Safety gradually inched its way up legislators’ lists of priorities. The world’s first car to feature three-point seat belts, in 1959, had predictably been a Volvo; eight years later, the British government made front seat belts mandatory. Yet it was another decade before the US followed suit; even then, during the 1980s the Reagan administration consistently delayed the introduction of seat belts. Meanwhile, as early as 1967 America had become, for the first time in sixty years, a net importer of automotive products.
Sensing a change in consumer priorities, American car styling became more apologetic. By 1962 Dagmars has disappeared, and fins had vanished from all but the luxury marques of Imperial and Cadillac. For 1963, even Chrysler’s Imperials, restyled by ex-Ford stylist Elwood Engel, were shorn of their decorative excesses, although modest fins (puny things when compared with the soaring appendages devised by Harley Earl and Virgil Exner) lingered on at Cadillac until 1964. In place of the bright hues of the cars of the 1950s and early 1960s, brown, bronze and beige tones now became all the rage, while tacky black or brown ‘vinyl roofs’ implied a convertible configuration which could not in fact be delivered.
Ford’s refreshed Lincoln Continental – extremely long and low, yet also soberly plain and rectilinear – heralded the direction of things to come. The last version of the Continental II had been, in critic Paul Wilson’s words, ‘a nineteen-foot monster with sides creased and wrinkled like the hide of a rhino’. The Continental III of 1961 matched the Kennedy era: sleek, smooth and quietly confident, with no flashy or unnecessary ornamentation. Chrome was kept to a bare minimum and there were no fins at all. It was a classic model which was bought by corporate fat cats and heads of state alike.2
The Continental III came to reflect an age in more ways than one. Just before 12.30 p.m. on 22 November 1963, an open-top Continental III carrying John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States, slowly turned left directly in front of the old Book Depository in Dallas, Texas. This particular Continental was 21 feet long, covered in armour plating, and weighed in at a hefty 7,822 pounds. It also had two removable roofs – neither of which was in use that day; Kennedy had ordered that the detachable glasshouse should be taken off since the weather was fine. As the car passed the Book Depository and continued down Elm Street, shots were fired at the president. As Kennedy waved to the crowds on his right a bullet entered his upper back, penetrated his neck, and exited from his throat. As Jackie Kennedy climbed on to the capacious trunk rear of the Continental (she later had no recollection of doing so), a secret serviceman jumped on to the back of the car, pushed her back into her seat, and clung to the vehicle as it sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Shortly after the Lincoln arrived, doctors pronounced the president dead. Vice President Johnson – who had been riding two cars behind Kennedy in the motorcade, in a closed saloon – took the oath of office as thirty-sixth president on board Air Force One, just before it departed from Dallas’s inappropriately named Love Field.
American confidence in the automobile’s invulnerability, wavering in the wake of Kennedy’s death, received a further blow with the publication of Ralph Nader’s 1965 polemic Unsafe at Any Speed. Nader damned the US car industry’s pursuit of profit, blatant disregard for safety and indifference to increasing concerns about pollution with a vehemence that no critic of the American auto had ever employed before. Nader’s text unequivocally pointed the finger at the automobile as one of the principal delinquents of the age, declaiming: ‘For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people’. He cited the US Department of Commerce’s 1959 estimate that fifty-one thousand Americans would be killed on the road by 1975 – suggesting that this target was liable to be reached ten years early – and calculated that US highway accidents now cost the nation $8 billion in property damage each year. He was also way ahead of his time in denouncing the car’s ‘power to pollute’. His principal complaint, though, was that the powerful vested interests of Detroit had made the automobile immune from criticism. Nader alleged that the car ‘has remained the only transportation vehicle to escape being called to meaningful public account’, and derided the motoring media as craven and subservient to the manufacturers.
Nader’s principal target was one unfortunate model: GM’s Chervolet Corvair. Developed hurriedly as a response to the huge success of the VW Beetle in America, the Corvair’s poor handling (partly caused by the omission of a $15 stabilizing bar) resulted in a tendency to flip over when turning sharply at speed. Nader’s book called Corvairs ‘one-car accidents’, and by the time it appeared GM was facing 103 lawsuits from Corvair owners. Even Chevrolet chief ‘Bunkie’ Knudsen demanded that the car be redesigned after his niece was seriously injured in one. (As early as 1959 Ford had come to the same conclusion when its test driver lost control of an early Corvair at the company’s track.) Yet Nader noted that GM had to date done nothing about these apparent failings: ‘bureaucratic rigidness and the abject worship of that bitch-goddess, cost reduction’, had encouraged them just to sit tight. This seemed to support his theory that modern car makers ‘put appearance above safety’ – a clear dig at the fifties cult of the omnipotent car stylist.
GM responded to Nader’s accusations not by remodelling the car but by attempting to muffle the messenger. The company commissioned private detectives to try to uncover evidence of his presumed (but actually non-existent) communist or homosexual leanings. But the cat was out of the bag. At the annual GM shareholders meeting of May 1965, Nader ally Dr Seymour Charles publicly demanded recalls of all 1960–3 Corvairs. (GM officers tried to stifle the debate by asking Dr Charles to talk to them privately after the meeting.) In the subsequent senatorial hearings, GM’s top executives showed a worrying lack of knowledge about their own products, and had no answer to Senator Robert Kennedy’s telling comparison of the GM safety budget for 1964, of $1.25 million, with that year’s corporate profits of $1.7 billion. Eventually, GM president James Roche, a colourless accountant who had none of the vision or presence of Alfred Sloan, was forced to apologize to Nader before a Senate subcommittee, and to pay him $425,000 in damages. In 1969 the Corvair itself was finally withdrawn. Sloan’s successors had successfully disposed of much of his carefully wrought business philosophy, eroding the much-vaunted ladder system of market segmentation and making a nonsense of GM’s internal demarcations. The result was, as evidenced in Roche’s lacklustre response to Congress, a lack of corporate leadership and conviction about how to react to the changing marketplace.
Nader’s assault on Motor City unleashed a torrent of criticism of the unsafe nature and ecological irresponsibility of the modern American car. As Stephen Bayley has observed: ‘Nader made American cars appear both dangerous and ridiculous.’ Now everyone felt able to voice their concerns. The visual pyrotechnics of designers such as Earl, Exner and Mitchell only served, observers now dared to suggest, as increasingly irrelevant facades for the Big Three’s complacency and indifference. Historian Lewis Mumford, the first part of whose magisterial Myth of the Machine appeared in 1967, declared that the American auto was ‘the result of a secret collaboration between the beautician and the mortician’, and that ‘according to sales and accident statistics both have reason to be satisfied’.
Nader, Mumford and their likes destroyed the confidence of the US auto industry – so much so that, in the opinion of many motor critics, the Big Three never made another great car during the next thirty years. An indication of the muddled thinking of the late sixties can be seen by comparing Bill Mitchell’s taut, compact Corvette Sting Ray of 1963 with the fate of his Buick Riviera. The 1963 Riviera was a sleek, low, stylish, hard-top, twodoor coupé, which changed the Buick division’s reputation for stodgy family cars almost overnight. Its pronounced side fenders and flared waist were the look of things to come; indeed, designer Sergio Pininfarina called the Riviera ‘one of the most beautiful American cars ever built’. However, three years later not on
ly did GM consign Alfred Sloan’s corporate philosophy to the wastebasket by allowing the Pontiac division to launch a downmarket rival to the Riviera, the Pontiac Grand Prix hard-top. The Riviera itself was pumped up to ludicrous proportions, with Mitchell and his team now converted to the belief that bloated was invariably better. Longer, wider and more distended, the Riviera was soon more powerful, too; in 1967 it was provided with Buick’s impressive new V-8 engine. Four years later, Bill Mitchell’s redesign completely sacrificed the car’s sporty image and by the end of the 1970s the Riviera, like the Ford Thunderbird, was almost indistinguishable from its more commonplace rivals.
Even more overblown than the later Rivieras was the Oldsmobile Toronado of 1966. A ‘full-size personal car’, equipped with hidden headlights and a Camaro-like fastback roof, aimed squarely at the Thunderbird market, the Toronado was, like the original Mustang, a twodoor coupé. But there resemblances ended. With vast overhangs at front and rear, and projecting, potentially lethal, side ‘guards’ either side of the front grille, the Toronado measured an astonishing 17½ feet and weighed almost 2 tonnes. It shared a platform and some parts with the 1966 Riviera but was far heftier – so much so that Oldsmobile soon had to install a ‘built-in assist mechanism’ to enable less sprightly owners to open the all-toosolid doors. Passenger space was, ironically, minimal – partly in order to make space for the gigantic, 7 litre Super Rocket V-8 engine (which was enlarged to a whopping 7.4 litres in 1968). But, aside from its sheer straight-line speed, the car’s overall performance was dismal. Its braking was inadequate (it was only fitted with feeble drum brakes), its fuel consumption was astronomical, its transmission was unreliable, and its inability to take corners gave a new meaning to understeer.1 Even GM admitted it may have gone too far. Sales of the model fell by 50 per cent in its second year, and in 1970 the Toronado – which Oldsmobile was now boasting was the largest frontwheel-drive car in the world – was repackaged as a cut-price Cadillac.
The Toronado was not the only swollen disappointment of the period. Ford’s sleek, spare Mustang ‘pony car’ of a decade earlier had now become, as Lee Iacocca himself later lamented, ‘a fat pig’. Iacocca, by now president of the Ford Motor Company, had ordered a smaller, more fuel-efficient Mustang for 1974. But this new Mustang II was based on the platform of the discredited Ford Pinto in order to pitch it against smaller, imported sports coupés such as Japan’s Toyota Celica and the Anglo-German Ford Capri (itself a derivative of the first Mustang). And although the new Mustang was smaller than its illustrious predecessor, it weighed 600 pounds more than the original. Moreover, its performance was barely mediocre, while its body styling was decidedly uninspired. With the brand seriously devalued, sales plummeted. It was not until 2005 that an attempt was made to recapture the stylistic clues of Eugene Bordinat’s classic original.
In the year in which the stylistically stunted Mustang II was launched, Ford also thoughtlessly disposed of their best styling asset. In 1974 the motor giant closed the Vignale styling workshop of Ghia, in which they had bought a controlling stake as recently as 1970. Ford continued to exploit the Ghia name (suggesting that this had been the only reason they had bought the company), but gradually whittled down the number of Ghia staff on the payroll; by 2001 there were only five.
The failure to exploit Ghia’s potential indicated that all was not well at Ford. Much of this was due to the increasingly erratic behaviour of its president – a familiar story to anyone acquainted with the firm’s history. Had Henry Ford II retired in 1970, he would have been hailed as the man who saved the company in the postwar era. As it was, his last decades were mired in personal and corporate wrangling.
By 1960, when he casually disposed of his financial wizard, Ernie Breech, Henry Ford II had already begun to resemble his autocratic grandfather. He now preferred to run the Ford Motor Company, as Henry Ford himslef had done, more as a personal fiefdom than as a vast corporate enterprise. The legacy of his careful nurturing of the media during the late 1940s and 1950s was carelessly squandered when he abandoned his wife, Anne, to conduct a very public affair with the lively, outspoken Italian divorcée Cristina Vettore (whom he finally married in 1965). Notoriously touchy about any reference to his grandfather, he also sought to impose his own imprint on Detroit and, by implication, to eclipse the achievement of Henry Ford I. In 1971 he commissioned downtown Detroit’s biggest-ever building project: John Portman’s Renaissance Center, consisting of shops, offices and what was at the time the tallest hotel in the world. Finally completed in 1977, the Center’s five giant towers dominated the heart of Motor City. By the early 1980s, however, many of the Renaissance Center’s shops lay eerily empty, while Ford was defaulting on the interest on the loans negotiated to build the site. In 1996 Ford cheerfully sold the complex to GM, which, in 2004, optimistically moved its world headquarters to the site. Meanwhile, Henry II had tired of his combative Italian wife and begun an affair with photographic model Kathy DuRoss, who was one of the attractive young women the company employed to help market cars in showrooms and at conventions. DuRoss and Ford were finally married in Nevada, away from the prying eyes of Detroit’s motor executives, in 1980.
With the national media were more interested in Henry II’s colourful private life than in the company’s new model line-up, Ford took its eyes off the ball. As a result, the firm whose fortunes had been founded on the small, durable, no-nonsense Model T found itself outmanoeuvred by a far smaller rival whose presence it had barely acknowledged.
With the American public increasingly preoccupied with the need to cut car emissions and reduce fuel consumption, it was clear that a new generation of economy cars – which by the mid-1970s were being referred to as ‘subcompacts’ or ‘superminis’ – was required. But the first American subcompact did not come from any of the Big Three. The AMC Gremlin of 1970 looked like a bug whose rear end had been sawn off; but it was economical, cheap and practical. AMC called it its ‘bold and innovative approach’ to the dual threat of increasing gas prices and fuel-efficient Japanese and German imports. The company did not even seem worried about the negative connotations of the car’s brand name. Time magazine noted that, while Webster’s Dictionary defined a gremlin as ‘a small gnome held to be responsible for malfunction of equipment’, American Motors preferred to describe it as ‘a pal to its friends and an ogre to its enemies’. Released six months ahead of its domestic competitors, AMC’s ‘import-fighter’ outperformed its adversaries even when they did appear. It rode, accelerated, and handled better, and offered more space than all its rivals, including the Volkswagen, and was more frugal with fuel than all but the VW. It also suffered far fewer recalls than its US challengers. In 1973 Automobile Quarterly judged that ‘the Gremlin offers outstanding performance for an economy car and excellent fuel mileage’. And, like the Volkswagen, it certainly looked distinctive. AMC’s chief designer, Richard Teague, was so proud of his creation that he told Motor Trend magazine that to compare the Gremlin to the Beetle was like ‘comparing a Ford GT40 to the Hindenburg’.
Richard Teague started his working life as a child star in film comedy shorts, usually playing the role of a girl, ‘Dixie Duval’. However, when he was only six his mother’s car was hit by a drunk driver, leaving young Richard without the sight of one eye and his mother an invalid. A year later, his father was killed in another automobile crash – also caused by an inebriated driver. Shrugging off his traumatic childhood, Richard became a technical illustrator for Northrop and then Kaiser, before joining GM in 1948 and Packard in 1951. Having been made chief stylist at Packard, on the firm’s forced merger with Studebaker he and his entire staff were recruited by Exner at Chrysler. Two years later the restive Teague left for AMC, where he achieved wonders on minuscule budgets. His last work for the corporation was the splendid 1984 Jeep Cherokee XJ, which Automobile magazine later lauded as one of the ‘20 greatest cars of all time’.
Given General Motors’ immense resources, its answer to Teague’s diminutive Gr
emlin, the Chevrolet Vega of 1971, should have been far superior to AMC’s subcompact. But it wasn’t. Styled like a sports car with a fastback roof, it looked suspiciously like a Fiat. Even its name sounded Italian. But its reputation for poor reliability, rusting bodywork and perpetual recalls dogged it throughout its brief, six-year lifespan. Engines stalled, brakes failed, gear-shift levers fell off, exhausts set fire to the petrol tank, and water leaks were legion. In July 1972 GM recalled 95 per cent of Vegas because their rear axles were, astonishingly, ‘too short’.1 Part of the problem was that the factory where the Vega was made, GM’s brand-new plant at Lordstown, Pennsylvania, was plagued with strikes. By early 1972, when Chevrolet management was claiming that Lordstown workers were deliberately sabotaging Vegas, the workforce (97 per cent of whom had just voted for an all-out strike) replied that they didn’t have to: the car fell apart without their help. Lordstown had been touted as the ‘fastest assembly line in the world’, but its staff conditions were little better than those at Ford’s Rouge River plant in 1913: penalties for transgressing rules were severe, a table showing workers’ ‘demerits’ was publicly displayed, and there was still no worker participation at senior level. The factory did boast the latest Unimate robotic painting technology; unfortunately, the untested robots often lost control and spray-painted the wrong bits. In 1977 GM finally put the Vega out of its misery.
Even more notorious than the Vega was Ford’s response to the Gremlin, the Pinto. Lee Iacocca had been involved in the Pinto’s development as vice president (a fact that he conveniently airbrushed out of his self-serving memoir of 1985), and in his original brief for the project he demanded a car that weighed no more than 2,000 pounds and cost no more than $2,000. However, the search for savings encouraged the Pinto’s designers to cut some dangerous corners. To save weight, the rear was shortened, exposing the fuel tank to the possibility of explosion in the event of a rear-end collision. The Pinto’s first, highly publicized, victim was Mrs Lilian Gray, a Californian housewife who was burned to death in a fuel tank fire in May 1972 when her Pinto was rear-ended by another car. Her passenger, teenager Richard Grimshaw, survived but was horrifically scarred by extensive burns. Motor critics were soon cruelly dubbing the Pinto ‘the barbecue that seats four’.
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