A Car Only Patriots Could Love ; CLASSIC CARS AMC PACER American Motors the Pacer Looked Horrible, Drove Badly and Ate Money. Martin Buckley Wonders Why Americans Loved It

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The AMC Pacer is really America's Austin Allegro, a Seventies car that was so uniformly inept in almost all respects that it has passed into folklore and become perversely "cool".

It makes any top 10 of all-time worst cars, its profile raised by appearances in the 1992 Mike Myers comedy Wayne's World and the Eminem video for "The Real Slim Shady".

Why was it so awful? It's hard to know where to begin, but its problems really stemmed from the fact that the Pacer was the issue of AMC (American Motors Corporation), by far the weakest of the Detroit producers. Here, funds to develop truly new models were limited in the early Seventies, yet it was felt that AMC needed …