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Unusual styling and weird proportions made the AMC Pacer one of the most head turning cars of the 1970s.American Rhapsody
The AMC Pacer is a lot like bell bottoms, Jimmy Carter, and the music of Paul Anka in that it was another mid-1970s sensation that is inexplicable looking back almost fifty years later. And yet, when it debuted in 1975 the Pacer was revolutionary, quirky, practical, and a potential savior for the underdog automaker from Kenosha, Wisconsin, AMC. So, what made the Pacer so charming? What doomed it to a scant five production years? And why do Gen Xers still love it so much? All this and more, below.
Development
In the early 1970s, AMC was the last of the independent carmakers still soldiering on in a market dominated by Detroit’s Big Three: Ford, GM, and Chrysler. AMC’s acquisition of the Jeep brand from Kaiser Corporation and new models like the Gremlin and Hornet showed the scrappy company had vision if not market share. Design Chief Dick Teague felt that market was ripe for smaller cars. The Gremlin, which Teague designed, was the subcompact forerunner to the compact Pacer. Teague started work on the Pacer in 1971 and presaged the shift in the market toward greater efficiency and affordability that would soon arrive with the Oil Crisis.
As practical as all this sounds, the Pacer was far from a conventional design. It was a hodgepodge of disparate elements composed chiefly of its exceptional width for a “compact” car and its copious amounts of glass. The Pacer’s wide track was nearly as great as that of a Cadillac Eldorado of the day, 77 inches versus 78 inches. AMC’s marketing specifically emphasized this attribute, calling the Pacer “the first wide small car.” And though the Pacer’s width made for odd proportions it also gave the car a very roomy interior. The Pacer’s extensive use of glass was a double-edged sword of sorts. Visibility was great front and rear (further enhanced by a low belt line), but it also let in a lot of sun, making the Pacer a hotbox on summer days. With glass accounting for 37% of its surface area, the Pacer earned the nickname of “the flying fishbowl.”
Dogged Ingenuity Pays Off
The engineers and designers at AMC were far from done with their novel approach to the Pacer. Not only would the car look unusual, but it would also be powered by something unusual, a Wankel rotary engine sourced from GM. A brief aside, the rotary engine is a far different design from your typical four-part Otto Cycle internal combustion engine with its cylinder and piston moving up and down (or side-to-side in a boxer engine). A rotary engine uses a triangular “apex” rotating inside an oval chamber to compress its air-fuel mixture. They are high-revving engines, but also relatively inefficient and dirty. (For more on weird engines, click here.)
Both those issues are what lead GM to cancel its work on their rotary engine, leaving the development of the Pacer very much in the lurch. But AMC engineers scrambled to find an alternative, finally landing on their 232 cu.-in. straight-six. The engine was big, even for the wide Pacer, and heavy, for a car already weighed down with glass, and not especially efficient, coming from the Jeep where it specialized in low-end torque. Somehow, engineers were able to fit the engine into the Pacer, pushing the firewall back behind the line of the windshield to do it.
The AMC Pacer was met with a strong reception upon its debut in 1975, despite the obstacles. Like the Gremlin before it, the Pacer traded on its oddball design and found an audience of car buyers enamored with its novelty. Early reviews praised the Pacer for its commodious interior and impressive visibility. Its responsive steering owed to its new rack-and-pinion steering set up, a bit of new tech only then shared with the Ford Pinto. The Pacer was maneuverable and futuristic and just unique enough to capture the attention of car buyers in the mid-1970s.
Bumpy Roads for AMC
Good times for AMC and the Pacer were not destined to last, however. The Pacer turned out to be a victim of its own success. Its initial popularity encouraged AMC to up production, speeding up the line to get more cars to market. But with speed always comes at a cost in manufacturing and build quality suffered as a result. And then there was the Pacer’s poor fuel economy. A new carburetor and other changed helped a little, but larger bumpers and tougher paneling meant to meet new government safety regulations added more weight to the car.
A larger 258 straight-six and an even bigger 304 V8 improved the Pacer’s motivation off the line while doing nothing to improve fuel efficiency. By the late 1970s, buyers were rapidly shifting to smaller more efficient cars at the same time competitive new entrants to the American market like Toyota and Honda were making in-roads with their own fuel-efficient compacts.
The final nail in the coffin for the Pacer was its former strength. The car’s novelty had aged rapidly and by the close of the decade looked dated rather than charming. The end of the decade also saw the end of the Pacer, which ended production in late 1979. AMC continued on for a few more years with the help of French carmaker Renault before finally being sold to Lee Iacocca and Chrysler in 1987.
An Ironically Unironic Redemption
The story of the Pacer does not end with its cancellation, however. The Pacer gained new admires when the “flying fishbowl” got a prime role in 1992’s Wayne’s World, as Wayne and Garth rolled around in Garth’s robin’s egg-blue Pacer (with flames of course) rocking out to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The scene redeemed both the Pacer, as ironically/unironically cool and fun, and reminded everyone in the early 1990s what was so great about Queen.
The pairing of Queen and the Pacer might appear counter intuitive, but it was a perfect introduction to the movie’s sensibility. The scene in Wayne’s World laid bare Gen X’s façade of cool, distancing irony to reveal a core of genuine earnestness, of a desire for friendship and belonging that was always so deeply felt, so raw that it became unbearable (hence the retreat to irony). Wayne and Garth head banging to “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the Mirthmobile provided an antidote to ‘80s cynicism with a dose of ‘70s free-wheeling zeal. Perhaps not coincidentally, Queen’s A Night at the Opera came out the same year as the Pacer, 1975.
Wayne’s World gave everyone still driving a Pacer permission to love the car again in that “joking, not joking” quasi-ironic stance that’s become so common in car collecting today. Take a gem mint Pacer wagon with only 2,500 on the clock. Is that the height of post-modern hipsterism or actual worship at the altar of automotive history? Can we even tell the difference anymore? Is there a difference at all?
What’s unique about the wagon is that the passenger door is longer than the drivers door for easier ingress and egress..
The sedan and wagon use the same, unequal length doors. My bright red, non-air-conditioned ’76 Pacer sedan had ’em, too. (Yes, it was like driving an oven in the summer!)