Who could forget The Pacer?!
Saw this article and thought of it immediately.
Rode in one once. Visibility out was indeed quite excellent.
Great concept car overall. Just not very well executed.
the Pacer was probably a better car than the Tesla is. You could work on it in your driveway, and the parts were nominally priced.
“Who could forget The Pacer?!”
I almost bought one of those back in 1979, I needed a car real bad. Then my cousin sold me his ‘69 Camaro.
I wonder if that stock photo of the Pacer had a caption to it. Such as “Son, I can’t believe you went ahead and brought home that piece of junk. Four years of college down the drain!”
Seriously though I owned a ‘76 Baby Blue Pacer. Bought it for $800 cash. I just needed a running car to get me through the summer.
That September, I drove it to the nearest junkyard, removed the plates, and just left it there with the keys in the ignition. I still catch grief about that car today!
Our Boy Scout troop leader had a 1977 AMC Pacer and I rode in the back seat all the way to and from a campout at Death Valley in what basically amounted to a greenhouse on wheels without air conditioning. Zero shade from the burning sun. We were roasting in the back seat so he opened up the driver’s door window to “let in air” that was like a blast furnace. The only thing we had to drink was warm garden hose water from our canteens.
The car was so loaded down with camping crap that the wheezy Pacer could only do 50mph which was fine with the troop leader since the Nixon limit was 55mph at the time and because he was a government lawyer he was a strict law-abiding ding dong. Honestly, he only kept the scout troop going so that his son could make Eagle Scout for whatever political future his father was planning for him. They both rode in the front seat talking about the law while dad quizzed his son on various aspects of legal theory.
I remember being so annoyed with the driver’s constant manual shifting on the uphill stretches using the 3-speed manual. Downshifting just made a bunch of noise and no extra power. The whole drive there and back was nothing but the driver constantly shifting the gears (”RRrrRRRR!!! RrrRRR-RRRR!!!”) while we sat dehydrating like strips of beef jerky from the sun beating down and gale force hot wind blowing onto our faces from the open window while they chattered away in the front seat about tort law and other nonsense to my 11 year old ears. I was licking the cap of my canteen trying to get the last drops of moisture out of it. Other lucky kids got to ride in the assistant scout leader’s diesel truck that made it to the campsite and back home hours before we did.
What a miserable vehicle. Whenever I see an AMC Pacer I’m transported right back to that miserable trip I took ages ago. After I graduated high school and read that American Motors Corporation went belly-up, I said “Good”.
