There’s some weird stuff out there today, but let’s get to the pop culture stuff first.
One of the world’s ugliest and most unappealing cars is going on the auction block by way of Barrett-Jackson next week — and it could fetch a ridiculous price.
Yes, it’s the Wayne’s World car.
The original vehicle used in the 1992 flick, a 1976 AMC Pacer, has been restored as close as possible to “movie condition,” meaning no heater or AC, AutoGuide reports. Why no creature comforts? The camera crew needed a place to mount the cameras, but bidders do get speaker boxes in the rear wheel wells and a hole in the roof to mount a licorice dispenser.
All other bits — body, bumper, wheels, seats, dash and headliner — have been refurbished. Wayne and Garth never had it so good. Like yacht rock and disco, the Pacer is a tacky relic of a tacky time, but it’s part of the American Experience.
In other news, Jaguar Land Rover has chosen Noodle, “member” of the virtual band Gorillaz, as its global ambassador.
Gorillaz, a pretty decent band that peaked in the early-to-mid 2000s (at least in North America), features animated, vaguely simian Brits with awful teeth as its members. Noodle is the girl member, so there’s a fair bit of demographic calculation going on here on JLR’s part.
The automaker hopes to use the appointment of a person who isn’t real to draw attention to the UK’s manufacturing skills gap.
Kids these days — they’re just not interested in British factories anymore.
JLR’s Formula E team, Panasonic Jaguar Racing, plans to do the same. Maybe British Battery will replace British Steel — who knows?
Back in Detroit, Ford is allowing visitors to venture deeper into its historic Piquette Plant than ever before — but there’s a catch. You have to hunt ghosts. Visitors with weak bladders, please, for the sake of fellow guests, head to the big museum in Dearborn instead.
The Detroit Free Press reports that ghost tours will take place on October 23 and 30 in the birthplace of the Model T. Opened in 1904, the plant remains open to the public, but getting your name on one of these tours allows you access to some off-limits areas.
It could be a good opportunity to poke around in a respectful manner, and you’ll get cider and donuts as added perks. With any luck, a nightmarish vision will materialize — the front of a ’58 Edsel, for example?
[Images: imcdb.org; Ronnie Schreiber/The Truth About Cars]
I expected many things at quarter-to-five EST on a Friday… but I would have never expected this article. (Steph, I mean that in a good way.)
There are a number of Pacers running around here in central Indiana, inspired by fandom of the local NBA team.
I do not find them one of the world’s ugliest and most unappealing cars.
“I do not find them one of the world’s ugliest and most unappealing cars.”
Agree! They’re alien-elegant and The First Wide Small Car! Also, the last :-(
The reason they’re the last Small Wide Car was apparent the second year they were sold: a large percentage of them had scrapes all along the right side, especially the back of the right front fender just ahead of the door. Many drivers couldn’t gauge how wide they were in tight spaces. There’s a lot to be said for slab-sided cars, though “cute” isn’t one of them.
The Pacer was originally not going to be so pudgy. Management was fearful of possible upcoming side-impact standards and had the designers change it.
Pacers are roomy and comfortable but are underpowered gas hogs, even by the low standards of the mid-to-late 1970s. They used nearly as much fuel as a full-sized car. Since the planned GM rotary engine didn’t pan out there was not much of interest under the hood, just a Rambler Six in a new suit.
It was built on a shortened Matador/Ambassador platform, and thus nearly as heavy especially with all that glass and huge doors. The width and big windows made it feel like you were in a big car if you were the driver or front passenger. But the back seat was between the rear wheels and very narrow, and the luggage area under the hatch door was tiny, since the gas tank was underneath and the spare tire above.
Although cut up Matadors are reported to have been used as test mules, the platform and chassis of the production Pacer were very different from all other AMC products. From a financial perspective that was the biggest problem. For a company AMC’s size it cost a fortune to develop and tool up for the Pacer and virtually none of that expense could be amortized over their more mainstream products.
Pacer had a bolt-in front subframe that carried the complete front suspension with coils on the lower control arms and rack-and-pinion steering. In contrast, all other AMC passenger cars (including the Matador/Ambassador) had spring towers incorporated into the front unibody structure that also directly carried the upper control arms. Springs were on the upper arms. GM/Saginaw recirculating-ball steering boxes were employed. Leaf springs were used in the Pacer’s rear suspension, unlike the coil springs in the larger cars.
About all that the Pacer shared with other AMC products was the drivetrain. Everything wrapped around that Rambler Six was unique to it.
That’s a Fit in the bottom picture, no?
Christ, Fits used to have such a unique front clip. And a very small one, too.
That’s Ronnie’s departed Fit.
Oh, yeah.. thanks. That corporate front could’ve been an Odyssey for all I could tell.
A Fit is a 5/8th scale Odyssey.
“In other news, Jaguar Land Rover has chosen Noodle, “member” of the virtual band Gorillaz, as its global ambassador.”
What? Who are they appealing to with this – anybody over age 33 won’t know who they are, and anyone under the age of 27 won’t care. How’s this supposed to be relatable?
This is a head scratcher. Gorillaz is a side project of Damon Albarn who is better known for being the lead singer of Blur and is/was a major celebrity in the UK but mostly unknown except to fans in the US and probably elsewhere. Gorillaz likewise is long past their popularity prime and little known in the US save for their 2005 hit “Feel Good Inc.” And anyway, I can’t think why Noodle would be particularly appealing to potential Jag or Range Rover buyers.
“Clint Eastwood” was big here too.
Gorrilaz wasn’t really a band – it was way for Albarn to make music with whomever he wanted. They are very very good. With all the talk about mediocrity like Oasis ( bad badfinger out-takes) , what’s lost is that Blur, and albarn are, at their best, brilliant and fearless.
I too think Albarn is brilliant and am a fan of his work. Lots of Brits are as well but too few Americans (and others outside Europe) are, where neither Blur nor Gorillaz ever obtained anything like the popularity they have in their homeland. (Americans do seem to love “Song 2” and “Girls and Boys”, though neither of those are exactly typical Blur songs). I’m just surprised someone like Albarn, much less Noodle, would be chosen as JLR’s “global brand ambassador”, whatever that is.
Blur is a good band? Could have fooled me.
Is the Gorillaz popular these days? I have no idea.
Heck no! No albums since 2011, and the last time they even performed was 2014.
I’ll play The Gorillaz often to calm down after Daft Punk, then on to Beck maybe. And the crank back up for Chemical Bros or something.
I could never get into Beck, but otherwise nice choices.
I highly recommend Beck’s “Dreams”. Great all around, but on a healthy system, bass goes completely subsonic a couple times.
“The automaker hopes to use the appointment of a person who isn’t real to draw attention to the UK’s manufacturing skills gap.”
Gorillaz-schmorillaz: Are they using an obscure animated character to promote that their vehicles are made in a country that lacks manufacturing skills, that young women like the character lack manufacturing skills, or that their German competition is made in a country that lacks manufacturing skills? Which of these interpretations would be a positive marketing message, or is there some other perspective obvious to everyone else?
I once drove a Pacer Wagon for a demo. it was beige with woodgrain. believe it or not, I really enjoyed the vehicle. it rode like a champ!
The Pacer is probably the most unfairly-bashed car based on its looks ever. Just about any Bangle-era BMW or current Nissan is far more unattractive.
Pacer – recall seeing one in England around the mid-70’s. It was parked on the driveway of a miniscule Harry Potter home in an outer London suburb. It woz, I mean WAY OUT OF PLACE. Looking like an over- inflated Interceptor. Petrol was terribley dear at that time too.
Just to clarify, while the Ford Motor Co. and Ford family members support the Piquette Ave. Model T museum, the facility is run by an independent non-profit organization.
My wife and I test drove these when they first came out in 1975. I still have the sales brochure. We had a 74 Torino 2dr at the time and the Pacer had more room and was very comfortable. We owed too much on the Torino to do a trade. I sometimes wonder how well I would have liked it if I had bought one.
First car was a ’76 Pacer I paid $200 for in 1984. I can’t say I loved it at the time, but it was unique! I knew it had been repainted, but it took a close encounter between a brick column and the passenger side door to find out why. There was bondo 1/2″ thick in the door. It had been damaged before. In the 2 years I drove it, the muffler fell off, the steering rack failed, the manual transmission shift linkage fell apart, the motor mounts broke, and it went through two clutches, one which failed suddenly because of the broken motor mounts, I believe. In ’86 my dad helped me get a Subaru and I gave the Pacer to him. He nursed it along for another 3 years, IIRC.
The problem with the Pacer wasn’t so much its polarizing looks, but that it was terribly inefficient; a wide, heavy ‘small’ car. It really didn’t have much of a chance. I would imagine that AMC would have killed it but it was too far along when GM pulled the rug out from under them when they canceled the rotary engine that it was supposed to get.
In a way, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that GM helped hasten AMC’s demise by essentially creating the costly Pacer debacle. Of course, it’s probably true that the novelty of a rotary engine in the Pacer wouldn’t have helped all that much, either.
In utility and efficiency, the Pacer wasn’t particularly worse than cars like the Volare, Granada, and the 1978 GM A-bodies (it was significantly heavier than the 1978 Fairmont). For its interior space, it got good gas mileage. But it really wasn’t what true small car shoppers wanted.
It was built on a shortened Matador/Ambassador platform, thus providing the width, but that approach led to a car that was nearly as heavy and gas-guzzling as a big ’70s car, and most of the weight lost by the severe shortening was gained back by the huge doors and glass area (which the standard AMC a/c couldn’t cope with). I shudder to think how underpowered this would have been with a low-torque GM rotary designed for a Chevy Monza, which was basically a restyled Vega.
The Pacer was 1000 pounds lighter than an Impala, and 500 pounds lighter than a Chevelle. It was comparable in weight, interior volume, and fuel economy to the new Volare.
Knee-jerk trashing of the Pacer seems out of place on a car blog. Dick Teague is one of the greatest car / industrial designers in history. He was working with zero money and old tech, so the pacer wasn’t what it could have been, but it was a bold (desperate?) statement that stands out in a pretty dire American carsscape.
The Fit could be seen as a successor, and what could have been accomplished with proper funding, and modern materials/tech. The prior generation is a culmination of what can be accomplished with modern industrial design and manufacturing. A car that is incredibly well made, incredibly fun (if you push it), cheap, durable, and never touched by human hands until it reaches a dealership.
I find it endlessly more fascinating than Ferraris etc. The making of a a supercar in the modern age is pretty simple. Someone with enough knowledge can make one with off the shelf parts and a good chassis (come back Gumpert!!). The Fit is a whole other ballgame.
Bloody great comment.
You made me play Kimigayo.
If you’d like to learn more about the Pacer, there’s a fine documentary on the car and its development that I reviewed here at TTAC:
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/01/movie-review-joseph-ligos-the-unfortunate-history-of-the-amc-pacer/
So is this Pacer one of the “stunt” Pacers from the movie? IIRC I read that the ones used in the stunts had Ford 302 V8s installed in them.
This one has no radio/heater so as to accommodate a camera, and there was no need for that in the stunt cars. Whatever DID happen to those?
I learned how to drive a stick shift in my dads Pacer X. I remember it with rose colored glasses as very fun to drive.
He had it for quite a long time and I don’t remember him every putting any money in it. It was a good car until it started to rust.
These were cool cars that were so different from anything available at the time that people didn’t know what to think of them.
Just watched an episode of Pawn Stars where Rick purchased the Mirth Mobile (the Pacer from Wayne’s World),for $9,500. So his family must have put it in the auction. The guy he bought it from won it in a TV station contest. Let it sit for 20 years so it was in pretty bad shape when Rick bought it. But they did show the camera mounts on the interior and it still had the licorice dispenser mounted on the ceiling.
The Gorillaz best days in the US were 2000-2005, Plastic Beach didn’t get a great deal of traction but if you’re the future of car-buying alt-rock lovers then they could do worse. Really, the Gorillaz roar back every few years with a new album and people get excited again. It’s an issue where nobody wants to admit to the obvious Gorilla in the room (pun totally intended!) – They’re basically an animated band without an animated movie or series to make them huge. But given all their music videos and fairly deep written history there isn’t much stopping them from eventually selling out to a major studio for a 1 off movie and see if they can make something of it using their best songs and a well written story.
It’s something that ‘car guys’ may not know but Gen Y certainly remembers fondly.
The Gorillcaz did make a video featuring the characters pictured driving a bullet riddled first generation Camaro being chased by a police car. They manage to shake the heat but then a red El Camino driven by Bruce Willis shows up.
The name of the song is Stylo and you can view it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhPaWIeULKk
It really surprises me that nobody else has mentioned it yet.