1976 AMC Pacer 🇺🇸

In an era when the American automobile industry was cranking out bloated, gas guzzling cars, using the all too familiar rectilinear 3-box design formula (engine box, passenger compartment box, trunk box) the AMC Pacer was a radical departure. Design of this car began in 1971 at the hands of AMC chief designer, Dick Teague. 

Teague started with the placement of four adult passengers and then designed the car around them. He explored every new concept in design and engineering from doors on each side of the car being different lengths, a feature that made it into the finished design,  to front wheel drive and even intending this new car to use a wankle rotary engine, neither of which materialized. He pushed the sides of the car out to the width of a typical  full-size car while keeping the length short. He increased the glass area to 37% of the exterior area. The end result was a car that was unlike any other in production at the time. 

The Pacer was the first American car to fully isolate the front suspension and engine from the passenger compartment to minimize noise and vibration. It was also the second American car, after the Ford Pinto, to use rack and pinion steering.

The forward thinking behind the Pacer extended to the safety as well. The car was designed from the start to exceed the more stringent crash test requirements that would not kick-in until 1980.

AMC marketed the Pacer as, “the first wide small car”, it provided the interior space of a full size American barge but was easy to handle in cramped urban environments. The direction AMC and Teague took in creating the Pacer was novel but couldn’t overcome the shortcomings dictated by AMCs lack of development money. The time and money spent on a car intended to be rotary powered would have been better invested in a more traditional engine with better fuel economy. Despite AMC calling the Pacer a Sedan Coupe, the lack of a four-door sedan version, in an era when this was the dominant body style, probably didn’t help. The eventual addition of a station wagon, also two-door, came too late and suffered even more from the lack of power and poor economy. 

The Pacer was a new way of thinking about the car for the average American but its failure was the canary in the coal mine for the future of AMC.