Maybe it’s the green?
One of my good HS friends had one of those. His was blue and he did tweak the engine and suspension. Many of us didn’t have our own cars in HS, so it was his blue dart that became the ride when we all had a party or other place to go to. Fun memories and times for us.
I would do the same…
Fiat and the Italians usually have a flair for design. That aberration must have gotten through under a multinational culturally lost phase of management.
In the days before disc brake through axel bikes, that bed was just the right length for an over bed bike rack.
How about this one?
Interesting article thanks. I didn’t know they only made the Edsel for a few years. Ouch.
All of the K cars were terrible in the looks department. Chrysler K platform - Wikipedia
Then on to the Aztec. The styling was changed dramatically when GM made the decision to change the production line it would go down. An interesting article on it below. My manager at my prior roll was at GM when the Aztec came out. He had seen it in concept, clay etc, then it got closer to production and he didn’t have visibility on it. Then it launched, and he went and asked the program lead on what the hell happened to the styling. GM moved it to a mini van production line and that required the body panels etc be redesigned to fit the tooling of a mini van production line, and due to the decision by the bean counters we were given that abomination. It was never a beautiful car, but it didn’t start with that horrid plastic skirting on the body.
GM seemed to have a really good knack for tacking a great concept and ruining it.
They all do, I used to work for a major power sports manufacturer, some of the stuff you would see from ID vs production was such a let down.
The interesting thing to me RE GM was their ability to build whatever they wanted on the same line, AKA the toyota model. Another anecdote from my former manager, at some conference or speaking event Toyota manufacturing engineers had a Q&A and were asked about modular design on production lines and they said, “go ask GM, they are way better at it than we are.” Which in the end became the downfall of GM. They got so good at building multiple vehicle configurations on the same line they were able to maintain brands that should have disappeared. There was no reason for Pontiac, Buick, Saturn, Oldsmobile, Chevy, GMC and Cadillac to all be making the number of models they each did on the same platforms.
That was interesting. Filing that under TIL…
When management gets involved in the design process, it all goes to shit, that is all anyone needs to know, just ask Boeing.
That actually used to work at Boeing because their managers used to be engineers.
The Aztec is particularly amusing because when the production was revealed, everyone hated it and GM was like fuck it… we’re still making it.
Major emphasis on used to be.