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The American Motors Company, shaped by the merger of Nash and Hudson in 1954, did very well throughout the late Nineteen Fifties (regardless of the nasty recession that killed the Edsel) by selling small, affordable cars and marketing them intelligently. A pop song about the Rambler even hit #4 on the charts in 1958. At the moment, Rambler — which started life as a model name in the Nash lineup — was the one AMC marque in showrooms; by 1960, Rambler gross sales had been second solely to these of Chevrolet and Ford. When it got here time to revise the bigger of the 2 Rambler platforms for the 1961 mannequin yr, AMC chairman George Romney — sure, Mitt’s father — decreed that the Rambler Six would change into the Traditional. Here is a type of early Classics, a well-optioned Custom 2-door Club Sedan, present in the identical northeastern Colorado car graveyard that gave us the 1982 Volvo 244 and 1949 Willys-Overland Jeep Truck Junkyard Gems in current weeks.
The Traditional would go on to win Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award for 1963, For 1962, AMC moved practically 300,000 new Classics off the meeting line and onto American roads, practically as many Chevy IIs as GM managed to promote that yr and edging ever-closer to the gross sales totals of Ford’s smash-hit Falcon.
As everyone knows, AMCs fortunes step by step declined after the early-to-mid-Nineteen Sixties interval, with the corporate finally being bailed out by the French authorities (which owned Renault on the time) after which wolfed up by Iaococca’s Chrysler to be able to glom the Jeep model plus all the priceless Renault engineering in the Eagle Premier. Let’s not take into consideration the lean many years for AMC proper now, although, not once we’ve obtained this consultant of the corporate’s high-water mark proper right here.
Consider it or not, new cars had been still being sold in the United States in 1962 with flathead engines, together with the very most cost-effective Rambler American models. Each Rambler Traditional ever bought, nonetheless, obtained a contemporary overhead-valve engine, both a straight-six or a V8. This one has the six: a 196-cubic-inch (3.2-liter) plant rated at 127 horsepower. The engine you are taking a look at right here is the direct ancestor of the 4.0-liter engine that went into Jeeps from the late Eighties all through the 2006 Wrangler, to not point out the 232s and 258s that powered tens of millions of AMC products during the 1970s and 1980s.
That column shifter appears prefer it controls an computerized, however the three-pedal setup tells us it is a good old three-on-the-tree manual. This rig was nonetheless the most typical transmission kind in American vehicles in 1962, however automatics had been gaining floor quick at that time. A Borg-Warner-made Flash-O-Matic three-speed computerized (an in depth relative of the automatics utilized in Volvo Amazons) could possibly be had within the ’62 Traditional for $186.50 (about $1,815 in 2022 {dollars}).
Because the worth of this automotive began at $2,150 ($20,945 at the moment), including practically 9% further for the automated did not make sense to most economy-minded Rambler consumers. The very most cost-effective Rambler Traditional that yr value an excellent $2,000, which brings it effectively beneath 20 grand in 2022 {dollars}. Not a foul set of wheels for the value!
This one sat outside for a few years, and the slabs of dried silt indicated that it obtained fully submerged by a horrible flood in some unspecified time in the future (I am guessing the 2013 floods had been accountable, although it is theoretically doable that the South Platte River Flood of 1965 drowned this automotive and it took 57 years to get round to hauling it off to a wrecking yard). Even a non-rusty two-door like this would not have been price fixing up after that.
The Traditional was changed by the Rebel in 1967, and the Rambler marque itself was terminated after the 1969 mannequin yr (simply in america and Canada, although; Rambler-badged AMCs had been bought new all over the world till the early Eighties).
Are you able to resist these Rambler offers?
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