In a recently published article about the Rambler Tarpon, Patrick Foster (2021) doubted that the show car would have sold better than the Plymouth Barracuda if it had reached production. His rationale was that neither compact sporty coupe had distinctive styling like the Ford Mustang.
The “Mustang was successful,” Foster (2021) argued, “because it had a gorgeous, unique body with no visual connection to the Falcon” even though it used many of its underlying components.
That argument makes sense — to a degree. The Mustang would have looked much less sporty if had shared any sheetmetal with the dowdy and aging Falcon. The most obvious difference is that the Mustang had a long-hood and short, duck-tailed deck. However, it also had curved side glass and a tucked-in lower-body shape that gave the wheels more visual prominence.
In contrast, both the Barracuda and Tarpon shared sheetmetal from the B-pillar forward with their more plebeian compact siblings, the Valiant and American. You could not achieve the Mustang’s proportions without a longer front end, a shorter deck, and a reduced wheelbase aft of the B-pillar.
Also see ‘Lee Iacocca got lucky with the 1964-66 Ford Mustang’
That said, I don’t think the Barracuda and Tarpon would have had to copy the Mustang’s look to have carved out decent markets. Indeed, there was no need to have sold anywhere near the numbers of the Mustang — whose stunning early success appears to have been partly due to cannibalizing the sales of other Fords. The automaker also had to recover the added costs of a brand-new body, which was conservatively estimated to reach $75 million (Halberstam, 1986).
Production of the first-generation Barracuda peaked at over 64,000 units in 1965 but then fell back to roughly 38,000 for its final year in 1966. Why couldn’t the Tarpon have done as well — if not better?
The Tarpon had advantages over the Barracuda
The first thing to keep in mind is that Rambler was still fresh from its success in the early-60s, when it topped Plymouth twice in output. And even after AMC lost altitude in the late-60s and early-70s, the Javelin mostly outsold the Barracuda. This suggests that AMC could have done well against Plymouth if the Tarpon that reached production had decent styling and was well-positioned in the market.
The first-generation Barracuda had two disadvantages over the Tarpon. Whereas AMC’s compact platform gained curved side glass in 1964, Chrysler would not take that step until 1967. That automatically gave the original Barracuda a dated look compared to the Tarpon. If AMC had introduced the Tarpon at the beginning of the 1965 model year — which Foster (2013) said was plausible — that would have given AMC a two-year head start.
Another Barracuda disadvantage was that it was less distinguished from its donor car. Most notably, whereas the Tarpon had unique taillights, the Barracuda used the Valiant’s — and they were not terribly sporty.
Alas, the Tarpon had major disadvantages as well
I should preface my comments with the acknowledgement that it is not fair to compare a show car with one that is in production. AMC designers might very well have fixed some of the problems with the Tarpon itemized below. However, the sporty coupe that AMC did end up producing — the mid-sized Marlin — suggests that the Tarpon might have kept most of its stylistic quirks.
Also see ‘Historians differ on origins of 1965 Rambler Marlin’
The late AMC designer Bob Nixon criticized the Marlin’s roof because it “went on forever” (Foster, 2014; p. 76). He was right, but it should be added that the Tarpon’s roofline was even worse — and it was based upon a concept car Nixon oversaw (Foster, 2021). The rationale for both cars’ rooflines — which gave them a stretched-toffee look — was to improve rear-seat headroom. However, if that was the overriding goal, then a semi-fastback greenhouse could have worked a whole lot better.
The Barracuda offers a useful point of comparison. It also had a full fastback and fishtail vaguely similar to the Tarpon, but its roofline began to arch down toward the deck much more quickly. In addition, the relatively small size of the Barracuda’s rear-quarter windows and the wraparound backlight gave the car a much less tail-heavy appearance than the Tarpon.
Also see ‘1965-66 AMC Marlin: How to fix beginner’s mistakes’
The single weirdest quirk of the Tarpon was the upward zig at the bottom of the rear-quarter windows. This was presumably designed to break up the windows’ excessive visual mass. It really didn’t work, so AMC designers quite rightly switched to more rounded rear-quarter windows on the Marlin. They still looked entirely too long but were somewhat less ugly.
Market positioning was just as important as styling
One reason why the Barracuda didn’t sell very well could have been because it only came in a high-end model priced above the base Mustang notchback. Although the Plymouth arguably had better engineering, its biggest claim to fame was the added utility of a fold-down rear seat and cargo pass-through to the trunk.
If AMC had positioned the Tarpon a bit higher than the 1966-67 American’s top-of-line Rogue two-door hardtop, it would have directly competed against the Mustang price-wise. In light of the Rogue’s minuscule sales, it’s hard to see how the Tarpon would have done a whole lot better.
AMC might have found a bigger market for the Tarpon if it had been priced lower and at least partly targeted import intenders. This would have also helped to inoculate AMC against inevitable complaints from the car buff media that it didn’t initially offer a V8 engine.
Also see ‘Richard Teague’s styling helped to kill American Motors’
One way to further emphasize the Tarpon’s import-fighter positioning would have been to reduce the car’s wheelbase by around three inches behind the B-pillar and trim the deck by a few more inches. That would have made the Tarpon the shortest car built by a U.S. automaker in the second half of the 1960s.
Conveniently, that would have also given the Tarpon a more long-hood, short-deck look. To offer a vague sense of what I mean, compare the proportions of the Tarpon with the 1970 Ford Maverick shown below.
Truth be told, the Tarpon and Marlin were distractions
Historians — professional and armchair — love to dwell on cars that never made it to production. One point that doesn’t get said often enough is that the Tarpon wouldn’t have been worth actually building unless the car looked good. Which it didn’t. The same could be said for the Marlin.
Foster has referred to the Marlin as “the greatest missed opportunity in AMC’s entire history” (2013, p.85). This strikes me as unduly harsh for what was merely an extra body style for an existing car line. The ill-fated 1974 Matador coupe, 1976 Pacer and redesigned 1967 mid-sized cars were far more expensive missed opportunities.
That said, the money spent on either the Tarpon or the Marlin could have been more profitably used to update AMC’s standard two-door hardtops. By 1966 the American desperately needed a more modern greenhouse. Imagine an S-shaped semi-fastback with a coke-bottle rear-quarter treatment.
Perhaps even more importantly, imagine that the dowdy two-door sedan was ditched in favor of a pillared coupe that shared the hardtop’s greenhouse. Now add a sporty model with frameless door glass and flip-out rear windows.
Also see ‘Rambler pays price for not listening to Car and Driver magazine’
Under that scenario, the Tarpon could have been a high-end series. It presumably wouldn’t have outsold the Barracuda, but the entire range of American two-door models could have easily done so.
The bottom line is that AMC needed an entry-level American pillared coupe much more than it needed to put the Tarpon show car into production.
NOTES:
Production figures, prices and specifications are from the Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975 (Gunnell, 2002).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Foster, Patrick R.; 1993. American Motors: The Last Independent. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.——–; 2013. American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America’s Last Independent Automaker. MBI Publishing Co., Minneapolis, MN.
- ——–; 2014. “Bob Nixon: Designer of Iconic AMCs.” Collectible Automobile, pp. 74-81. June issue.
- ——–; 2021. “The Tarpon concept was almost AMC’s Pony Car.” Hemmings. Posted June 23.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised 4th Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Halberstam, David; 1986. The Reckoning. William Morrow & Co., New York, NY.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES:
- oldcarbrochures.org: Rambler Marlin (1965); Ford Maverick (1970); Plymouth Barracuda (1965)
- marlinautoclub.com: Rambler Tarpon (1964)
It could be interesting to wonder what if AMC had given the green light to the Budd XR-400 instead of going with the Tarpon or Marlin? The Budd XR-400 could have serve as a starting point for a “proto-Javelin”.
https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/a1888541/budd-xr-400-amc-mustang-wasnt/
I had seen this car in Collectible Automobile a number of years ago. It would certainly have needed more development and better proportions to be considered production ready. I mean, that’s how the Marlin made it from Tarpon showcar/prototype to showroom floor reality, right?
I realized after reading this post that I couldn’t recall having read any history of how the first gen Barracuda came to be, so I went to Wikipedia and then to Chromefinsrestoration.com. The influence of the Corvair Monza is noted on Wiki and both sites refer to the pre-production hype surrounding what became the Mustang. Also mentioned was the limited budget available for creating Plymouth’s sporty compact.
This got me thinking that in view of the time and financial constraints under which the Barracuda was developed, why did Plymouth marketing and advertising not focus on Barracuda as a separate brand/marque? Imagine if it had been marketed as “Barracuda by Plymouth”? Sure, it was a Valiant, but if a Barracuda logo had been added to the grille and rear deck (in ’64 instead of ’66), the Plymouth badging minimized, amber turn signal lenses added to give the tail a distinctive “Euro” styling touch, and any references to the Valiant eliminated, might that not have generated more interest and therefore more sales?
What I don’t understand is why Detroit has continually spent time and money on niche vehicles only to fail at exploiting the niches and the cars created to fill them. The Barracuda might have had a better chance against the Mustang had it been positioned as a kind of budget American GT instead of a family friendly sporty compact.
At least the designers got the Barracuda’s fastback roofline right, unlike that of the Tarpon. If you squint, even just a little, the Tarpon looks a lot like a bathtub Nash. No telling where the Tarpon might have evolved from there! Sadly, the Barracuda turned into a needlessly bloated muscle car and any semblance of what might have been in 1964, disappeared along with the nameplate a short decade later.
Good points, CJ. I suspect that a big reason why Chrysler management inched so slowly into making the Barracuda’s branding more distinctive was because it didn’t have Ford’s experience with niche vehicles. Up until 1964, Chrysler’s idea of a halo car was the 300 — a family car with a few extra doodads.
Chrysler also seemed to be more in tune with the street-racing scene rather than the grand-touring crowd (perhaps epitomized by Road & Track readers). The former was viewed as all-American whereas the latter had an exotic, European vibe. As of the mid-60s the only U.S. cars that made much of an effort to appeal to the GT crowd were the Corvette and Corvair. Chrysler never really got on the bandwagon, e.g., the biggest priority of the redesigned 1970 Barracuda was apparently to fit big-block V8s.
A decade earlier, Virgil Exner lobbied to get the DeSoto Adventurer 1 built but Chrysler menagement still got cold feet with the Airflow debacle and tried again with the Adventurer II.
https://www.allcarindex.com/concept/united-states/desoto/adventurer-i/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1954_DeSoto_Adventurer_II_Ghia_-_fvl.jpg
Like the Budd XR-400, the same question could be applied about the Adventurer II, what if it got the green light?
Steve astutely observed that Chrysler did not have experience marketing niche vehicles, unlike Ford, which had both critical (Continental) and financial (Thunderbird) success in doing so. However, if anyone at Chrysler could have done it, Exner’s and his early 50’s dreamcars were certainly dramatic and prestigious enough. And yes, it’s exciting to speculate how things might have changed at Chrysler had something like the Adventurer II been built.
I agree, CJ. The Valiant badging sucks. I have a ’65 Barracuda and I’m deleting all Valiant badging. I’m replacing the rear window trim with a ’66 Barracuda trim that has the fish on it. The horn button and front turn signals will change too. What I really love about this car is the 7′ space in the back. Plymouth did a fantastic job with this feature.
Once the v8 was available in the Valiant in 64, a Signet was everything the Barracuda was without the fancy roofline. I’ve had a 63 Signet 2 door hardtop for many years, part of the deluxe compact market segment that was started by the Chevy Corvair Monza, followed by the Futura, S-22, Dart GT, etc. Buckets, extra chrome, maybe a console, vinyl,carpeting, full wheel covers. Barracuda was barely an effort on Chrysler’s part as the Signet was already on the market.
The Tarpon … I can’t make my eyes reconcile that design.
The tail lights are pure platinum though, it’s single positive feature.
In profile it looks like it should have two more doors for it to make sense.
BTW: even the brochures for the 64 Barracuda show the name “Valiant” on the rear panel. As well as the red and blue “V” under the rear window just like the ones on the front grille and rear deck of my ’63 Signet [and the Signet hubcaps].
Chrysler was taking zero chances.
http://www.oldcarbrochures.com/static/NA/Plymouth/1964%20Plymouth/1964%20Plymouth%20Barracuda/1964%20Plymouth%20Barracuda-02-03.html
The “V”s still appear on the ’65 below the rear window and steering wheel horn, it’s spinner hubcaps as well as the name “Valiant” on the radio.
http://www.oldcarbrochures.com/static/NA/Plymouth/1964%20Plymouth/1964%20Plymouth%20Barracuda/1964%20Plymouth%20Barracuda-02-03.html
From certain angles, the Tarpon looks good. The problem is with the profile view.
I’ve always thought that the 1964-65 Rambler American is a very attractive car – among domestic compacts of that era, only the second-generation Corvair is more handsome. As the article notes, AMC would have been better off updating the roofline of the American two-door hardtop, instead of spending money on either the Marlin or Tarpon.
Here’s a thought. The humped fastback reminded many people, perhaps unconsciously of the fastback first postwar generation cars of Hudson, Nash and Packard. Although production stopped a good decade ago there were plenty on the road until recently. The Tarpon (and Marlin) rear decks look good until you try to put something in the trunk. The Tarpon would need something to liven up the front end. How about the quad headlite look of the IKA Rambler?