My father built one of those when he was 19 or 20, body was built from wood slats, covered with lacquered feed bags. Tricycle skis, Chev banger hand carved prop. The state police timed him through a half mile with a half mile run up on a frozen lake at 78 mph. Have pics and newsaer clipping somewhere.
In this case it's quite palpably relative! It was designed in the era when American designers considered that anything shorter than about five metres ought to have a "cute" look, like a toy designed for toddlers. European designers at that time would have tried for a "serious" car, and most Japanese designers then wouldn't quite have succeeded in designing a cross between a portable radio and an origami swan.
To some degree at least, I have to admit to at least liking these cars if for no other reason than their originality. I can't think of any other production car that it shared styling with. Which is why it probably ended up as one of those "love it" or "hate it" cars. There was no real middle ground as far as the public's opinion went. It didn't help that American Motors decided to build a car for which there was only a vaguely imagined market.
The real problem with the Pacer was AMC senior management. It was designed to be a Gremlin-sized car, but senior mgmnt decided to put it on the Matador platform. History repeating itself... The Tarpon was designed to go on the compact American platform, but sr mgmnt had it stretched over the larger Classic instead. The Tarpon could have competed with the Plymouth Barracuda in '65, the Marlin was a fish out of water...
Hello Gaz,Nice boat-autos, but... But, wouldn't be easier and cheaper to build a good auto and a good boat instead of this mixture? Anyway, it would be nice to have a ride/sail in one of them. In Belgrade, during the late sixties, there was a couple of Amphicars but never seen one in a water, only on the streets. I knew a guy that later bought one - but he had so many projects that never made it drivable, over asphalt or water... Ciao, Zoran
P.S.: Strange, but people always like to experiment with flying automobiles, or road-going boats, or amphibious aeroplanes, or whatever combination: as locomotives on the roads and automobiles on the rails... Z.
Then, Zoran, there was that fascinating episode in the history of the American steam-powered automobile, around the mid-'20s, when what seemed like hundreds of manufacturers of steam cars appeared out of nowhere, only to disappear again two or three years later. Some of them apparently actually made cars. A catalogue of those marques might make for an interesting book (which I am not going to write).
AMC got shafted royally by Volkswagen over the Pacer. The car was designed around the Rabbit/Dasher front wheel drive unit, then Vdub changed their mind and wouldn't supply it to AMC. AMC then had to go back and change the whole design to RWD and use their outdated inline 6. One of the biggest problems was the car was designed by stylists and many things just didn't fit or were cumbersome. Door windows didn't roll down all the way, back seat ingress/egress was difficult, fuel mileage wasn't what the times demanded, etc. The car was mostly a mistake and it was a major "nail in the coffin" for AMC.
The deal was not with VW but with GM and their on-again-off-again rotary engine development programme. AMC had already rejected front wheel drive at concept stage. Moreover, the Golf Mk1 (Rabbit) transverse fwd platform and the Passat B1 (Dasher) longitudinal fwd platforms – completely different layouts – were developed largely concurrently with the Pacer. By the time VW had components to sell, the tooling for the Pacer was pretty much already there. Interesting from reading up on this, the Pacer was very much specifically designed as an un-car, or anti-car, to embrace the market Volvo were then only beginning to dominate.
Early concept sketches suggest transverse mid engine and dos-à-dos seating. That would have qualified as real automotive weirdness. I wonder what it would take to back-develop that from an actual Pacer. We'd seen the dos-à-dos idea before. Zundapp had developed their Janus microcar from the Dornier Delta prototype: The innovation with the proto-Pacer was in putting the transmission and rear suspension under the passengers' knees. I rather like the sort of proportions that gives. But it is something of a case study in structural envisionation. It purports an inevitability and then presents a response which turns the unmitigated dystopia into something not so bad, and perhaps on balance rather interesting. In the Pacer's case it is posited that our lives would henceforth comprise nothing but gridlock and looking for parking, but with this kind of car it might actually be fun, and not a disaster at all. The implication that the motor industry in general and AMC in strategic particular is a structural prerequisite for the decisive solution goes without saying, to such an extent that the idea is barely consciously articulated even though it is the crux of the message. The obvious fact of the motor industry's material instrumentality in enabling the aforesaid gridlock in the first place isn't even thought ... At the same time there are no structural incentives to develop as fully or as graphically alternative visions in which neither the gridlock nor the cartelized motor industry are inevitable, so it is not surprising what ends up in the portfolio of visions which inform policymakers' thinking.
That steering column must have had some reason to go all the way to the front. Photographs from other angles show something like sliding pillars or MacPherson struts, implying steering. More than that I do not know. Compare this "civilian" iteration:
Are you sure? That would have been interesting to drive. I remember a trip down the "68th street hill" in a Radio Flyer coaster wagon backwards when I was about 8. (I had been fishing with my dad and was fascinated by the way he steered the outboard with a tiller.) It did not end well.
The Jalopy Journal
