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All right, that headline isn't quite what you'd call accurate; actually the Alliance probably hastened AMC's demise by a few years; while Chrysler could get a great big bailout from Uncle Sam, AMC- not being considered "too big to fail"- had to get bailed out by the French government. The Alliance - and its later Encore spinoff- was a Kenosha-ized Renault 9, and it grabbed the 1983 Motor Trend Car Of The Year award… then, well, things didn't work out so well. Franzouse , always on the lookout for interesting French car-related stuff, has found this Alliance worship site to brighten up our Monday. [RenaultAlliance.net]
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newVideoPlayer("84_Renault_Encore_476.flv", 506, 423,""); The Renault Alliance won the 1983 Motor Trend Car of the Year Award, so buyers might have figured the hatchback version- named the Encore- would combine French build quality with the financial acumen of American Motors to produce one of the finest motor vehicles of all time. Well, unfortunately, the Kenosha-ized Renault 9 didn't live up to expectations, but it did get great gas mileage... at a time when gas was 95 cents a gallon and getting cheaper by the minute.
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They all laughed at the AMC Eagle back in the day; why would anyone want to buy a car with four-wheel-drive ? And, of course, just about everything AMC did during the Late Malaise Era reeked of the panic swirling about Kenosha at the time, so car buyers could just picture the bash-to-fit frenzy of line workers running over to the Jeep assembly plant to swipe components to affix to Concord bodies. But these days everyone seems to want "command position" driver height and 4WD every bit as much as they want 16" diameter cupholders. Before its time! You still see a few of them around , though, and the Gray Lady has taken notice. [New York Times]
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newVideoPlayer("83_JeepCJ_Macho_476.flv", 463, 387,""); You know what big-haired early-80s chicks really liked? No, we mean even more than cocaine. That's right, a macho dude who rides a buffalo to work! Thing is, sometimes you need a ride that doesn't leave bovine poop in the parking garage, and then there's the matter of getting Buffalo Crotch Scabies from bareback bison riding. That's when you go for the Jeep CJ, which is slightly more comfortable than the buffalo, yet nearly as macho.
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newVideoPlayer("83_JeepCJ_Macho_476.flv", 463, 387,""); You know what big-haired early-80s chicks really liked? No, we mean even more than cocaine. That's right, a macho dude who rides a buffalo to work! Thing is, sometimes you need a ride that doesn't leave bovine poop in the parking garage, and then there's the matter of getting Buffalo Crotch Scabies from bareback bison riding. That's when you go for the Jeep CJ, which is slightly more comfortable than the buffalo, yet nearly as macho.
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newVideoPlayer("81_Renault_18i_476.flv", 463, 387,""); Remember the Renault 18i? Maybe if you live in Europe (where it was called the Renault 18, without the i) you do, but in North America these things disappeared without a trace. AMC had to sell Renaults as part of its deal with the French government; a fair number of Le Cars and Alliances limped off the showroom floors, but the other models (e.g., the Medallion ) were bombs. Smell the desperation in this ad, especially the part at the end about the "10% rollback."
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