Forgotten Heroes
AMC Pacer
If history tells us anything, it’s that the AMC Pacer was a dud. It was a laughing stock when it was new, and nothing has really changed over the past four decades. It remains the butt of countless jokes, and routinely features near the top of lazy ‘worst ever car’ lists. Except history is wrong. It may not have been a great car, but the Pacer did sell – just not in the sort of numbers that its maker had hoped for. Nor was it inherently awful; it’s just that it was perhaps a bit too left-field for a conservative American market. It wasn’t the car that would-be punters had been promised. In that respect, it is far from alone. The Pacer was conceived as a small rotaryengined device made of lightweight materials. It was to have been the American Motor Corporation’s retort to Japanese and European compacts that were making hay during a period when petrol prices had soured and federal emission controls were being implemented. ‘Project Amigo’ was supposed to have been a blank-sheet-of-paper design that borrowed little from other cars in the range. Scroll back to the early 1970s and no idea was too wild for AMC’s starry-eyed creative types. No concept was off limits. Mid-engined proposals were put forward, as were tiny front-wheel drive city cars, but at an early stage it was decided that this brave new world would need to be on the wide side, if only by comparison with foreign imports. Impending safety regulations meant that the as-yet unnamed new car would have to be able to withstand heftier front, rear and side impacts. Not only that, American consumers expected a certain degree of space and comfort, even in small cars. Customer clinics said as much.
GM PULLS OUT
Ideas were whittled down until the final specification was revealed to the company board in 1971. The new car was to boast doublewishbone independent suspension at either end, a front-mounted Wankel rotary engine sited in a subframe and isolated from the body via rubber bushes, and an expansive glass area for panoramic all-round visibility. There were, however, one or two problems. The men in suits repeatedly shot down designer Dick Teague’s proposals, which necessitated him going back to the drawing board time and again. When the definitive design was finally signed off, he freely admitted in later years that he had long since become sick of the project. Worse was to come. A deal was brokered with General Motors in February 1973 whereby AMC would be able to use its rotary engines (which were actually made by Curtiss-Wright on GM’s behalf ). The idea was to use proprietary units until it was in a position to make its own rotaries. The newly-named Pacer was designed around these prototype engines, but GM dropped a bombshell a year later: these new rotaries weren’t particularly fuel-efficient, which was something of a concern given that the USA was living though a fuel crisis. Not only that, they were also unlikely to meet new anti-pollution regulations. GM managed to get an exemption, but it was more of a stay of execution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it chose to cut its losses rather than commit itself to throwing more money onto the pyre. All of which left AMC in a bit of bind. The firm’s engineers were obliged to shoehorn in the aged 3.8-litre straight-six boat anchor that powered everything from the Jeep Wagoneer to the AMC Gremlin in double-quick time. This had a detrimental effect on the car’s handling, and also moved the Pacer another step further away from being a true rival to the small four-cylinder imports that it was purportedly targeting. Nevertheless, the Pacer broke cover in 1975, and AMC had high expectations. The media were rather scathing, though. Much of its vitriol targeted the car’s controversial styling. Offering a remarkably low drag coefficient of just 0.32cd ( by way of comparison, a Ford Sierra was 0.34cd), the Pacer was the antithesis of your typical squarerigged Detroit barge. With its down-sloping nose,
‘frenched-in’ headlights and huge glass area, it was too quirky for most arbiters of beauty. The decision to equip the car with a passenger door that was 10cm longer than the one on the driver’s side was also questioned in print, though Teague insisted that it was for practical reasons – it made it easier for rear-ferried passengers to get into the car from the pavement. It also didn’t help that the Pacer was roughly the same size as a Jaguar XJ6 and weighed more than a W123-series MercedesBenz. Packing only 90bhp, it was sluggish at best, managing the dash from rest to 60mph in a glacial 13.7sec, while managing only 14mpg if you drove like a saint. This being an American car, the options list was beyond comprehensive, though. There were all manner of deluxe and ‘performance’ upgrades (all things being relative), with the most popular being the X Package. This comprised stiffer springs, a front anti-roll bar, and a floor-mounted gearlever in place of the column shift along with some gofaster stripes. In the first year of production, some 145,528 Pacers were sold, 72,158 of which were X-rated.
FILM STAR
Unfortunately, that was as good as it got for the Pacer in terms of units shifted. A year later, the car received a power hike to 120bhp, which did little to counter claims that it was too slow. Sales slipped to 117,244 units in 1976, and AMC responded with a new variant that it hoped would halt the slide – the Pacer Wagon. It ultimately failed to find favour, although it outsold the regular model (37,999 Wagons to 20,265 ‘saloons’) in 1977. The perpetual lack of horsepower was alleviated in 1977 with the insertion of a 5.0-litre V8 – performance was greatly improved, but it simply served to make a further mockery of the Pacer’s intended role as an economical runabout. Sales continued to freefall, and no changes were made for 1979 save for the arrival of a new Limited package. This comprised leather trim, electric windows and an ugly ‘egg crate’ grille. AMC managed to shift fewer than 2000 Pacers in 1980, the model’s final year, and each of those had been built in ’79. All told, around 280,000 were made, which was nowhere near the sort of numbers that AMC had envisaged, and unlike the Gremlin sister model, the Pacer never returned a profit. In order to recoup development and tooling costs, AMC would have needed to sell around 150,000 cars a year for five years. So the Pacer wasn’t a success, but it was memorable if only as a cultural touchstone: it is impossible to mention the car without also namechecking its role in the 1992 film Wayne’s World. That, and countless videos for rock and indy acts. The Pacer is now cool, and not even in a knowing, ironic kind of way. In the USA, at least, a Pacer never ceases to draw a crowd at a classic car show, and many owners are too young to remember the jibes that were levelled at it in period. Either that, or they simply don’t care. It would appear that the difference between kitsch and classic status is about 40 years.
’It was the same size as a Jaguar XJ6 and weighed more than a W123 Merc – but had just 90bhp’