This was one of the more interesting vintage reviews I’ve come across, because I don’t remember reading about these new 1967 AMC Rebels at the time; not too surprising, as my 14 year-old attention was more captivated by the Lamborghini Marzal or such. Ramblers—curiously, the new Rebel was still a Rambler in 1967—just didn’t light my fire, despite the new styling and the new name.
Yes, these were quite well-styled for the time, but did it make a difference? Not in sales; ’67 Rebel sales were down 17% from the boxy ’66 Classic! Ouch; that must have hurt.
But how did they drive? CL tested two very different version: a 770 with the 232 six, and an SST with the top 280 hp 343 V8. Their one word summation on both: “disappointment“. More ouch.
CL notes that the new ’67 Rebel (with a dubious new name) was attractively-styled. It took a while to get a couple of them for testing, but they finally did get a pair of them, a mid-level 770 coupe with the 232 six and automatic, and an SST with the 280 hp four-barrel 343 V8, then the top power option.
The 770 with the 145 hp 232 six quickly made it obvious that it was anything but a Rebel when it came to performance. Teamed with the Borg-Warner three-speed automatic, it was downright slow; painfully so, not just in absolute terms, but in relative ones, compared to other six-cylinder cars at the time. As in slower than the larger and heavier 1966 Chevy Bel Air six with a two-speed Powerglide:
The Rebel’s stats: 0-60: 17.3 sec., 1/4 mile: 21.0 @ 67 mph. 30-70 mph: 16.7 sec.
The Bel Air six and other comparable sixes and imports are in the chart below:
The Rebel six was the slowest of all the domestic sixes and just barely faster than the 46 hp Opel Kadett. Not good. It’s especially odd, since a ’64 Classic with the same power train was the fastest of all these sixes. Very odd, the more I think about it. The ’64 only weighed 120 pounds less than the ’67. Hmm.
The ’67 was just slow and sluggish, with the B-W automatic hunting between 2nd and 3rd in 35 mph steady city driving. It felt “grossly overworked” on the highway.
The 343 V8 in the SST was obviously “a good deal more lively“, and a much more pleasant car to drive in traffic as well as on the highway. But…that’s not to suggest it was genuinely fast, or competitive with other similar cars, “ones with 327-350 cubic inch V8s“.
A 0-60 time of 9.0 sec. and a 1/4 mile in 16.9 @83 mph certainly didn’t live up to the “SST” moniker. These are rather middling times for a mid-sized V8 with a four barrel carb. Actually, CL got it wrong; these are barely competitive with smaller V8s. CL tested two ’64 Chevelles, both with the 220 hp 283 V8; the manual did 0-60 in 8.7 sec. and the 1/4 mile in 16.2@84 mph; the Powerglide version had a 0-60 time of 9.1 (same as the SST) but beat the SST in the 1/4 mile with a 16.5 @ 82 mph. That’s pretty pathetic; a 327 Chevelle would have spanked the SST.
In both cases, the B-W automatic had some unpleasant characteristics that were more pronounced behind the six. It was “jerky“, and from rest, there was a time lag from the time the accelerator was depressed to achieving full torque output. Both issues were deemed “unacceptable” by CL.
Suspension geometry was conventional, the typical SLA front units and a live rear axle supported by four trailing links. But there was quite a lot of difference in the handling, due to differences in spring rates and shocks. The 7700 six had very mediocre handling “spongy…tended to pitch and hop over irregularities and roll unduly in cornering“. Steering was “ponderous“. The stiffer suspension on the SST was significantly better, but not exactly exceptional, with a harsh ride in some circumstances.
The 770’s all-drum system was…“unacceptable“. They were undersized to start with, and wouldn’t even slow the Rebel six down from 80 mph in anything approaching a reasonable rate of de acceleration. And that was with the driver stomping the brake pedal with both feet.
At least the SST’s optional disc brakes worked well, on the first stop from 80. On the third and fourth runs, fade and rear wheel lockup occurred. But overall, it was considered quite good.
Structural integrity, long an AMC strength due to their deep experience with unibodies, was deemed good. But there were some annoying buzzing rattles, and the passenger side window wanted to pull away from the body at 70 mph.
Given the mediocre fuel economy of the six (14.6 mpg) and its sodden performance, its price of almost $3000 seemed high to CL for what was presumably an economy car. On the other hand, for $700 more, one got a proper car, with decent performance, nicer interior, better suspension and brakes, and racing stripes to boot. The SST’s 12.5 mpg fuel consumption wasn’t really much of a penalty to pay for that either.
CL sums up that AMC has tried to do what the Big 3 have done successfully: build medium-sized cars that function well both as economy cars as well as high performance cars, with the Chevelle, Fairlane and Coronet being held up as examples. But the new Rebel “fails to deliver at the low end , while the SST doesn’t rise to meet other cars of similar size…at the top end of the performance scale.” So despite their attractive appearance, the anticipation that CL had about testing them turned to “disappointment“.
This is a huge comedown from only a few years earlier when the little ’61 Rambler American was highly praised by R&T. The development of the essentially all new ’63-’64 cars and then again these for 1967 taxed AMC’s limited engineering and development capabilities a bit too far. At the same time, the Big 3 were starting to make some genuine strides forward. AMC was trying hard to keep up, but all it could seemingly muster was the styling. And that got old all-too soon.
Motor Trend (February 1967) tested an SST (apparently not the same car) with the same powertrain, but a 2.87 axle, and got identical acceleration times. (They were 0.1 second quicker to 30 mph, but the 0–60 and quarter mile times and quarter mile ET were the same.) Their text comments are interesting:
“Acceleration times of the SST are below par. Our test car was hindered by the high axle ratio (low numerically) and lack of a strong valve train. Rumor has it that both conditions will soon be rectified by options to make it a stronger performer. Until that time though, wheel-spinning take-offs, low acceleration times and engine rpms over 5000 are out of the question.
“The engine would also benefit from the installation of dual exhausts. American Motors is planning on offering this option, but private installation can easily be accomplished by SST owners. As it is now, the 343 engine is panting for breathing space at a sustained speed of 60 mph or more.”
The jerky 1st gear starts in the BW automatic – I believe this is essentially the same unit as the old 1950’s Ford-O-Matic and the 1956+ Stude Flight-O-Matic. Maybe this was the reason both of those were almost all offered in a configuration that made 2nd gear starts the normal method in “D”.
I have always considered these cars as tragic. I think the early versions of this generation were handsome cars that should have been popular. Unfortunately, they reinforce my old prejudice that AMC was most often the source of cars with undistinguished driving dynamics. The base model should display the car’s innate personality, and the base model here was very disappointing. With some exceptions, AMC seemed to offer cars that didn’t do any one thing better than the competition, and that, as a package, lagged almost everyone else.
And 9 inch drums in a 3200# mid size car? Zowie! My 71 Scamp had 9 inchers in a smaller, lighter car and they were marginal even then.
Sounds like the 232 equipped car was poorly tuned or had some issue, those numbers are incredibly bad.
I drove a 1970 Rebel once, pretty much the same car as my 72 Matador but I was impressed by how unpleasant the B-W transmission was compared to the Torqueflite in my car.
It could be interesting to wonder what if AMC beginned to use Chrysler’s torqueflite a bit more sooner? Like for example, for the 1967 Rebel.
When Consumer Reports tested AMC cars in 1972-73, it specifically noted the big improvement in both performance and refinement brought about by the switch to Chrysler’s Torqueflite. It really made a difference in the character of the cars.
The first family car I remember was a 1950 Nash AMBASSADOR. Huge, comfortable and plenty of power from seven main bearing six cylinder motor. Several families in neighborhood were loyal to Nash. With the end of the Nash name, things changed dramatically! George Mason’s plan to combine Nash, Hudson, Packard, and Studebaker failed. Mason unfortunately passed and Romney officially tried to salvage what was left, originally labeling everything under Rambler name! Stylists did a Valiant effort in trying to make proverbial silk purse from a sows ear. Ambassadors and Marlins were some of the best, but far from the glory days of Nash! Another sob (NOT Saab, thank God) story about the auto industry!
Good point, with loyal Nash and Hudson owners who wanted new cars put off by the names phased out. Where to go? Big 3.
My Dad pointed out a Nash back when we had ’64 Rambler wagon, saying “Rambler’s former name” and even then wondered why the change?
These cars show how AMC had lost the plot under Roy Abernethy. The company was trying to keep up with the Big Three in the areas of size and styling. But customers who looked at the cars found under-sized brakes, outdated trunnion front suspension and standard vacuum-powered windshield wipers.
AMC had no hope of getting anyone out of a Cutlass or Satellite without addressing those issues. Instead, Abernethy spent money on regular restyling efforts and model proliferation.
Adding to the company’s woes, the 1967 Rebel, Ambassador and Marlin were initially plagued with quality problems, including fit-and-finish issues (which had previously been an AMC strength). Interior materials on these cars were also a noticeable step down from the prior generation of “senior” Ramblers.
Car sales in general were down for the 1967 model year, but AMC, with its smaller volume base, could not afford a big decline in sales. For the 1965 model year, for example, the Classic sold well over 170,000 units. Sales for the restyled Rebel were roughly 95,000 for the 1967 model year. That is a catastrophic drop over a two-year period for a company the size of AMC. (Increased Ambassador sales did not make up the difference – it appears as though the restyled and enlarged Ambassador simply stole sales from the Classic/Rebel.)
In early 1967, AMC almost went bankrupt, and was only saved by serious cost-cutting and emergency financing.
Serious question: What could AMC have done that would have realistically produced a better outcome?
The issue they had been facing since at least 1964 was that the Big Three intermediates were stomping all over what had been the principal AMC sales base (the Rambler Six/Classic). The smaller American had always represented a smaller chunk of their business, it was no longer especially competitive, it was in a segment with smaller and less profitable market share than the intermediates, and AMC didn’t have the resources to make it competitive with the imports except on price.
The then-forthcoming Javelin was a desperately needed step in trying to fix AMC’s hopelessly uncool image, and the money AMC spent on the new six and V-8 was as well spent as anything AMC could have spent it on. While, as Stéphane suggests above, it would have been nice if they could have offered TorqueFlite five years earlier, that presupposes that Chrysler would have been willing to sell it to them, and even if they were, that alone wouldn’t have been especially transformative. (TorqueFlite was a vastly better transmission with better performance, but if someone really wanted it, they could always buy a Dart or Valiant.)
That’s probably one of the most (if not the most) difficult question to answer in automotive history of that period. I’ve grappled with it several times.
The problem in trying to answer it is placing oneself back then, and not from today’s vantage point. Because with hindsight, it’s easy to say just stick with smaller cars as the energy crisis will change everything. As in: put your resources into a very good single platform, like the Hornet & Javelin, and hope fr the best.
The stark reality is that this business is all about scale, unless you can exploit niches. Which suggests that AMC had no real hope of competing against Detroit in the main classes of passenger cars. They needed to exploit niches. Which of course they did in 1970 by buying Jeep. But what decisions to make in 1962-1964, about the future products? Very hard to answer.
Obviously they didn’t make the right one, as it almost killed them. But they did hang in there long enough to keep surviving. Which alone is quite an accomplishment.
It’s not unlike what K-F faced a decade earlier; and they eventually bailed themselves out with Jeep, as did AMC in the 70s and 80s. And then Chrysler. Jeep has done wonders for all of its owners.
I can see the argument for “dump the Rebel to fast-track the Hornet,” but I also see a number of potential downsides. First, if it had meant effectively abandoning the midsize cars, it would have been a tough swallow for AMC dealers, who had been used to Classic sales keeping the lights on. Second, the compact market in 1967–1968 wasn’t that strong, and when it started picking up a couple of years later, the Hornet would have been three years old, probably with no major refresh in sight, just in time to get hammered even worse by the Nova and Duster.
That’s why I said it’s an extremely difficult question to answer. They probably did the best that could have been done under the circumstances, and they did survive, so I’m not really going to second guess them.
Your point about putting oneself back then is a good one. There’s an archived New York Times article that sets out what AMC’s thinking was, and on its face, it’s plausible: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/09/07/archives/american-motors-putting-stress-on-power-and-luxury-rambler-maker.html
There is little historical precedent for an also ran auto manufacturer to grow in the face of much larger established incumbents in its home market. Honda might be the exception to that rule, but it had its dominance in motorcycles that gave it a platform to grow.
As Paul says, niches had kept AMC healthy. I think the biggest problem is that there was too much of a Nash mindset around the place. Nash had been successful mostly because George Mason was such a good manager. The cars themselves were always “nice”, as in good enough for loyalists but not really great at much besides being well-built.
I think by 1964 or so it should have been apparent that the economy was expanding and luxury was selling. One niche not being exploited along about then was Cadillac-quality (or even Buick-quality) appointments in a smaller package. The Ambassador could have skipped the longer nose and simply become a genuine Kenosha Cadillac, a size or two down from the real thing. Nobody was doing that, and there should have been enough volume (or profit) there to make it work. And once 1973 came around, that car would have been a gold mine.
But that particular car, as built, lacked the solid feel that would have made the sale. And a Rebel on the same body might have destroyed the mystique, unless it was differentiated by some unique sheet metal and maybe a shorter wheelbase.
A second idea was that sport/muscle was all the rage in 1964. AMC never really had anyone like Duntov at Chevrolet or even Granatelli at Studebaker. There was nobody there to demand that the engineers up their game on the chassis to make a car someone could race. This car should have been run at NASCAR but, of course, it never was. Studebaker showed what a skunkworks could do with not much money, but AMC never really had anyone who thought that way. Mark Donohue raced some Javelins later, but I think he started too late to do the company much good.
FWIW (not a whole lot) Penske raced this generation at NASCAR, but not until 1974.
Yeah, but AMC got into drag racing and Trans-Am well before that, and there were Bonneville speed runs and other efforts almost as soon as the Javelin and AMX debuted. There was a concerted effort to establish as much credibility as they could manage.
I think NASCAR in the mid-sixties would have been a costly losing game. What chance would AMC have had to compete with the NASCAR tuned 426 Hemi? Ford couldn’t, and they had a lot more resources and experience to throw at the effort.
Penske started NASCAR with the Matador in 1972. Mark Donohue won on the Riverside road course with the shoebox in January 1973–straight up ran away from the field. Penske’s Matadors were like the typical Ford/GM Cup car of the era with a 1965 Galaxie chassis and current brand specific engine/body. Penske used the swoopy new 1974 Matador and ran Matadors through 1975 with corporate sponsorship. Penske ran the Matadors at Riverside in January 1976 with CAM2 motor oil sponsorship, then switched to Mercurys for 1976. Bobby Allison ran the Matadors from his own shop in 1977.
Ford did very well with the 427 wedge and Boss 429 in NASCAR. Holman Moody and boatloads of cash kept Ford fully competitive. Chrysler sat out most of 65 because NASCAR wouldn’t allow the limited production hemis in Belvederes and Coronets, and Ford sat out most of 66 because NASCAR accepted the 1966 hemi as a regular production option. By 1969, Ford was top dog. The Charger Daytona was created because it was cheaper than creating a whole new production engine to stay even with Ford. Without the Pettys at Chrysler, Ford would have been clearly top dog of this era.
If AMC couldn’t match the quality of cheaper intermediate rivals, from whence would come the quality to make the Rebel a junior Cadillac? And who would have paid the fare if they did, if the standard model wasn’t competitive with a Chevelle, much less a Skylark?
AMC did offer an extra-plush Ambassador, the DPL, although it was nothing to threaten the Plymouth VIP, and it featured upholstery appealing, to put it delicately, to rarefied tastes (http://www.oldcarbrochures.org/United%20States/AMC/1967_AMC/1967-Ambassador-Brochure/slides/1967_Ambassador-04-05.html).
That 67 DPL’s upholstery might have been fine for Grandma’s sofa, but not in a car, even back then!
They could have given it all the quality and appointments of the premier luxury players but image still sold and AMC just couldn’t compete on rapidly changing styling consistently, they never had anything as timelessly elegant to run a basic style through long cycles with substantive refinements like the Europeans. Plus the smaller packaged European luxury makes would have inevitably ate their lunch like they did Cadillac eventually anyway, AMC still didn’t have the engineering.
The latter is probably more realistic, but with the leadership declaring “The only race we care about is the human race” that was doomed. The company needed different leadership in general, the image problem (brand and styling) still existed and engineering was just as conservative – the second Gen AMC V8 proved to be competitive later with its 360, 390 and 401 displacements, but was brought to a competitive market capped at 343 cubic inches when all other competitors long since offered near 400ci displacements in their midsizers.
Ironically it was AMCs late arrival into Motorsport that seemed to get the engineers to finally equip all the suspensions with upper ball joints.
Didn’t the 360 and 401 require the taller deck? (If I’m recalling correctly, there were both short-deck and tall-deck 390s, but the 360 and 401 were both tall-deck engines with the longer stroke.)
From wayyyy out in dreamy-dream land floats this idea: sell the IKA Torino in America.
They did offer the 290 in the Rogue hardtop — which had performance very similar to the 380W Torino with less fuss, and didn’t look THAT different. (The Torino was based on the American, and while I think it was better looking, I imagine Americans of the time would have assumed it was just a facelift.)
Since the Rogue sold barely 10,000 copies in total in 1967–1969 (not counting the Hurst SC/Rambler), this does not appear to have been an untapped goldmine.
AMC management needed to remember that Romney watched tooling costs carefully because he realized that a small company could never hope to compete head-on with GM. Restyling the senior cars in 1965 and 1967, and then trying to turn the Ambassador into its own model with unique sheet metal, were dead ends from a profit standpoint…and Romney would have realized that.
And while the engines were good, the chassis, transmissions and vacuum-powered windshield wipers were not. AMC needed to dump the torque-tube rear suspension and front trunnions well before 1967 and 1970, respectively. Same with the Borg-Warner automatic, non-synchro first-gear manuals and vacuum-powered windshield wipers. All of these outmoded features only served to create an image of a company selling outdated cars for tightwads. Reviewers ranging from Car Life to Consumer Reports were dinging the cars for these features by the late 1960s. It was not just the “buff books” and people who read them who were looking askance at AMC products for these reasons.
New sheet metal may get attention, but when potential conquest customers see the same old outmoded features underneath, that ends the sale right there.
It is one thing to be a Honda or a Subaru and grow from one car to versions of the one car, then expand from there – and to be an AMC and go from many platforms in differing markets, to one car. Dropping the Rebel/Matador/Ambassador and focusing on the American/Hornet/Concord and make that one car the best in the compact field, just wasn’t considered a realist option. The boys that ran Kenosha didn’t think about retreating sucessfully – they only thought about fixing the market fronts that were losing the battles.
There was a belief that once in a market, it was best to expand on what you had invested into that market, than it was to withdraw from that market.
Imagine if Honda’s Accord flopped. Or, after a successful first generation, rapidly lost sales. Should Honda pull out of the market and refocus on the Civic, or should they have tried to find out how the Accord was failing and make the next generations of that car more sellable? That is what every manufacturer has to deal with eventually.
AMC had to deal with that problem after 1963. Their larger cars never succeeded and their compacts were successful until the larger cars spent all of the money to keep their compacts competitive. But pulling out of the larger car market just wasn’t an option and AMC played their hand until they were forced to kill off the Ambassador after 1974, and the Matador a decade later.
Do I have an idea? Yes – AMC needed to do the unbelievable once again and focus soley on the Hornet and made spin-offs from their best Hornet design. AMC needed to do to the Hornet what Volvo did with their 240 – be the best and expand slowly from there using the same car. AMC couldn’t afford more than one platform. But as Chrysler discovered throughout the 1980s, a good small car can be stretched and turned into larger cars and even a hit minivan, the niche buster.
This isn’t true, though. The Ambassador was always a minor item, to be sure, but it was a mildly stretched version of the Rambler Classic (nee Rambler Six). In 1963, for instance, which was a very good year for AMC (428,000ish units total), the 112-inch wheelbase Classic and Ambassador outsold the American by about 3½-1. It held its own pretty well against the Fairlane, but then the A-body Chevelle/Malibu promptly ate its lunch. (The 1964 Chevelle was a LITTLE bigger than the Classic, but not so much that it wasn’t still pretty clearly the same class of car.) The ’67 Rebel was a vain effort to retrench in what had been AMC’s strongest market segment.
The American’s best year, 1964, sold about 160,000 units, and it didn’t sustain that. Even after the Rebel failed to revive intermediate Rambler sales, the larger cars still outsold the American.
Also, AMC in the sixties had essentially two platforms: the Classic/Rebel/Ambassador/Marlin and the American/Javelin. I wouldn’t call that “many platforms,” although one could certainly argue that two was still one more than AMC could really afford.
Here’s the other thing: The compact class in which the American competed (if we may call it that, since it was near the back of the back by this point) was hardly an unoccupied niche. Even if we pretend the pony cars hadn’t taken a significant chunk of the compact market, there were still the Chevy II/Nova, Falcon, Dart, and Valiant, to say nothing of imports like the Opel Kadett and Datsun 510. I’m struggling to see what AMC could have done in that class that would have been a “killer app” against varied competition that often had the advantage of much bigger dealer networks and ad budgets.
The whole foray of Rambler was lightning in a bottle, as stated the entirety of their competition was deeply entrenched in the compact field in the 60s and had and used the resources to update them and improve them to a level AMC couldn’t have kept up with even if it was their only car line. By 1964 there was simply no reason to say “compacts are what the company needs to focus on” besides the inertia of the Romney era, and ironically the truly successful “niche” Rambler had carved out wasn’t even compacts, but what would be considered intermediate with the Classic, so the whole “dump everything but the American (and later Hornet)” just doesn’t register as realistic.
The Rebel and Ambassador were underwhelming, but so was the American at this point, nothing in their lineup was a beacon of light until the Javelin, but it arrived 3 full years after the Mustang and a year after the Cougar, Camaro and Firebird, and while it was the right car for the brand with the right styling, in the right segment, it arrived to a market hostile to a “cool” American Motors product and by the time it proved itself to them the ponycar bubble had burst, with ponycar buyers moving on to imports or PLCs, and AMC gave chase to the latter with the 74 Matador but made it so comically silly looking it was dead in the water. The Pacer was an attempt to chase the former but took the unnecessary route of going for an untapped niche with the “wide small car” thing, which we know how that turned out.
At best with the luxury of hindsight, AMC could have gotten a head start and gone the subcompact route before the big three, which would have required a massive (Pacer eclipsing)level investment for an all new platform and engines/powertrains they’d either have to produce or source, which by the time that investment is recouped they’d get eclipsed by the Pinto, Vega and the now wide open floodgates of Japanese cars. And that’s a big IF if it would have been a success to begin with
Eagle was probably the best idea AMC ever had after the first ramblers as far as untapped niches, and given its mechanicals could have been created 10 years earlier to really establish itself if it had occurred to them.
“…Abernethy spent money on regular restyling efforts and model proliferation… ”
The money spent in the 60’s for style changes and trying to push Ambassador as a full size ‘mid lux’ car started AMC’s long term decline. Buying Jeep may have been good long term, but took lots of cash. Matador and Pacer added gasoline to the fire.
Javelin, Hornet, Concorde and Eagle were ‘band-aids’, but couldn’t keep Renault and then Mopar from buying them out, for Jeep.
“… forced to kill off the Ambassador after 1974, and the Matador a decade later.” Last Matador was 1978, not a decade after ’74. 2 wheel drive Concorde was dropped in ’83, though.
This is nowhere near my first period road test to contain reports like this, of the Borg-Warner automatic’s terrible manners. How did BW manage to sell so many of such a poorly-behaved transmission to so many automakers? There were no such flaws in the Turbo Hydramatics; the Torqueflites, and (I feel like this is a fairly solid guess) the C4, and I have long wondered how much nicer ’60s-’80s automatic Volvos might’ve been with an A904 Torqueflite rather than a BW35 or BW55.
Also, wow, yeah, that 232 car was slow; I hesitate to imagine the same car with the 199 motor.
The Borg-Warner boxes were cheap, and for British and European carmakers, I think the popularity of the BW35 benefited from local production, which avoided the tariffs and duties that would have come with importing American transmissions. Also, until the end of the sixties, GM didn’t have a light-duty THM like the A904 TorqueFlite (the TH350 arrived for 1969) because of the ongoing fascination with two-speed torque converter automatics.
(The test results for the Borg-Warner transmissions do suggest that they were not actually superior to Powerglide or ST-300 in performance, that’s for sure.)
As for the C4, Ford was using it in their bigger European models (certainly in the English Zephyr/Zodiac — I’m not sure offhand which automatic Ford-Werke offered in the 26M), and may not have been interested in sparing the capacity to supply automakers that they regarded as direct competitors.
I know for a fact you’re right about tariff/local-content reasons; that’s why Chrysler Australia started using the BW35 in all but their premium de luxe models for ’70—yech, talk about a downgrade.
Still a shame, though.
Has anyone noticed how much the 1968 Plymouth B-body resembles the 1967 Rebel? Chrysler had a habit of copying GM’s last model cycle models but, here, it looks like they went for AMC?
Probably not enough time to actually copy a 1967 Rebel for the 1968 Plymouth, but there sure seems to be an uncanny resemblence there.
I mentioned that similarity last Summer.
So interesting that one magazine can label a car as disappointing, and another can label it as great! Tom McCahill was very impressed with the Rebel (and later on raved about the ’72 Matador and it’s handling prowess). Popular Science gave it good marks too.
Also, the 343, which used the heavier duty cast iron M11 Borg Warner, seemed to do fine, transmission-wise in this report. They weren’t the best tranny’s, but when properly adjusted they were quite adequate.
The 1st year of the 343 was hampered some by poor breathing. In 68 there was a new intake manifold (and then when the 343 became the 360-there were the excellent breathing ‘dogleg’ heads.)
I wouldn’t trust Tom McCahill with a [insert your favorite T McC metaphor here]. Sure, he was a hoot to read, but objectivity wasn’t one of his strong points.
Yeah, what 210delray said, except I don’t find his writing hootworthy. I don’t say he was a poor writer—he wasn’t; I just find him a tiresome one-schtick pony. I think he was famous for being well-known rather than for being a source of dependable information.
It has been reliably reported that a car would be dropped off at McCahill’s house, and when it was picked up a few days later, it had not been moved from the spot, and there were no additional miles on the odometer.
But the review – complete with a road test – had somehow been written…
Interestingly, his last review was of the 1975 AMC Pacer.
Yes the story I remember is that MI downplayed his death for as long as possible, obviously because McCahill was the MI franchise.
I discovered Uncle Tom at age 12, since my uncle subscribe to Mechanics Illustrated and I brought home copies of the magazine after he was finished with them. So that largely explains why I found him a hoot with expressions like “corners flatter than a librarian’s chest.” Another story was that he and a lady friend drove the length of the New Jersey Turnpike toward NYC in an open convertible at night while both were buck naked. Supposedly they were never stopped by Johnny Law.
You can trash Uncle Tom if you want, but Norbye/Dunne in Dec. of 67 and April of ’70 Popular Science both gave quite good marks to the ’68 and ’70 Rebels. They were rather serious and respected automotive testers!
Oh, don’t fret; I have plenty of scorn for Jan Norbye, too!