1962 Rambler American 400 Convertible
UPDATE: Reader Paul Perkins Photoshopped my car show pictures and improved the image quality. Thanks, Paul!
I don't remember ever seeing a Rambler American before. Nobody in our extended family drove a Rambler. The only Ramblers I specifically remember from childhood had right-hand drive and were used by mail carriers. Government-issue fleet vehicles are not exactly the stuff of pistonhead passion!
So, when I saw this nicely-restored little '62 Rambler at the Cleveland Auto Show--in the old-school exhibit hall, of course--I was a little surprised by my reaction.
I wanted to take the darned thing home with me.
The Rambler American was the smallest car American Motors Corporation produced in 1962. It is an evolved version of the original "Little Nash Rambler" of 1950--the one made famous by the novelty song "Beep Beep"--and the history of it is rather fascinating.
The Nash Rambler was built on a 100-inch wheelbase--that is to say, it was roughly the size of today's Toyota Matrix. Though much smaller than the typical postwar American super-dreadnought sedan, the Rambler was given a high level of trim and amenities. The result was a car that was handy and economical, but not cheap.
Several other independent manufacturers rolled out their own compacts, with varying degrees of success: the Kaiser Henry J was stripped down to keep the price low, and came off as cheap rather than economical; the Hudson Jet was superbly engineered and equipped, but awkwardly styled and priced too high; the Willys "Aero" series was moderately successful at first, but was discontinued in 1955 when Willys' parent company Kaiser abandoned the US automobile market. The "Big Three" stayed away from compacts entirely, and imports weren't much of a factor at the time, so Nash and its successor, AMC, had the compact market pretty much to itself for most of the 1950s.
The Rambler was restyled in 1954, the year when Nash merged with Hudson to create AMC. After the merger, it was sold as both a "Nash Rambler" and a badge-engineered "Hudson Rambler." In 1956, AMC came out with a third-generation Rambler on a 108-inch platform. When a new platform is introduced, the tooling for the old version is normally discarded or recycled, but AMC saved the tooling for the 100-inch wheelbase Rambler. This proved to be a wise move.
In 1957, in an economy sliding into recession, AMC sold more than 109,000 Ramblers, but only 10,000 or so of the “senior” Nash models, and a mere 3,500 bigger cars with the Hudson brand name. Concluding that the name “Rambler” had more brand equity than either “Nash” or “Hudson,” AMC president George Romney decreed that all AMC cars sold in the 1958 model year would be Ramblers. The 108-inch wheelbase Rambler became the "Rambler Six" and, with a V-8 engine, the "Rambler Rebel;" the full-sized Nash Ambassador was re-labeled the "Ambassador V-8 by Rambler."
Reasoning that in a slow economy, a car which was even smaller and less expensive than the already small and inexpensive Rambler Six might have some drawing power, AMC pulled the tooling for the two-door '54-55 Rambler sedan out of storage, changed the grille pattern and reshaped the rear wheel well, and reintroduced it as the 1958 "Rambler American." It was a pretty low-risk move, since the engineering and tooling had been paid for long ago.
AMC was the only manufacturer to see its 1958 sales increase over 1957. The revived American accounted for 30,640 sales, or just under 20% of AMC's total output. AMC revived the station wagon version in 1959, and total sales of Rambler Americans nearly tripled, to 91,491 units. In 1960, after the four-door sedan was reintroduced, AMC sold 120,603 Americans.
The American was restyled in 1961. The platform underneath was essentially unchanged from 1950, and the engine was the same sturdy 90-horsepower straight-six flathead used in the 1950 original. The new sheetmetal followed the rectangle-with-rounded-corners style also found on the contemporary Corvair, Lark, and Falcon. It was slightly shorter in overall length than the '58-'60 version, but a more space-efficient design increased passenger and cargo room. The new lineup included a hardtop coupe and a snappy convertible.
The one at the Cleveland Auto Show was a '62 Rambler American 400--"400" being what AMC called the top trim level that year. The sheetmetal was unchanged from 1961, but the "400" had a new overhead valve version of the straight six making 125 horsepower. That level of power a 2,692-pound car is no fire-breathing terror of the dragstrip, but the straight-line performance would have been good enough for an "economy car" in those days.
This particular example is equipped with an automatic--a Borg-Warner unit which AMC called "Flash-O-Matic." Love those mid-century brand names!
The car is within a couple of inches of my GTI in all its major dimensions, but the driving dynamics of that 1950-vintage suspension, with its leaf-sprung live-axle rear end, are probably a world away from what the VW is capable of. There's no ABS, GPS, EFI, ECM, iPod adapter, or anything electronic beyond a transistor AM radio with a single speaker. The styling isn't flashy, but it's neat and clean and has a certain blue-collar honesty about it that I find attractive. I wouldn't take this car canyon-carving, but for summer ice cream runs with the top down, you could do a lot worse.
The ad and the photo of the 1958 American came from the archive at John's Old Car & Truck Pictures.
--Cookie the Dog's Owner