“The Rambler will never get credit for all it did. It never will. And the reason it won’t is because those who followed me, as (Patrick) Foster (1993) points out in his book, didn’t believe in the Rambler and the philosophy that we relied upon to make the Rambler a success, which was to spread the tooling over as large of a volume as we possibly could.
The toughest decision I had to make was whether or not to drop the Nash and Hudson lines and concentrate on the Rambler. And that’s what I did. And we spread the tooling costs for a volume of Ramblers that reached the point where we were fully competitive with the Big Three. We were taking away Big Three dealers and we were on the march.
The great tragedy, from the company’s standpoint, is that my successors didn’t recognize what we were doing, didn’t recognize the opportunity that we had and didn’t follow through on it. Because if they had, American Motors would be one of the top, big automobile companies in this country today. But they didn’t do that.”
— George Romney, July 10, 1994 presentation
RE:SOURCES
- Foster, Patrick R.; 1993. American Motors: The Last Independent. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Lehman, Paul; 2011. “George Romney at the Nationals, July 7-10-1994: Part 2.” YouTube. Posted July 7; accessed July 15, 2013.
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