Daring to be diminutive

AMC's Gremlin and Pacer, and Ford's much-derided Pinto, led America's response to the threat of imported European compacts

- JAN-HENRIK MUCHE

A ccording to one executive who was there at the time, selling the idea of small cars to the bosses of America's 'Big Three' makers - those imperious men in the teakpanelled offices of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler - was a hopeless task. "Small cars mean small money," explains George Gallion, who held managerial positions in the design offices of GM for four decades, confirming that the smaller the car, the smaller the profits.

Logically, then, big cars mean big money. As a result, year after year, product planners and marketers preferred to push new luxury land yachts to the dealers, almost always larger, more powerful and more ostentatious than those that had come before them.

In the end, however, it would be the local customers themselves who forced a change in attitude. Compact imported cars, and above all the Volkswagen Beetle, began to populate America's streets from the 1950s. While their share of the market grew every year, the number of US-produced vehicles in this segment steadily declined, dropping to below 7% by the late 1960s. This was the moment for the Big Three manufacturers to launch their retaliation.

'Detroit fights back' was the coverline of Newsweek magazine on 6 April 1970, accompanied by an image of a quirky little car with a truncated tail (above right). With sales starting on 1 April (an unfortunate choice, bearing in mind the reputation the car would later gain), the underdog American Motors Corporation was ahead of the Big Three with its new Gremlin, stealing a six-month march on Ford and GM, which wouldn't launch their own compact cars -the Pinto and the Chevrolet Vega respectively - until the late summer. Chrysler was even further behind. AMC quickly secured buyers with what was then the cheapest domestically produced car, priced at $1879.