep Cherokee – a good enough effort to make AMC salable to Chrysler vs. just closing the doors.
As someone raised in the 90’s the Pacer has always interested me. I think I only ever so one on the road and it really inspired me to look into how this thing came to be. AMC really had to do something different in the 70’s to be relevant, it’s just too bad it was this. Not a bad idea in theory, but as been said here many times before, the future was FWD. Had they gone that route the results may have been very different although I’m doubt they had the funds to follow through.
The Pacer shared about as many parts with a Matador as a Valiant. The Pacer and the Matador had the same rear end while Torqueflite autos were shared with the Valiant. Hell, the Pacer had more in common with a whole line-up of Jeeps, they had the engines and trannys.
I find that interior dimensions comparison chart interesting. The much derided Gremlin rear seat doesn’t finish last in both head room and leg room and is first in hip room! I’m not saying it’s comfortable back there but it’s not as bad as it’s always made out to be. Very few bought these cars for their rear seat. The Pacer does okay, about on par with the Granada. Pretty disappointing given it’s revolutionary look.
Repeating an old story:
After Dad died in fall, 1978, I talked Mom into buying her first new car, and the Pacer was the first car we looked at.
Studying the details, I decided no way.
We checked out a Dodge Aspen. For pretty much a stripper model, too expensive and the dealer wouldn’t budge on the price.
Chevy had nothing I was interested in – I was mad at them and GM (and remained so for the next 20+ years).
Ford? Nope.
Back to AMC: A brand new 1979 Concord. A nice metallic brown, four door, tan all vinyl interior, 6 cyl., PS, PB, Automatic, A/C, am radio. A great car.
The Concord was definitely a case of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The Hornet was pretty uncomfortable, noisy, terrible back-breaking seats, awful-looking dashboard made of multiple ill-fitting plastic pieces. The Concord was essentially the same car, yet it was comfortable, quiet, and had a nice-looking dash that included that wonder of the age – a quartz digital clock.
Concord was an upgrade of Hornet and was miles better. AMC made most of the right changes to transform a pretty cheap, chintzy compact car into something much nicer and more desirable.
Pacer was also upgraded late in life, for the ’79 MY. New interior door panels and the Limited option with leather moved it to the top of the lineup after Matador bit the dust. Instead of being pitched as a bare-bones starter car, it was moved upscale into the luxury class. Sadly it was too little, too late. The story of AMC.
They sure were!! The “AMC Spirit” was awesome too!
It’ll be interesting to read the driving impressions.
Pacer was imported and sold in France, it was bought mainly by show biz crowd. I bought a 1977 model in 1992, the car was previously owned by Michel Drucker, the famous French talk show host, who used it in the Corsica island when in vacations.
My car was equipped with the bigger in line six engine, it broke loose the rear tires when taking off from a red light.
I did some repairs on it myself, it was low tech and easy to repair, new parts were available at the time, parts came by mail order from US suppliers.
That car was attaching, my freinds called it the “Pope-mobile”, it resembeled a fat Fiat Ritmo, so the styling was familier.
I’m a sucker for old cars in original unrestored condition and it pained me to see my boys at Wheeler Dealer customized that beautiful bronze Pacer they found in the Bay Area.
I love the Velocity shows but so few want to restore an old car, most want to customize and “shave” things like emblems and door handles. I wish Fantomworks got that Pacer and put it back to original. They were the ones with the gray 1960 Lincoln that had all the power steering issues.
That is one of the few episodes of Wheeler Dealers that had me shaking my head, (the other was the Chevy LUV) after what they did to that Pacer I wouldn’t have wanted it. I have so many good memories of cruising with my pal in his 1976 Pacer hatch. If you had folks in the back seat the exhaust could hit the pavement because it went under the axle not over.
People don’t give the Pacer enough credit for its significant engineering innovations. Everyone remembers the Cadillac V8-6-4(-0), but the Pacer had a straight 6-5-4. The two rearmost plugs were aft of the windshield, all but inaccessible without moving the engine. Who the hell’s going to pay book time for moving the engine when they came in for a tune-up? Nobody! 6-5-4.
All this discussion of AMC and the Pacer is good…However I still believe the beginning of the end for AMC began when Roy Abernathy took over. How he ever thought he could compete with the Big 3 I’ll never understand. Guess he just didn’t want to show up to board meetings in a Rambler.
You are 100% correct in your suspicion. Abernethy (correct spelling) wasn’t George Romney by any means! As opposed to the future Michigan governor, who’d go anywhere in a Rambler, his successor thought the success of the 1963-64 Ramblers was indicative of market demand for bigger and better; Abernethy wanted to drive a car befitting the status he though he had.
A Metropolitan would have been more fitting…that misguided man set American Motors off on a quixotic quest to compete with the Big 3, model class for model class, but his tenure (with Dick Teague doing the designing) led to the best-looking four years’ worth of Ramblers/AMCs ever built (1965-’68). All it cost was the existence of the company, 20 years later – the last ten of which were on life support, IMHO.
I owned a ’65 Ambassador convertible for 18 years. I grew up with a 4DR sedan version of that car that Dad bought new in February of ’65; learned how to drive in it, and watched my dad sell it in 1973 for $1500 – he paid $3500 for it new, not a bad deal at all after eight years – and he bought a 1972 Audi 100LS 4DR for Mom to drive. For six years she liked the Audi, complained it wasn’t her dream Mercedes, and bitched about wanting her Ambassador back! I bought the convertible in 1977, and sold it in 1995 when I got married with an instant family which is the reason I gave my wife. Truth was, the rubber bushings were shot in the antediluvian front trunnion suspension and NO ONE – not even Steele in North Carolina – made repro rubber for old Ramblers then. Going over a pothole loosened the fillings in my teeth. It was with a heavy heart that I finally sold that beautiful car. Attached see a similar car; mine was Antigua Red with a white Haartz top I had installed in 1980 (factory top was black) – it was a head-turner 20 years after it was made. Perhaps it was 20 years before its time…
Here’s one more shot of a 1965 Ambassador from the back end. This was the cleanest rear treatment of most any ’65 model, save perhaps for the Continental or the full-sized Buicks. Clean and elegant. Reminds me of a Packard; no surprise, as I believe Dick Teague worked for them before going to work for Nash/Hudson/AMC.
+1
Abernethy really didn’t have much choice. The Big Three were invading Rambler’s market segments with intermediate offerings, and even bypassed AMC by proving that “small” didn’t have to equal “cheap” with cars like the Corvair Monza and the Mustang.
Note that AMC’s sales fell in 1964, even with an attractive Classic and Ambassador only in their second year, and an all-new American on the market. The very handsome American scored a sales increase, but Classic and Ambassador sales fell, most likely because of intense competition from the new GM A-bodies. (And 1964 was a very good year for car sales, so AMC couldn’t blame a down market for its sales decrease.) The 1964 line-up had been put in place by Romney, not Abernethy.
People criticize Abernethy for having AMC try to meet the Big Three head-on, but the truth is that the Big Three were meeting AMC head-on.
The Pacer may have inspired the Porche 928 but the 928 wore it’s suit much better. The Pacer’s lower sheet metal looks like pants that aren’t pulled up enough and the glass looks like shirt tails that aren’t tucked in. These proportions make the car look like a fishbowl. AMC should have known something was off when the doorglass wouldn’t fit inside the door. On top of that it looks like a frog from the front. Sorry, but a smart looking 1975 Rambler would have been just the ticket to compete with the new Ford Granada.
At a trim 200″ long, with plenty of cargo capacity and room for six with a healthy, economical I-6 or V-8 – that Rambler would have swamped the Granada.
On the subject of the Pacer’s door glass not fitting inside the door, thst was because the belt line was just to low. The cheap plastic interior panels of 1975-78 had molded portions at the top designed to be armrests, but everybody used these as door handles to close the heavy doors, resulting in the door panels coming loose often. AMC solved this problem with entirely new door panels in 1979 which incorporated a proper “door pull handle” as part of the upper door armrest.
The AMC Six was not an appropriate engine for this car; even so, it’s probably for the best the GM Wankel never materialised. GM being GM, especially at that time, it would very likely have been a probematic, half-baked excrescence. It’s difficult to imagine what the eff AMC were thinking(?), going ahead with an engine that didn’t exist from a company with every incentive to kill off even their smallest, weakest direct competitor.
History might be at least somewhat notably different if AMC had instead arranged to buy Wankel engines from the likes of Mazda.
GM never would have dreamed of trying to kill one of their best customers. AMC vehicles of that generation contained a ton of parts from the various GM divisions. Saginaw, Delco-Remy, Packard Electric, Rochester Products and Guide components are all throughout an AMC of that era.
This was also when there was recurring talk of trying to break up GM because it was too big and was seen as stifling competition by those that didn’t know that GM supplied parts to Ford, Chrysler, AMC and IH.
So AMC was seen as a customer not a competitor.
Plus you know that GM would have packaged the Wankel with a choice of a Saginaw or Turbo Hyrdamatic transmission and at a price that would have kept out the competition and provided inroads to make a Turbo Hydramatic the standard Automatic across all AMCs instead of them purchasing them from Chrysler.
GM would never have tried to deliberately kill off AMC, due to antitrust concerns. During the early 1970s, GM provided AMC with assistance in the development of pollution-control devices, and allowed AMC to use its facilities. The federal government had granted both companies a waiver from the consent decree forbidding any of the domestic automakers from cooperating on the development of pollution-control technology.
In the long run, the Mazda rotary engine wouldn’t have worked any better in the Pacer than a GM-developed rotary engine. The rotary engine almost sunk Mazda in this country in the mid-1970s due to poor fuel economy and reliability problems. The company only rebounded when it introduced the GLC, which featured a conventional piston engine.
And nobody buying an AMC car (especially one of this size and weight, almost all with automatics) in the 70s would have been happy with the awful lack of low-end torque that was characteristic of the rotary. Especially given this car’s lack of sporting pretentions. This car just begged for the 304 (at least) right out of the box.
I don’t think they provided assistance in the development of pollution control devices to AMC they just sold them parts and sold them time to calibrate their cars at their facility. If it wasn’t for GM a lot of cars never would have seen 1975. Their emissions control components went on lots of non-GM vehicles, including every US based mfg as well as many imports.
AMC shot themselves in the foot by selling the Buick V6 back to GM. Surely it would’ve been a good fit under the Pacer’s wide but short hood. Someone on another thread told me AMC requested the V6 afterwards but GM charged too much, which makes me wonder if it would’ve been any better had the rotary been produced. Maybe GM had too much internal demand anyway.
In a lighter car, the Mazda rotary wouldn’t have been bad – but in that glass fishbowl of a Pacer (what was it, 3000 lb. or more?) a 3-rotor engine would have been optimal. In the two Mazdas I owned, the fuel penalty wasn’t too bad…my problem was, the rust. Road salt and Mazdas from the early 1970s did NOT get along.
The R&T write-up about “psychographics” is hysterical. The potential buyer named “Mrs. X.”
bwah ha ha ha!
I always wanted a Gremlin X with an AMC 401, but a Pacer with one would be cool, too.
My word – save your wishing! I knew a guy in college who owned a Gremlin with the 390 in it and it was impossible to drive. (That car would chirp tires with the 258 I-6 and a 3spd.) If Greg gave that car any more than one-third throttle, the rear end fishtailed like crazy. You’d need slicks in the back, and 300 pounds of cinderblocks behind the rear seat to make use of all those ponies.
A 401 would have been insane.
A misfire from day one. This and the Matador coupe temper any sympathy I have for AMC…stupid mistakes when they should have been putting their money elsewhere.
I always loved the cover of one of the Brit car mags, I think it was Autocar, when they had one on test for that issue: “We Test the Pacer… and Wish We Hadn’t!” LOL!
I had exposure to two late 70’s AMC products – my girlfriend of the time had a ’77-ish Concord 2 door, which was not a bad car with the 6,leather seats and A/C. My close friend had a ’78 Pacer which, on it’s 2nd or 3rd life by then endured a shocking amount of teenage boy abuse. Somehow we could cram 6 people in it, 4 of us being 6 feet plus and north of 200 lbs, and the smaller ones in the front middle and in the way back.
Racing into an empty mall parking lot on a snowy night at 40 mph or so, and cranking the aforementioned 6 turns lock-to-lock wheel with that kind of weight in it (with typical bald tires) was great fun. Sort of like a spinning top but with 600 lbs in the back seat it oscillated while it spun. . .. Believe it or not this tended to attract some attention from the local police.
It survived 2+ years of thrashing and went onto a new owner, seemingly none the worse for the wear. And somehow we did manage to replace those rear plugs but don’t recall how exactly.
I always thought the point of the Pacer was to be the rotary engine. Since that didn’t happen, dropping in the six and eventually a V8 wasn’t going to do it.
A shame because I really liked the design.
“I always thought the point of the Pacer was to be the rotary engine”
Yes, you are correct. And working name was “AMC Amigo”.
I always thought these were such a cool-looking car; such a shame that there are so many “if onlys” surrounding the Pacer. If only it hadn’t weighed so much. If only AMC had had an appropriate engine. If only they could have got more room inside. If only styling had gone this way instead of the formal/brougham route. If only AMC management had a plan and knew what they were doing……
Fortunately these things don’t matter in scale. 🙂
Beautiful work! The finishing on the yellow one, especially well done, with the wheel arm trim, and whitewalls.
I agree with all your points. As I’ve said a couple times here before, the station wagon version was the design they should have released first. Or at the same time, in ’75. It was two years late, in time for popularity to decline. The wagon was less polarizing, more practical, and I believe, weighed less than 100 pounds more.
Thanks. 🙂 Here’s another view. I don’t like the ’78 front, but that’s what they reissued.
Very nice!
If the V8 was actually under that hood, I could a lived with it.
Just a six in this one.
Biggest issue IMO was AMC quality, which drove people to Japan, Inc.
2nd was the MPG, why get such a small car and not save fuel?
The AMC Pacer was a short car, not a small car. Please, remember that difference.
Like a lot of kids, I drew lots of cars – often of my own designs. I had a fat folder filled with side profiles of a whole line of cars from subcompact to luxury coupes. When the Pacer was presented, I tried cutting my intermediate sized cars down so that they could replicate the idea.
They all looked horrible. Just could’t make these Pacer versions of my cars look presentable. It seemed that no visual slight of hand could pull off this stunted look.
Total fails. So I pretty much knew that the Pacer couldn’t make it in the market.
AMC sold the rights to the Buick V-6 back to GM in 1974. AMC got the tooling and the rights for the motor when they bought Jeep back in 1970. Buick used this motor up until 2006 or so but modified it over the years. It would have been interesting to see a Buick V-6 in a Pacer. Might have been a good place for the engine in the AMC line up. They had to shoehorn in their straight 6. I remember John Denver driving a Pacer in the first “Oh, God” movie with George Burns in around 1977. The Pacer filled with water at one point in the movie and the fish bowl was born! ;)!
Pacers were like Pet Rocks, Mood Rings, and song “Afternoon Delight”, all over the place for a few months/weeks, then “out”.
By spring 1976, AMC sales overall tanked, with no one wanting the nerd-mobiles. The Concord was only true [non Jeep] hit afterwards*, then had to get bought out by Renault, then Lee I.
*The Eagle came out on Renault’s dime, by the way, but that also faded with Jeeps taking more 4×4 sales.
To me, the reason for the Pacer was really as a novelty…it looked much like a vehicle from “The Jetsons” (although with wheels)…but aside from visibility one of the advantages, didn’t take advantage of the width…for instance, would a front bench allow for seating of 3 (don’t know how wide a Matador really was, if it was like our ’61 or ’63 Rambler Classic Wagon, guess not too wide, so maybe not valid).
Also, I’d guess that it was a hot house even up North, I’d shudder to think about owning one in Texas or southern state…the Ambassador had standard air conditioning, guess the Pacer should have also? Some of the mid-80’s Hondas also had great visibility but didn’t look like a fishbowl (of course they were likely smaller cars).
So…why make it wide? No advantage except for spread out room in the front seat, and guessing the rear bench wasn’t as wide, so still only seated 2.
That and not having enough engine space…for a heavy car. Probably engine access wasn’t fun with limited space. I like AMC, but they should have put more emphasis on the Hornet (of course they didn’t likely know about fuel shortages in the early 70’s) instead of this. Yes, some 20/20 hindsight, but AMC couldn’t afford many wrong choices, ,once the novelty wore off, seems like sales went way down too.
We had a 1976 Pacer. We want to sell to good new owner.
This car was cherished. It was a lucky car. It had missing two mirrors from vandalism. Engine is working with new battery.
Color is burgundy. It is in N CA.