American Motors Corporation

~ the goodbye ~

On 1 May 1954 Nash-Kelvinator and the Hudson Motor Car Company merged into American Motors Corporation. It was the largest corporate merger the United States had seen to that point, and the reasoning behind it was defensive. Neither company was big enough to buy tooling at the volumes General Motors got, and George Mason believed that two of them stapled together might be. He died in October of the same year and George Romney, later a governor of Michigan, took the job.

The plan that saved it was to stop pretending. Romney dropped the Nash and Hudson names in 1957 and put everything behind the Rambler, a compact car sold with a straight argument about fuel and parking at a time when Detroit was selling length. The 1958 recession arrived at exactly the right moment for that argument. By 1961 Rambler was the third best selling nameplate in the country.

Then the big three noticed. Once Ford and Chevrolet built compacts of their own the advantage went away, and American Motors spent the rest of its life doing the same trick with less room: strange small cars that nobody else wanted to build, styled by Dick Teague on a fraction of the budget his counterparts across town were given. The Gremlin arrived on 1 April 1970. The Pacer followed in 1975 with more glass than anything else on the road and a passenger door four inches longer than the driver's, so people could get into the back.

The decision that outlived the company came in 1970, when it bought Kaiser Jeep. Everything American Motors built with a car badge on it is gone. Jeep is still here, and it is the reason Chrysler eventually paid for the rest.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the small car bet ~

The Gremlin was a Hornet with the back of the car cut off, which is exactly what it looks like, and it beat the Ford Pinto and the Chevrolet Vega to market by about six months. It sold for under two thousand dollars in its first year. The Pacer was the opposite kind of gamble: designed around a Wankel rotary engine that General Motors was going to supply, until General Motors abandoned the program and left American Motors to stuff its own heavy straight six into a car whose whole shape had been drawn around something else.

Both cars became jokes. Both cars also sold: the Gremlin ran nine model years and the Pacer moved over 145,000 units in 1975 alone. The one nobody jokes about is the Eagle, launched in 1979, which took a passenger car body and put four-wheel drive under it with the ride height raised. That shape is now most of what the industry sells.

~ the Renault years ~

Renault started buying in during 1979 and by 1982 held a controlling stake. The logic made sense on paper. American Motors needed capital and a small car it had not designed in the 1960s, Renault wanted dealers in the United States, and the Kenosha plant in Wisconsin could build the Alliance under a French design with American labor.

The Alliance was even Motor Trend's car of the year for 1983. Then the exchange rate moved, quality complaints piled up, and Renault found itself losing money in a market it did not understand while also losing money at home. On 17 November 1986 Georges Besse, the chairman of Renault, was shot dead outside his apartment in Paris by members of Action Directe. His successor was under orders to stop the bleeding, and the American operation was the obvious thing to sell.

Chrysler agreed to buy it in March 1987 and closed on 5 August. Lee Iacocca wanted Jeep and wanted the Kenosha capacity, and he got both. Kenosha stopped building cars in December 1988 and around 5,500 people lost their jobs. The corporation itself was wound up on 20 June 1988, renamed Jeep Eagle Corporation that August, and formally merged into Chrysler on 29 March 1990.

~ the Tuzla footnote ~

Turkey's first car factory was a Jeep plant. Türk Willys Overland opened at Tuzla in 1954, the same year American Motors was formed. It assembled civilian and military Jeeps from American parts with locally made components under the Verdi family for most of two decades. In 1971 the Ministry of National Defense bought the plant and handed it to the army, which is within a year of when American Motors acquired Jeep from Kaiser. So the Turkish end of that lineage went its own way just as the American end changed owners. Tuzla kept building military Jeeps under Turkish design into the 1990s and registered its own name for them, Tuzla 1013, in 1995. The factory closed in 2006, eighteen years after the company whose product it started with.

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