9781422277065

AMC had their own troubles by the mid-1980s that led to the company being acquired by Chrysler, but the problems weren’t so much to do with poor sales. The Jeep was more popular than ever. Gasoline in the United States was fairly cheap, and people were starting to purchase bigger cars. The newest player in the American car game couldn’t keep up. AMC’s troubles were due to a perfect storm of technical and management problems. The company had trouble getting ideas from the drawing board to the assembly line. They had aging plants that had not been updated since the Nash days. The company procedures for re-tooling a factory were time consuming and outdated. So, while the Jeep was selling great, AMC’s vast compact car line was floundering.

A previous and unrelated American Motors Corporation existed between the years 1920 and 1924. Ironically, Louis Chevrolet, one of the founders of Chevrolet motors, headed this company. This American Motors Corporation made cars in New Jersey and, through a series of mergers with numerous companies, ended up a part of a company called Amalgamated Motors. Amalgamated Motors has been lost to history. It is unknown if they ever made a single car. The only remains of Amalgamated Motors are stock certificates that sell among collectors for around $80. Other countries also saw the rise and fall of well-known brands. In Sweden, postwar carmaker Saab rolled its first automobile model, the Saab 92, off the line in 1949. The company produced more than a million cars over the next

Under the control of AMC, which acquired Jeep in 1970, Jeep made models like this 1980 Jeep Scrambler.

This 1983 Saab 900 GLE is one of a million 900s the Swedish carmaker produced between 1978 and 1998.

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