The Milwaukee AMC plant that also supplied bodies and sub-assemblies to Kenosha Main was the most notorious for workers showing up drunk and openly fighting on the shop floor. George Romney famously visited the plant and knocked heads together in 1961.

By the 1980s, it was for sure.

That God-forsaken timesuck of a movie has to qualify as one of the highest talent-to-suckage ratios in film history. So much talent on that cast. So unwatchably horrendous. 10  years after I rented that atrocity on Netflix, I’m still mad as hell at the 2 hours of my life I wasted on it.

I have read accounts - I forget from where - that said that the Jeep engineering team in particular so enjoyed working together and feared being broken up and reassigned within Chrysler that, as soon as the buyout was announced, they worked around the clock for 15 days in 1987 to get the ZJ concept complete in time…

According to “The Last American CEO,” Chrysler initially tried to negotiate to just buy Jeep from Renault. Renault insisted that they would only agree to sell Jeep if the rest of AMC went with it. So Chrysler negotiated the purchase price down, Renault countered with guarantees to buy 250,000 PRV V6 engines. The…

Sorta. AMC didn’t close the Lakefront plant until 1985 or 86, I believe. And Kenosha Main didn’t close until December 1988. So it would have been after the timeline in That ‘70s Show, but as you say, they probably gained inspiration from AMC.

True. But they ended up with a lot more than that. AMC’s design and engineering teams were experts at doing more with less and Chrysler basically blew up their entire product development structure in the early ‘90s to adopt the AMC method, which saved the company lots of time and money in the vehicle development…

Absolutely fascinating. This video would have been up in the year or two before they converted the plant to Renault Alliance/Encore production and the Spirit, Concord, and Eagle tooling was transferred to their lower-capacity Brampton, Ontario, Canada plant.

The 1985 Buick Riviera...

GM, Ford, and Chrysler built garbage for passenger cars at the same exact time the Japanese and Germans were not only advancing the game, but doing so with higher quality and reliability than the American marques were. Too many loyal American-brand customers were stung by poor quality, poor reliability, poor dealer…

When GM announced they were killing the Chevy Sonic a few months ago, everyone said this. But no one noticed that the Trax actually gets better gas mileage than the Sonic.

Sounds like a motorcycle is the right vehicle for you, then.

You don’t want life-saving airbags, ABS, and a crash structure that won’t fold like a cheap tent when anything bigger hits it?

Because you’d get murdered in an accident. Small cars are crash tested against deformable barriers that sit at CUV height, just like all other cars are. That means belt lines have to be raised to give better crash protection and better mounting points for airbags. Same with hood lines, which need to accommodate more…

Not really. The Fiat 500 and Smart ForTwo are also in the Miata’s ballpark.

Also, a 2018 Mitsubishi Mirage is right at the 2,000lb mark.

I think you mean subcompacts, not compacts. The curb weight of a base 2018 Fiat 500 Pop 5-speed is 2,366lbs according to Fiat. A 1990 Suzuki Swift GTi with a 4cyl 1.3L engine has roughly the same exterior dimensions. I’m comparing the GTi model because it came with a 4cyl engine rather than the base model’s Inline-3:

So is the new X2.

Alfa Romeo’s BEST year ever in the US before they pulled out of the market in 1995 was about 6,700 units sold between 3 models (GTV, Spider, and Milano/75) in 1986. Even if the 4C were going away completely - only the coupe is - 25k units in one year in the US is still a historic success for Alfa.

My guess is that some of this is necessary, while most of it is a ploy to extract more concessions from the unions. GM hasn’t said they’re shuttering these plants. Just that they’re “unallocated” after 2019. And that’s when GM is scheduled to begin negotiations w/the UAW on the next contract.