On December 3, 1979, the last Pacer rolls off the assembly line at the American Motors Corporation (AMC) factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When the car first came on the market in 1975, it was a sensation, hailed as the car of the future. “When you buy any other car,” ads said, “all you end up with is today’s car. When you get a Pacer, you get a piece of tomorrow.” By 1979, however, sales had faded considerably. Today, polls and experts agree: the Pacer was one of the worst cars of all time.
By the end of the 1960s, AMC was the only surviving independent automaker in the United States. The only way to assure AMC’s future, company officials decided, was to embrace what they called a “Philosophy of Difference.” That is, they built only cars that offered buyers something brand-new. (During the 1960s, the company had tried to compete directly with cars produced by the Big Three–General Motors, Ford and Chrysler–and had nearly gone bankrupt as a result.) They also decided to build cars that would meet the stringent federal safety and pollution standards that they imagined would be in place in 1980.
Thus, the Pacer: an “economy car” that was, despite its designs on the small-car market, amazingly heavy (thanks to those crash-protection standards) and terribly fuel-inefficient. Most peculiarly, the Pacer was nearly half as wide (77 inches) as it was long (171.5 inches, on a 100-inch wheelbase). In theory, this meant that four adults and their cargo could travel in comfort; in practice, it meant that the car was goofy-looking and impossible to park.
Contributing to the overall goofiness were the car’s enormous windows–more than one reviewer compared the Pacer to a fishbowl. Also, to make it easier for passengers to load packages into the back and drivers to climb in on the curb side, the left-hand door was shorter than the right one. (As a result, parallel parkers in Great Britain typically needed to crawl over the passenger seat to get out, because the driver’s-side door was so big that it would get caught on the curb.) The short, squat car was also woefully underpowered.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its bad reputation, the Pacer has also earned a spot in pop-culture history. A 1976 Pacer—robin’s-egg blue, with flames painted on the front fenders—starred in the 1992 film “Wayne’s World” and in the accompanying video for the old Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The rapper Eminem featured a late-model Pacer in the music video for his 2000 hit “The Real Slim Shady.”
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A simple picture of the Pacer would have been helpful to the younger crowd that has no idea of what one looks like.
You raise an interesting issue — just what are the demographics of TBP? Maybe the owner of the site can chime in … or anyone else who happens to have fairly solid information …
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=AMC+Pacer&t=brave&iax=images&ia=images
I still see the occasional Pacer on the road. Not so with the Chevy Citation, a 1980 Motor Trend Car of the year.
It may have been the worst car of all time but it wasn’t the ugliest. that honor goes to the AMC Gremlin.
The Pontiac Aztec.
AMC, what fun.
I tried to drive a V8 Gremlin once, could not keep the back wheels from spinning. No weight back there.
In 1986, had a coworker that had a yellow Pacer that we car pooled in. One day driving in the other direction was another one with a young child (opposite race if you get my drift) waving like mad at us. Pointed it out and asked my coworker if he had “other” family. Went over well…
A friend’s mother bought this car. They only owned it two years.
George Romney was president of AMC during that time; need we say more?
The Chevy Chevette was decent looking but it had a huge problem. When you pulled into an old full service station you’d say, “Give me 10 gallons of regular and fill the crankcase up with 30 weight.” You got around 250 miles/quart if lucky.
The num-nut that thought an aluminum block was a great idea probably wound up running GM into the ground in the 80s.
AMC began to die when the guy who ran it, Abernethy, decided to go back to building big cars and trying to compete with The Big Three. Had they stuck with the Ramblers, and spent the money on updating them, they would had probably survived. They also wasted money designing new engines; for example, why they spent money on building the 258 c.i.d. six is a mystery, when they had the patterns for the Hudson 308 engine that still put out more horsepower than that one or anyone else’s base engine. Why they didn’t try to concentrate on fuel efficient cars in 1973 and after is also anyone’s guess.
it all proves one thing- stupid decisions made by arrogant people is what kills companies.
” Once upon a time there was a race car racer and he had himself a sooped up AMC Pacer…”
A great song called Engine Joe from The Mighty Slobberbone (Denton TX) written by the great Brent Best.
Check it out on Youtube