Word: cars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CODDLE YOUR CAR. Cars get the blahs, just as people do in the cruelest months. The battery is the auto's tenderest part: in freezing temperatures, it loses up to 50% of its power. To keep it happy, the car should be garaged at night, with a blanket over the hood or a warming watch light hung inside. To keep the battery charged, the driver should stay in second gear for as long as possible at speeds under 50 m.p.h.; when the car is in high gear, the generator does not produce enough energy to beef up the down...
...raised from $225,000 a year to $245,840, Shareholder Harry Korba asked, "Why did you not have the decency to tell the board you would refuse the increase?" The dapper Chapin replied, "We are not going to discuss my cost of living." Another shareholder, Jerry Fylonenko, said that car buyers he had talked to variously described A.M.C.'s squat, glassy Pacer as "a fish bowl, a candy machine or a pregnant roller skate." Overall, though, the mood of the meeting was less one of anger than of sad resignation. Said Shareholder Bert Sampson: "The stock...
What has happened to A.M.C. so far is that in all the 23 years since it was created by the merger of Nash-Kelvinator* and Hudson Motor Car Co., the company has never been able to find a secure niche in the auto market. It prospered in the late 1950s by bringing out the first U.S. compact, the Rambler, but then lost much of its market share when General Motors, Ford and Chrysler started making compacts too. In the mid-1960s it tried to compete against the Big Three by offering a wider range of car sizes and lost disastrously...
...model run, Chapin plans some changes. A.M.C. will introduce a new luxury compact to compete with such cars as the Ford Granada and Dodge Aspen, and will give the Pacer a peppier engine. The Gremlin already comes with an option of a fuel-miserly four-cylinder power plant. The company, Chapin told shareholders, remains committed to small cars; he prophesied that the U.S. "will be a small-car nation by the 1980s...
Other parts of A.M.C.'s business have been doing well. The Jeep division is setting sales records, and at year's end AM General had a huge backlog of orders for buses. As for passenger cars, cost cutting has reduced A.M.C.'s breakeven point, some observers estimate, to fewer than 300,000 autos a year. The company may be able to sell at least that many if predictions come true that total car sales in the U.S. this year will hit 11 million-but in the past few weeks that has become a giant "if." American Motors...