After forming in 1954, the new American Motors Corporation continued to produce Nash and Hudson cars through 1957. However, starting in 1958, these two old car names were phased out and AMC focused its entire production on a new line of compact car called the Rambler. Company President George Romney (Mitt Romney’s father) believed an economical and well built compact car was the way of the future and it turned out he was right. AMC and arguably Studebaker created the compact market segment and were the only domestic option to mounting sales of imported foreign cars. This quickly changed by the early 1960s when every major U.S. auto manufacturer was offering a compact car, similar in size to the popular Rambler. You might be surprised to learn that AMC was the forth largest auto manufacturer in the U.S in 1960.
The last article I published was about Rambler Ranch outside of Elizabeth, Colorado. http://www.examiner.com/article/rambler-ranch-corrals-american-motors-cars. The slide show attached to that article about Rambler Ranch included examples of early Nash and AMC cars. In this slide show, I showcase some of the early Ramblers, 1958 to the early 1960s, when the Rambler name was at its highpoint. Watch for my next article which will be Part 3 of the series, this time covering muscle cars and '70s and 80's AMC cars on display at Rambler Ranch.
This week’s Trivia Question: What year did VW first import cars into the U.S and how many cars (Bugs) did they sell their first year?
Answer to last week’s Trivia Question: Nash first offered it’s “Bed-in-a-car” featuring fold down seats starting in 1936.
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