For the second time, I’m being forced to rethink my long-held disdain low-opinion of the lowly Rambler American. The first time was Road and Track’s test of a 1959; they quite liked it, and for good reasons. Even though it was little changed since the original Rambler of 1950, that car was quite ahead of its time and was still highly competitive in 1959, given that the only real domestic competition was the Studebaker Lark.
Jump forward two years, and Car Life (owned by the Bonds, who also owned R&T) waxes eloquently about the restyled ’61 version, including the styling, which I have always deemed to be quite atrocious. Admittedly, it was very practical, with excellent visibility, high seating, and short overhangs (it lost 5″ in length), it had AMC’s excellent heating and ventilation system, and saving perhaps the best for last, it was now available with the ohv version of the Rambler six.
I promise to never say anything negative about these ever again!
CL starts off wondering why the 100″ wb American doesn’t sell any better compared to the 108″ wb Ramblers, since “the American is a perfect example of a very desirable automobile…we were mightily impressed with the latest…American Custom 4-door sedan.” CL also mentions that the venerable 90 hp flathead six, still standard on the base versions of the American, “gives brisk acceleration and more top speed than you’ll ever need…and remarkably low fuel consumption”. It’s a Rambler love fest!
Note: R&T mistook the installed ohv six as one of the aluminum block versions not. The 195.6 cubic inch six offered both more performance as well greater economy, but due to a significantly higher (2.87) rear axle ratio compared to the flathead’s 3.31:1 ratio, the improved acceleration evaporated (same as the flathead’s), but the economy improvement was very much in evidence (2-3 more mpg). Obviously a more aggressive axle ratio (3.31) or even the 4.11 with the available overdrive could result in “rubber-burning performance”. Or something like that. It should be pointed out that this ’61 had the B/W automatic, and the ’59 had a manual transmission; that would likely also account for the muted acceleration test times.
CL admits that the first impression of the restyle “isn’t all favorable”; one staff member said it was a big mistake. It was invariably going to be challenging to put a fashionable new dress over the body of the pudgy original, given that the modest budget didn’t allow for any significant changes of the unibody hardpoints. But it just doesn’t work for me; I much prefer pudgy over this “two-box” styling: one smaller and narrower box (the greenhouse) sitting on a larger/wider box.
But there were practical benefits! The upright seating position allows for excellent visibility and makes it easy to see where the corners of the car are and just pleasant to operate. You can’t see how your car looks from the inside anyway!
And once again, “The steering, in particular, merits high praise; it is quick and accurate, light enough for easy parking.” The somewhat firm ride “gives a good feel to the car when driving over winding mountain roads.” Even the brakes were good! America’s own boxy Alfa Giulia sedan? Who would have thunk?
Top speed was “a slightly disappointing 89.3 mph“, about the same as the flathead, and also the result of the the high axle gearing, which kept the engine from reaching its power peak.
Rambler’s excellent “Weather Eye” heating and ventilation system also allows for fully integrated air conditioning for only $350, a bargain. Given the the great benefits of a/c, better to buy a Rambler American six with it than a Chevy without it.
And there’s more, the icing on the cake: fit and finish was “immaculate“, and general quality was deemed better than many higher-priced makes.
The summation: “If you can do without a stylish carriage, but won’t trade for anything less than a quality job of assembling and a well-designed package, then the Rambler is for you. Here, indeed, is a car where form did follow function.” I can now see myself in 1961 and buying one of these; it’s something of an analogue to my xB: ugly, tall, boxy, comfortable, fun to drive, economical and well built. How could that not have been obvious all these decades?
Related CC reading:
Vintage R&T Road Test: 1959 Rambler American – Dorkiness Is Only Skin Deep
Curbside Classic: 1961 Rambler American – The Hip Ugly American
I wonder how many of the Car Life staff actually bought one? And I wonder why nobody since seems to have described a Rambler American as being fun to drive? (or have I missed those?) I chalk this test up to novelty – this was a very European car in concept, with its small size and efficient packaging, so just the kind of thing the R/T people would love. But I’ll bet they loved the Corvair more. I wonder if the sparkly new tech of the aluminum engine block was an influence? Or the ever-present desire to find something nice to say about the products of an actual or potential advertiser.
I will answer the question the author asked by saying that most people buy cars for image rather than for a great driving experience. All we need to do is look at the sales figures for Chevrolet and Plymouth in 1962. Me? I am still not sold.
” … most people buy cars for image … ”
My best friend and I loved to tool around in his family’s gigantic and swoopy blue and white 1957 Desoto Fireflite convertible. It went like the wind and made wonderful sounds through its dual exhausts.
Then his family traded in the Fireflite for a used (maybe 1962) Rambler American.
For car crazy 19 year old college juniors, it was such a serious let down. We could not answer the big question: WHY?
Now, in 2023, given a choice between the two, I think I’d take the Rambler. It would probably be much easier to maintain and it would fit in my garage.
1961 Short & Dorky = 2023 Unique & Practical
1957 Longer, Lower, Wider = 2023 Trophy Wife. ;-}
LOL!
Yes, JP, you are seen out and about in your car – it and the way you are dressed, style your hair, etc. are the way others see you, so, whether we admit it or not, the style of our conveyance matters.
The Rambler had many admirable qualities, but its proportions and styling were awkward and would just not project the right sort of image for most people. It teeters on its wheels which have an odd relationship to the rear arches, making it look unstable – a real no-no to most people.
As the article says, designing an automobile is a compromise and AM did not have the money to change the basic hardpoints. If the car had been able to have a lower belt line, more glass area and a wider track it would have looked to my eyes a little like the British Ford Cortina, which was a huge sales success.
Here’s a picture of one – What do other CCers think?
+1 on the proportion and styling
The Rambler looks just too ugly. I could not live with one however good it might be in other aspects.
While I am not a fan of UK Fords, I have to admit the Cortina is a very nicely styled sedan.
The Cortina’s rear 3/4 looks much better. The lower beltline does help. In stock form (unlike the photo), I don’t know if the Cortina’s wheels were any less inset than the American’s. Huey, perhaps Ford missed an opportunity by not importing their Cortina with an in-house import division like Opel or Simca? Could it have sold well here?
Ford did, in fact, import them.
I wasn’t around at the time, but I don’t recall ever reading that Ford imported cars that early. Earliest I heard of is the Capri.
Ford started importing cars from Britain in the late 1940’s and sold them at ” selected” dealers.
Never big sellers they were a way for Ford to offer an alternative to their larger U.S. models.
There are a lot of detail similarities in the styling between the two and, external width apart, the % size difference isn’t that much either. I guess the Cortina’s proportions work a lot better because it was a clean sheet design rather than a reskinning.
Now if they had been able to make the Rambler a couple of inches taller (yes, against the contemporary I trend, I know) it could have helped alieviate that squashed look, at least from the side view.
That’s definitely an improvement. Looks more like a ’64 Lark now, in its proportions.
That “unchopped” top is a remarkable improvement!. Suddenly I’m seeing a lot of Datsun 410 in that Rambler.
Hmm… I’ve never thought about bluebirds and larks being birds of a feather…
The pictured Cortina isnt what they really looked like as from the factory they werent lowered and didnt have wide wheels but yes they sold well and the Lotus version’s performance rubbed off on the gutless 1200cc base models, Ford UK produced a winner, nicknamed Cortinny due to light weight and if you hit something they folded up like an aluminium can.
I have never been a fan of small cars, but thought the 50s Rambles were cute junior versions of the larger Nash AMBASSADORS. The squared off restyle held no interest for me, but Nash did make very dependable cars. First family car I remember was a 50 AMBASSADOR. Great huge car with plenty of power from seven main bearing six. Parents kept that one until 59 with no problems! Nash under George Mason built some really good cars. If he had lived long enough to combine his Nash-Hudson with Studebaker-Packard,as he had planned who knows what could have happened? 😎
After 1956 the Ambassador was a stretched and gussied-up version of the 108 wb” Rambler – the stretch was to a “full-size” 116″ wheelbase, with all of that being unnecessary hood length since that was cheaper than a longer unibody.
I see similarities with the Volvo 140 especially in the greenhouse with the large window in front of the C-pillar. 125 hp OHC six with a 3:23 rear end and a manual transmission with overdrive could have made for a hot little compact. Perhaps not one the Beach Boys would have sung about though.
I saw a bit of 144 as well, Jim, but as the Rambler was concurrent with the Volvo 122 I think it makes more sense to compare those two. But like others, I also see the Alfa sedans and the Cortina.
I wonder if this “American” would have done better if it had been marketed as “European”.
I was also thinking this seems very much like an American version of a European car. Small, practical, efficient, kind of homely, and well-built. The kind of car that appeals to municipal engineers and college professors, much like imports at the time did.
As to the looks, I think it’s like many AMC products with parts of it that look really good and parts that don’t. I like the front end, the front fenders and the greenhouse. From the front 3/4 like the lead photo, it looks pretty sharp. Then you walk around to the side view and egads! They duplicate the arch of the front wheel opening in the back, but with the wheel off center, and it looks all wrong. The flat, tall rear end isn’t doing it any favors, either. The rear does look a little stubby by the standards of the time, but the standards of the time tended to have overly long rear overhang. With 5″ less rear, it looks efficient and balanced. The age of the platform really shows in the thickness of the doors and the huge “shelf” from the edge of the door to the side glass.
When it came time (finally) for my parents to trade our “59 American, they bought a used Falcon wagon. I was ecstatic they didn’t buy one of these even though I had my own car (a beater) by then. They brought one of these Americans home to try it out over a weekend, but decided on the Falcon because they really wanted a wagon and according to my dad, used Rambler wagons were just “too high”.
I think this generation if Rambler American is ever uglier that the preceding generation. That is no small achievement. And while Rambler flatheads seemed immune to neglect and abuse, the aluminum OHV 6 required level of maintenance attention unfamiliar to Rambler owners accustomed to the bullet proof flathead.
Head bolts had to be periodically torqued to maintain the head gasket seal between the aluminum block & cast iron head. Special antifreeze was required that was not supposed to be mixed with more common varieties.
I think AMC failed to adequately consider the thrifty nature of their customer base when they designed the aluminum 6. Northern car owners almost always had a gallon or two of antifreeze in the garage to periodically top off the coolant. No way would a thrifty Rambler owner dump that coolant even if he had read the owner manual.
Since a well optioned Rambler had a heater & a sometimes a radio, many a Rambler trade-in came to our lot with a pristine unread owner manual in the glovebox. Rambler owners didn’t need instructions to work the heater or radio. These engines were predestined for failure.
I don’t agree on the ugliness thing but that engine… What were they thinking? Iron head on ali block does not work, it’s the other way round that does it. Here in Europe we had Skodas with that configuration and they were no paragons of reliability either (those were the old Communist times so owners just had to accept part re-con every 50,000 miles. It was either that, no car or just as bad Polish, East German or Soviet designs).
Having said that Chrysler and GM did not exactly have much joy with their all-aluminum engines either; again those require special coolant being used, a fact neglected by the average 2nd/3rd/4th owner.
Hi Rob, absolutely right. My dad had a ’61 Rambler American Convertible. In 1967, it overheated on an L.A. freeway and the engine was toast. I could never figure out why – cars overheated all the time back then with no long-term problems. Enter AMC’s aluminum block and the cast-iron head, and a bit of research. I’m sure my dad didn’t know about the head bolt torque requirement (every 20,000 miles?) and I didn’t know about the special antifreeze requirement until your comment.
Whatever praise one lavishes on the Weathereye, in our experience, with Ramblers from ’61, ’67 (a Rebel), and ’69, the heater/defroster unit was terrible. They would consistently get gunked up with leaves, twigs, etc. and blow cold.
Still we loved our Ramblers, especially the Rebel, and miss them!
Yeah, to me the four door sedan is pretty stubby and unattractive. But on the other hand, the convertible model and station wagon versions of this car looked good to me, cute is the word for them.
Gotta say I like the 2-door sedan still with the original slanted B pillar from the ’50 Nash Rambler too.
I was unaware that the ’61 Rambler American reskin led to 5″ shortening.
It’s also 3″ narrower than the 1950-60 100″ Ramblers. Possibly the all-time biggest narrowing of overall width over an unchanged track and inner unibody, all due to the extra width that had to be designed into the original to accommodate the hidden front wheels.
I like dorky-but-fun cars. Not enough people do, sadly.
It’s pretty obvious that the American’s designer (Dick Teague?) was several limited in having to retain all the 1950 hard points in the new design – note, for example, the severely sloped B pillar on the coupes. Given those constraints, he did about as well as could be expected.
These ugly ducklings weren’t unpopular. Rambler sales continued rising through ’62, despite all the new competition. The perfectly beautiful ’63 halted the rise.
True. AMC was on a roll in ’63 and ’64 with their redesigns of the Classic/Ambassador and American. Nice cars.
This car is why Detroit didn’t bother building efficient, practical, rather boring cars until the imports handed them their lunch in the ‘70s. There was nothing to really dislike about the American, but not too many car buyers actually bought them. Detroit noticed that.
It has an ugly, frowning face. We don’t like PEOPLE who lack a sense of humor, and that carries over to cars, too.
Actually that model was so durable/reliable, a sense of humor was required. They’d just keep running long after they looked even more dated then when they were new.
Ohio, our “neighboring state” did not do car inspections. i recall seeing these trolling the roads there into the early “1980’s”.
Can’t help but wonder how much of the original 1950 Nash Ramber is in these cars. The low roof, high cowl/belt line, and overall proportions suggest quite a bit. And then there is that very interesting rear door dog-leg over the back wheels.
The success of the 1950 Rambler in the fifties brings up another ‘what might have been’ in the auto world, and that’s if the 1947 Chevrolet Cadet had went into production. It didn’t, and small Rambler did surprising well throughout the fifties and early sixties, to the point that first Studebaker with the 1959 Lark, then the Big 3 following the next year with their own cars in the compact class.
GM could have beaten them all to the market by at least a decade (and likely crushed AMC and Studebaker in the process). Of course, it’s not like GM did too badly without a compact throughout the fifties, either.
I believe the “53-54, Nash” was the “underpinnings” of this version.
I can think of a number of girls I knew in high school and college who were absolutely wonderful people, fun, smart, funny, etc. but were anything but pretty and no one (me included) ever dated them. When they finally did wind up getting married (and all the ones I remember did) their husbands were the luckiest guys in the world. They could not have had better wives. I expect most of the readers of this blog have similar stories.
Seems to me that the featured car is analogous.
I don’t like to make comparisons between cars and women, but yeah, the analogy works. Even for plain homely guys. All we needed was a chance! Then the gals could see what we were really like.
Back in the ’50’s and ’60’s cars were all about fashion trends and looks. The American consumer base had discretionary income and access to credit and they were “conditioned” to go for the hot new thing. Less affluent, and more conservative buyers were careful about how they spent their money. They wanted practicality and value. They were in the minority.
I used to refer to homely cars like the Rambler, or early ’50’s Packards, and Plymouths, or any other dull looking car as a “non car.”
I’m with you Paul – being a kid in the 60’s I thought these were some of the most ungainly/ugly cars to roll down the road – I had a grudge against Ed Andersen for a good 50 years.
But I’ve seen the light – Ole’ Ed did as best as he could with the old unibody hard points. I’d take one over a Falcon six in a heartbeat, especially a convertible or a wagon.
Actually the aluminum engines were only available in the Classics, not the Americans. The CI OHV engines were standard starting with the 1960 Rambler American Custom. In ’61 to ’63 the flatheads were standard in the Deluxe and Super and later 220 and 330 models but the OHV was optional.. The CI OHV engines remained standard in the Custom models. The ’61 in the photos is almost a twin to mine which I’ve owned for going on seven years. Mine is a three speed manual with radio and heater and reclining seats. It runs well and I love it, quirky styling and all. I believe they were well built and good basic transportation for the time. According to my book American Motors the last independent by Patrick Foster, over 135,000 Rambler Americans were sold for 1961. Not bad for little AMC!
Thanks for pointing that out, James! No Rambler Americans got the aluminum six (and I don’t understand why the Car Life experts couldn’t figure that out!) Two reasons: 1. the diecast aluminum engine was expensive to build, and 2. it had a full flow oil filter mounted horizontally down near the fuel pump…it would not fit in the ancient, narrow engine bay where the inner fender unibody structure and suspension mounts made for a too-snug fit. BTW, all the convertibles got the OHV engine.
I know, ancient, underneath-but with a decent ride, nice option selection-including amazingly comfortable individual reclining seats (with a headrest option, and in 62-63 a “lounge tilt seat” option as well. Just homely enough to be ‘cute’ and different!
Yes, I meant to point that out. I assume this was a “factory demonstrator” or such, to evaluate it in the American.
Yes, 1961 was the peak year in sales up that time, and only bettered by the new 1964 models.
my grandfather was a mechanic at Triangle Motors in Zanesville Ohio for 50yrs.whenhe started there it was nash, studebaker, terraplane and Hudson., later beccming AMC. he drove one of these but also had an earlier model that had had fins and came in some not so attractive shade of pink.
This car appeals to my German side.
Built in Wisconsin too. So German.
“Why Don’t Cars Of “Great Merit” Sell As Well As They Should?”
It is because most buyers didn’t prioritize great merit.
I could never understand what posses people to buy a plane jane no frills car like the Rambler. Now move up to 2023. It is a better looking car than most of today’s cars on the road. Who knew?
Shows that “car guys” have been complaining about what the ‘general public’ buys since the first automobiles. In the 70’s all the hand wringing was about PLC’s and ‘why cant Detroit build a good small car?” Now it’s all “why don’t people buy sedans and wagons anymore?”
One big problem with this article. The aluminum block engine was never available in the American only in the classic. Even the engine in the photo is the OHV cast iron engine. Easily identified by the top oil filter.
I’ve been wondering about this myself. Was it a factory “special”? Or did Car Life flub it? Seems like it’s the latter.
It looks like they mistakenly conflated the OHV heads with the aluminum block, i.e., assuming that all OHV Rambler engines would have the latter.
It’s also conceivable that when the test was made, which was certainly months earlier (probably the summer of 1960), the plans for the aluminum engine were different than they ended up, and nobody on the editorial staff thought to go back and double-check when this test finally ran. That’s the sort of thing where the “News and Notes” sections in these magazines can be more revealing than the main articles.
Dad bought a 61 American in 70 for my sister to drive to college. It was seemingly a fine car until Dad bought new tires for it. While on the lift, the car started caving in. Dad bought my sister a brand-new Gremlin. A few days later while Dad and sister were waiting for the Gremlin to take home, 2 college girls brought the American back to said dealership demanding their money back.