(UPDATED FROM 6/26/2020) The Saab 99/900 proved to be the box that crushed the tiny Swedish carmaker. I grant you that this platform was hardly an immediate failure. Even so, the design of the 99 […]
My essay about Lee Iacocca elicited some interesting pushback, so I would like to offer some follow-up thoughts. Some commentators have pushed back against my criticisms of Iacocca by pointing to things he did well. […]
(UPDATED 12/16/2022) The 1961-63 Lincoln Continental is commonly viewed as the first downsized American luxury car. However, during this same time time period Cadillac also offered a more compact variant that has received little attention. […]
Would American Motors have continued to be successful in the second-half of the 1960s if George Romney had stuck around? He stepped down as CEO in 1962 to successfully run for governor of Michigan. This […]
(EXPANDED ON 1/27/2023) In doing research on our “unresolved postwar mysteries” story, I came across a piece of information that challenged one of my long-held assumptions. George Hamlin and Dwight Heinmuller stated that the Briggs […]
(EXPANDED ON 1/27/2023) Many books, magazine articles and blog posts have been written about the independent automakers’ struggle to survive in the 1950s. Even so, I have come across a number of unresolved mysteries relevant […]
(UPDATED 9/23/2022) The easiest way to sum up the spectacular failure of the DeLorean Motor Company is to say that its founder was exceptionally unlucky. I am hard pressed to think of a worse time […]
When writing a story about the 1974 AMC Ambassador, I came across American Motors car brochures for 1979 and 1980 that took the unusual step of picturing the company’s headquarters in Southfield, Michigan. In the 1979 […]
George Romney may have been one of the U.S. auto industry’s best post-war leaders, but he made eight big mistakes while leading AMC from 1954-62. Some of his bad moves were costly enough to almost […]
The most strikingly quality of American Motors’ car designs developed in the mid-60s was how quickly the automaker ditched the Rambler look in favor of styling mostly indistinguishable from the Big Three. This was a […]
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