Indie Auto

1972 AMC Ambassador proposal by Brooks Stevens

Proposed 1972-73 design could have saved AMC from ill-fated 1974 Matador coupe

by Steve in Design Notes 19

(EXPANDED FROM 2/4/2022) The above image shows an early design proposal by Brooks Stevens for a redesigned AMC Ambassador planned for 1972-73. The car has vague similarities to mockups pictured in a Patrick Foster (2013) book — which were scrapped. Instead, AMC came out with the radically styled 1974 Matador coupe and a facelift of its [...]

DeBest ad for the 1981 Pontiac Trans Am that was never printed

June 17, 2026 2

(UPDATED FROM 7/17/2023) Pete DeBest thought he had it made. He followed his dad into the car business by landing a gig at Pontiac’s ad agency as a copy writer. Things went great at first. For example, one day he was in a meeting where [...]

Automotive Hall of Fame post on Robert McNamara is still riddled with fact errors

June 15, 2026 16

(EXPANDED FROM 1/17/2024) More than two years ago we pointed out that the Automotive Hall of Fame posted remarkably inaccurate information about former Ford Motor Company executive Robert McNamara. Their fact errors [...]

1969-77 Plymouth: Fuselage wasn’t so bad compared to anti-fuselage

June 12, 2026 15

(EXPANDED FROM 5/3/2024) Ponderous styling of the so-called “fuselage” Plymouths has been pointed to as the biggest reason why sales were smaller than the well-regarded platform it replaced (e.g., auto editors of Consumer Guide, 2022). [...]

1974-76 Elite shows how Ford was late to the party with mid-sized personal coupes

June 10, 2026 13

(EXPANDED FROM 2/27/2024) The 1974-76 Ford Elite highlights one of the Ford Motor Company’s bigger mistakes of the 1970s. The automaker was too slow in entering the mid-sized personal coupe field. The Elite was a [...]

Langworth and Norbye made excuses for General Motors’ big-car fixation

June 9, 2026 8

(EXPANDED FROM 2/27/2023) Indie Auto was partly created to spark more robust debates in U.S. auto history. As a case in point, a few years go I questioned a take by Richard M. Langworth and Jan P. Norbye about why automakers [...]

Three videos: The death of car culture, rich people’s cars and the 1957 Nash

by Steve in Multimedia 6

Our first video, from the YouTube channel America Revisited (2026), argues that the country’s car culture is dying off with the Baby Boomers. The video goes on to suggest that car culture was about “freedom in a specific form affordable to a specific people in a specific moment that history handed to one generation and then quietly closed the door.” The video points [...]