The Big Squeeze

We've done all this before, you realize. When the economy went blooey in the late Fifties, the public started buying little cars in such quantities that even people importing obscure European brands such as Borgwards and Skodas made money. American Motors got a shot in the arm and George Romney paid us back by trying to run for President. So the Big Three countered with a volley of "compact" cars: the unforgettable Corvair (which took a bad rap from Ralph Nader for its handling but leaked oil, ate fan belts and rattled like a Taiwanese alarm clock), the Valiant (a stolid four-door that spawned the Chrysler Slant-Six still in use nearly 15 years later) and the Ford Falcon (an undistinguished sedan that was the mechanical basis for that unforgettable marketing coup, the Mustang). Now, these cars, which were introduced in 1959--1960, transmitted certain messages back to Detroit that were indelibly scribed in the brains of the (text continued on page 92) auto moguls; i.e., stark, cheap-o midget sedans would not sell in vast quantities, but gussied-up, two-door versions of the same vehicles would. Hence, the Corvair became successful after the sporty Monza reached the market and the Falcon made it only when it was given a full plastic-surgery rebuild and appeared masterfully disguised as the Mustang. This cycle is, of course, endemic to Detroit marketing, and all cars, large or small, tend to increase in size, weight, horsepower, price and general opulence as they proceed through their annual model changes.

Because of this phenomenon, Detroit plunged into the Seventies with its old compacts long since either in oblivion (Corvair) or increased in size (Tempest, Valiant, et al.) to a point where they bore no relationship to the small, economical imports that were seizing nearly 20 percent of the domestic market. Chevrolet then introduced the Vega, Ford the Pinto and American Motors the Gremlin in an attempt to check the increasing erosion of sales to VW, Datsun, Toyota, etc., and to carve out a new body of younger car owners not committed to the large, expensive automobiles embodied in the stereotyped American dream. The Pinto and the Vega were milestone vehicles for Detroit. Both were created using technology specifically intended for small cars, as opposed to the employment of big-car bits and pieces cobbled up to serve double duty. Moreover, they carried engines in the two-liter range that were positively microscopic by standard Motor City measurements and both cars were introduced with pledges that the designs would remain stable for at least five years, without the habitual, gimmick-laden annual model changes that had become an increasingly boring, costly, wasteful and redundant part of the domestic car scene.

If there was ever a time that Detroit accepted the legitimacy of small cars, it is now. After enjoying success with the original Pintos, Vegas and Gremlins, the auto biggies are ready to expand the market. Only Chrysler has remained aloof from building its own, home-grown mite; it chooses instead to import the Japanese-built Colt, a sturdy, enjoyable little machine; but most car experts believe that sooner or later. Chrysler must blow the dust off its pocketbook and cough up for a small car of its own. Ford was first to escalate the action with the Mustang II, announced as a late starter in its 1973 line-up. Now General Motors is in the fray with various permutations of Chevrolet's Monza 2 + 2 and American Motors is launching its tricky little Pacer. These cars are second-generation small vehicles, and while they are more expensive and more oriented toward the sportin' life than their predecessors, they have not been stretched and bloated in size. They remain of modest dimension, indicating that Detroit is committed to the notion that lean, compact-size machines are here to stay.

Certainly American Motors has made the longest and strongest commitment to small cars of all the domestic car builders, going so far as to announce in 1974 that it was killing its full-size Ambassador and devoting total production to compacts and intermediates. Of course, one of the cornerstones of its product line-up is the Gremlin, whose sliced-off body profile has become less weird to the American eye since its introduction and has enjoyed steady, profitable sales (at least until the great slump of 1974). But the Gremlin was a compromise for A.M.C., patched together from parts already in use on its Hornets and Rebels; and as A.M.C. product planners evaluated their line-up three years ago, they reasoned that a radical and original car was necessary to face the new social consciousness. "We knew things would never be the same in America following the revolution of the Sixties," says Jerry Meyers, the rangy, square-jawed vice-president of A.M.C.'s Product Group. "New kinds of cars would have to be created to meet the new consumer awareness of the Seventies, and this would require a major investment, with a design created from a clean piece of paper. After evaluating where we thought the market would be going, we decided that our new car would have to cater to the needs of the people who would be living in the great concentrations of population in the East, Midwest and West Coast." Meyers' "concept car," as it was coded, would have to meet a number of criteria: such as large interior room, as large as that found on present intermediate cars; small outside dimensions, a goal that had to be reached, even if the sacred Detroit phallus of the long hood had to be eliminated; light, economical power plants, either the new rotary engine or the company's smallish in-line six, but not a gas-guzzling V8 under any circumstances; plenty of accessibility, with two side doors and a rear-opening hatch for parcels; and solid protection for the passengers (integral roll bar) and the bodywork (full wraparound bumper).

Stylist Dick Teague, whose Gremlin, Matador and Hornet designs have been acclaimed for their aesthetics and their function (the stumpy little Gremlin, cobbled out of existing A.M.C. parts, cost a mere $5,000,000 to create peanuts in the car biz), sketched a shape for the concept car during an engineering meeting that generated instant enthusiasm. It was short and wide and vaguely egg-shaped, with a mere bump of a hood and massive areas of window glass. As it was refined, some said it took on a cursory resemblance to the famed Porsche 911 coupe. With a modest over-all length of 171.5 inches and a wheelbase of 100 inches (by comparison, the Volkswagen Beetle is 158.6 inches over-all, with a 94.5-inch wheelbase), Teague's design still provided full interior seating room for four adults. An interesting fillip involved the right or curbside door, which was four inches wider than its counterpart on the left, to aid entry and exit.

"We knew we had the proper kind of car for contemporary use a car that might remain keyed to the public's needs for perhaps ten years," says Meyers. "But there was a major decision to be made. If we were to produce the car without compromises, it meant a major investment. With the exception of our six-cylinder engine and transmission, no existing American Motors parts could be interchanged. Everything had to be designed and tooled from the ground up, a major undertaking for a small company like ours. Yet all our research indicated this was the car perfectly keyed to the Seventies." Based on Meyers' optimism, American Motors gambled on his concept car soon to be named Pacer and unloaded somewhere between $50,000,000 and $60,000,000 to launch the project. The result is one of the most strikingly original and daring automobiles to be produced by Detroit in a decade. Available at first only with A.M.C.'s six, with the rotary a possibility, the Pacer will be aimed at a broad spectrum of buyers, with prices ranging from quite cheap for the basic models to expensive for the fully loaded versions. For the first time in memory, American Motors is not aiming a product at a specific segment of the market, but it hopes to offer the Pacer in enough varieties so that it will appeal to a vast and diverse collection of car buyers. "I guess you could call this our trump card," says Teague, who, like his management colleagues, is aware of the financial devastation that will ensue if the public fails to love the Pacer as much as they do. "Win or lose, the one comfort we have is that we did our best not to compromise; that we tried to do it right." A noble thought, indeed.

If the Pacer represents a giant A.M.C. gamble, the new General Motors small cars are safer, more conservative bets. The Chevrolet Monza 2 + 2 and its twin sisters, the Buick Skyhawk and the Oldsmobile Starfire, must rank among the neatest-looking automobiles to appear in the past decade, and certainly presage a new generation of clean, lean G.M. cars of all sizes.

No matter what the name, the Monza 2 + 2 has the heart and soul of a Chevrolet, and its being suited up in the Buick and Oldsmobile colors is a simple story of General Motors energy-crisis jitters that will be recounted shortly. Its genesis can be traced to Chevrolet and the year 1971 A.D., when the executive types discovered that the stripped-down, charwoman-special Vegas were selling in minuscule quantities compared with the zoomier, more expensive G.T. versions. This caused them to devise a new (continued on page 166)The Big Squeeze(continued from page 92) automobile, code-named the H Special (the Vega is the H body in the G.M. line-up; if you are an automobile biggie, you don't refer to specific brands, you talk about A bodies, B bodies, C bodies, and so on). The H Special, as conceived in 1971, would have the kind of sporty appearance and performance to compete with such imports as the Datsun 240Z (now the 260Z), the Alfa Romeo Giulia, the BMW 2002, etc., and would most likely replace the aging Camaro in the Chevrolet line-up. While the original plans called for the H Special to be propelled by a turbo-charged or fuel-injected version of the Vega aluminum four-cylinder engine, the car was soon altered to carry the notorious Wankel rotary power plant a unit for which G.M. had unloaded perhaps $100,000,000 in behalf of licensing and development. The basic shape of the H Special was developed by a small team of Chevrolet stylists led by Henry Haga, who is now chief stylist for G.M.'s German Opel subsidiary. From there it was passed to the Italian studio of Pinin Farina for further refinement (the first time in recent history that G.M. has consulted outsiders of any kind in matters of styling). Farina's car returned to the U.S. with the basic lines of the present Monza, except that its rotary engine needed no hood bulge, its headlights were round and the door handles were concealed in the louvered window posts (a position deemed too costly by Chevrolet production experts). Its name plates identified the car as a Lynx, although the name was never seriously considered for the consumer version.

By the summer of 1973, several realities were becoming clear to Chevrolet: The rotary engine's lusty appetite for gasoline would prevent it from early mass-production usage, meaning conventional power plants would have to be used in the H Special. Moreover, it could not be produced on the same assembly lines with the Vega, although the two cars shared a vast number of common chassis pieces. Two alternate engines were chosen, one bad, one good; the lumpy, anemic, troublesome Vega four-banger and a 262-cubic-inch version of the famous Chevrolet "small-block" V8, first introduced in 1955 as a 265-incher and generally acknowledged in its 283-, 327- and 350-cubic-inch configurations as the greatest mass-produced engine in automotive history.

Chevrolet wanted to call the car the Chaparelle, in keeping with its long association with Texas race-car designer, builder and driver Jim Hall whose Chaparral racers had been such a big attraction in the major sports-car races of the Sixties. But negotiations with Hall over royalties for use of the Chaparral name even with it spelled differently broke down and Chevrolet discarded the idea and finally, in May 1974, within days of when production was to commence, decided to go with the Monza 2 + 2 appellation.

At that point, the industry was working its way out of the great energy scare of 1973--1974 and the G.M. management had shuffled its line-up to provide all its divisions with smaller cars to meet a balky, hard-eyed, price-conscious, fuel-pinching public. It had therefore decided that Chevrolet should share the Monza with the Buick and Oldsmobile divisions (an earlier decision had already assigned the Vega to Pontiac and Cadillac was hard at work on its own small luxury car), although the lateness of the hour would permit no individual styling changes other than a quick shift in name plates. In fact, time was so tight that all of the cars Monza, Skyhawk and Starfire would have to be produced on the same assembly line at Chevrolet's St. Theresa. Quebec, plant and the original 200,000-unit production would have to be split, with Chevrolet getting 100,000 Monzas and Buick and Oldsmobile each receiving 50,000 Skyhawks and Starfires.

In order to invest their car with some distinction. Buick engineers worked frantically to install their aged, 231-cubic-inch V6 engine, which had to be repurchased from A.M.C.'s Willys Jeep Division. This engine is also used in the Oldsmobile Starfire, due to the time crunch. Therefore, the public is buying Monzas, Starfires and Skyhawks that, except for simple plastic-tape trim and name plates and modest power-plant differences, are identical cars.

Somehow, once one gets past the superb styling of these vehicles, a kind of leaden disappointment sets in. These are automobiles born of inflation and the rising sloppiness found in contemporary assembly-line manufacture of all types. Much of the car, including the hubcaps, chrome trim, grillepieces, most of the interior and even some of the inner body structure, seems to have been fabricated from various compounds of plastic and vinyl. The rather narrow body produces a brand of elbow-rubbing coziness for the front-seat passengers (but with plenty of foot room); however, the rear seats are best used when folded down in the luggage-shelf configuration. Both the four-cylinder and the V6 engines are noisy and unsmooth, and only the 262-cubic-inch V8 despite its 230-pound weight penalty and cramped installation provides a proper level of performance for a car that can, in its most elaborate permutations (air conditioning, etc.), cost nearly $6000.

As it now reaches the public, the Monza-Skyhawk-Starfire is simply not up to the quality implied by its handsome exterior. But it is too early to make a complete judgment of the vehicle, especially when one considers that G.M. has had greater difficulties in adjusting to the fact of small cars than did its competition. Surely its resources are great enough to make the Monza, et al., into fine vehicles. Buick and Oldsmobile will no doubt produce versions more in keeping with their own product images, probably increasing both quality and price in the process, while Chevrolet is already talking about such variations on the theme as a five-speed transmission and a notchback coupe. These changes, plus the constant possibility of the rotary engine, give the Monza immense potential for the future. For G.M. and its ongoing adjustment to the new realities, count the Monza as a beginning, not an end.

If nothing else, it represents a quantum leap away from the Vega, replete with its rattles, its troublesome engine and its nagging problems with fender rust-outs. The 1975 Vega carries newly redesigned rear suspension, plus options for power steering and brakes, but it is essentially the same car that Chevrolet has offered in the past. Now Pontiac has entered the small-car scene with a thinly disguised Vega called the Astre. Aside from trim options (the SJ luxury and the GT sporty packages), the Astre is a Vega to the core. However, there are indications that Pontiac plans to resurrect the rugged little four-cylinder engine last used on the Chevy II in 1970 (a power plant many G.M. insiders believe was and is clearly superior to the present Vega four), which should markedly improve the vehicle.

If any of the major American manufacturers has exhibited a recent rapport with small cars, it is Ford. While it has maintained a certain fascination with the tacky i.e., triple opera windows and bogus Mercedes/Rolls-Royce grilles that have appeared on every vehicle in its line-up except school buses and dump trucks Ford's Mavericks, Pintos and Mustang IIs have been an over-all force for good in the American automotive market place. Certainly the Pinto, now that it is operating with its well-conceived 2300-c.c. overhead-cam four-cylinder as its base engine, coupled with an optional V6, is a solid, if somewhat unzippy economy automobile. (Lincoln-Mercury has recently entered the small-car campaign by tacking a Bobcat name plate on its version of the Pinto an identical machine if one can overlook the non sequitur of its bulky grillwork). But it is the Mustang II, now in its second year of production, that will spearhead Ford's march into the future. After the original Mustang had undergone several styling changes, it had, by 1971, become a bloated, overweight offspring of the pleasant, sparsely styled little coupe that had captured America seven years earlier.

Ford introduced the Mustang II, noting that its interior space was similar to that of its predecessor, but its over-all external dimensions were 19 inches shorter. The car had been originally intended as a rather pretty three-door fastback, but an eleventh-hour decision, based on strong responses in a San Francisco market-research project, prompted the company to produce a companion notchback version. It was a brilliant move, because, of the 296,000 Mustang IIs sold in the 1974 model year, 60 percent were notchbacks (though its choppy, severely angled shape made it appear to some as if it were a collection of body panels scavenged from several different automobiles).

Therefore, it is the notchback that has become the basic, bread-and-butter version of the Mustang II and the model upon which Ford has lavished such gaucheries as a silver half-vinyl roof, cranberry-crushed-velour upholstery, etc. However, it is the fastback, with its third door and its highly usable rear-deck area, that remains the most functional and enjoyable of the Mustang IIs. Now that Ford's doughty little 302-cubic-inch V8 has been wedged into the Mustang II (requiring a slightly modified hood and larger grille), the car has taken a giant leap toward becoming a legitimate small American G.T. Unlike its G.M. rival, the Monza, the Mustang II fastback has a sturdy, well-manufactured feel (a sensation enhanced both by the use of quality materials that can boost the price to over $6000 and by the ample use of body insulation that brings the car's weight to over 3000 pounds). While its performance will hardly make grown men tremble, the 302 does provide enough torque to move the car along at a brisk pace. A three-speed automatic is presently the only transmission available (a four-speed manual is on its way), but acceleration is adequate, even with the rather heavy chassis and an engine tamed by the stringent 1975 emission standards. Interior appointments are quite comfortable, although, like the Monza's, the Mustang II's rear seat is better suited to hauling luggage than to hauling people. At best, it is a car for two adults and two children; but it can carry that capacity load with a substantial quotient of comfort and fun.

Yes, we are moving ahead. Social conscience seems to be descending on Detroit in the form of smaller, more efficient automobiles. The car moguls are learning that small is not a synonym for stark. If this trend can be pursued with enthusiasm, the American environment is bound to improve, thanks to the over-all elimination of waste the kind of excessive waste embodied in giant machines that gobble metals and rubber in their construction, fuels and lubricants in their operation and valuable space by their very presence. And, what's more, people who buy this new generation of small cars may begin to understand what European car freaks have been saying for years: Driving an automobile can be fun, after all.