(EXPANDED FROM 12/30/2022) A few years ago we had a debate in a comment thread about the importance of scale in the U.S. auto industry (go here). I thought I would add another layer to […]
Road & Track complained that for 1960 the Auto Union’s two-door hardtop was given a “crude ‘American’ touch, a clumsy wrap-around” windshield (Bond, 1959). That made this body style look even more incongruous than previously. […]
Car Life magazine argued that the 1970 AMC Hornet met two out of three of the automaker’s stated goals for the car. Engineering Editor David Bean wrote that American Motors thought that the compact and […]
(EXPANDED FROM 6/3/2022) The 1970 Plymouth Barracuda and its sibling the Dodge Challenger proved to be a costly mistake that epitomized Detroit’s slowness in responding to changing times. Indeed, the Chrysler Corporation’s early-1970s pony cars […]
I subscribed to Motor Trend back in the day and still vaguely remembered Eric Dahlquist’s article about the 1970 Ford Maverick. So when I came across his story in the Automotive History Preservation Society’s library […]
(UPDATED FROM 8/15/2014) Imagine that you run Volkswagen’s American operations in 1959. Detroit has finally woken up to the public’s growing interest in small cars. Studebaker and American Motors are already seeing dramatic sales increases after introducing compact […]
The shift to smaller cars was happening before the first oil embargo, which stretched from October 1973 through March 174 (Wikipedia, 2023). In an October 1972 column, Popular Science Automotive Editor Jan P. Norbye walked […]
(EXPANDED FROM 9/9/2022) The 1975-80 AMC Pacer may have been a memorable car, but it was also a key factor in American Motors’ demise as an independent automaker. What’s particularly tragic is that the Pacer’s […]
Automotive News recently bemoaned how heavier electric vehicles “are causing safety and pollution problems.” The news report by Richard Truett (2023) pointed to heavy battery packs as the main “culprit” but also weight gains caused […]
Predicting the future of the U.S. auto industry has always been fraught with peril. Popular Science’s Detroit Editor Jim Dunne got a lot of things right in his reporting during 1970, but a number of […]
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