Concours d'Lemons: 1976 AMC Pacer

The Concours d'Lemons is a car show, "Celebrating the oddball, mundane and truly awful of the automotive world."

The Pacer was the last all-new car AMC ever built. It put a lot of money into the project, and although initial sales were strong, it seems everybody who thought it was cool bought one, then they couldn't sell any more. It also got a reputation as a not very well-built car.

So you may look at the Pacer and simply ask, "Why?!" Well, Americans were used to driving big cars, and there was a market in the 70s for small cars that were as wide as big cars and that drove the way big cars did. AMC had used this same idea for the Gremlin.

* This car is done up as a replica of the Mirth Mobile from Wayne's World.
* I've never seen a Pacer on the street in Washington, though I have seen a couple of Gremlins. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Concours d'Lemons: 1958 Edsel Villager

The Concours d'Lemons is a car show, "Celebrating the oddball, mundane and truly awful of the automotive world." I've wanted to get an Edsel on this blog for a long time.

The Edsel is widely considered the greatest American product failure of all time. By the time Ford cancelled it in November of 1959 (two years after its launch) the Edsel had lost $350 million, or $3.2 billion on today's dollars. (In dollar terms, GM's Saturn cars were an even bigger failure, but that's a story for another day.)

 

 

 

 

 

The Edsel was not a terrible idea. In the mid-1950s, one out of every four cars sold in a America was one of GM's mid-priced brands: Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick. To compete with those cars, Ford had only Mercury, a brand that didn't sell a lot of cars.

What went wrong? Everything.
* The car was not very attractive, and it had a stupid name.
* A lot of executives at Ford never believed in the project and didn't help to make it succeed (these kinds of internal struggles were always a problem with the Detroit automakers).
* Despite the incredible investment, Edsel had no dedicated production lines; the cars were added to assembly lines already making Fords and Mercurys, so the production line workers kept having to change assembly routines while building cars at the same pace. This resulted in poor build quality.
* Whenever Detroit shows off a new car to the press, they make sure the test cars are perfect. That didn't happen with Edsel; some of the test cars fell apart and gave it a bad reputation on day one.
* The US economy went into recession just when the car was launched in late 1957. Car sales plummeted, particularly upscale cars like the Edsel.
* The Edsel was a big, expensive car launched just when buyers were taking their first looks at the Volkswagen and other smaller, more practical vehicles.
* Ford promised the Edsel was going to be a whole new kind of car - something revolutionary. It wasn't. Edsels were just mild variations on the cars Ford was already selling.
* Edsel did however have a lot of gee-whiz, push-button technology. Technology that didn't work right. For example, instead of a shift lever for the transmission, the more expensive Edsels used electro-mechanical buttons in the center of the steering wheel to change gears (see the pic below). This was one of several gimmicky, unnecessary features on the car that proved unreliable.

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