Part 3: Be Aware Of Everything, Be Afraid Of Nothing
As the 1960s ended America was a very divided society, a fact that shaped the realities within which Detroit lived. The counterculture of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War and such infamous incidents as the Watts, Newark and Detroit riots, the mess of the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and the tragedy at Kent State in Ohio in 1970 all combined to make for a time that while one of some optimism, was becoming much more focused on realism, and Detroit was immune to none of these practices. Indeed, Detroit's being forced to pay far more attention to safety was largely a response to one of the many movements in the nation and its society, with many big corporations being cast as villains by portions of American society. There was little Detroit could do to totally counteract this, particularly once the muscle car era began to be snuffed out by the rise in insurance premiums that were placed on the muscle cars. The pony car battle indeed even got into some issues, as the Mustang and Javelin grew in size over the years, but their problems and the resulting problems with fuel efficiency ultimately would result in the Mustang having to be reborn as the Mustang II in 1974. It also showed that that American Motors was truly level with Chrysler and starting to catch Ford, a situation not hurt by the introduction of Detroit's new generation of compact cars with months of each other in 1970.
The counterculture movements added to problems, and sniping within companies made matters worse still in Detroit. After appearing before Congress to advocate GM be split up as a monopolistic enterprise in 1961, George Romney was called before Congress again in 1967, and Romney stuck to his guns, a fact which did not endear him to General Motors' management but other than that ultimately had little effect. GM's much bigger problems in 1970 lay its problematic workforce. GM's years of arguments with the UAW, along with the counterculture problem, erupted into a bitter four-month strike in 1970 which sapped the company's resources, which in the midst of a growing recession was bad news - and the bankruptcy of the Penn Central railroad in 1970, and the double hammers of both the loss of a major locomotive order and substantial shipping problems for all of the Detroit makers, added to the problems. 1970 was the worst year for General Motors since before WWII, and even after the bitter strike, several plants (most infamously the ones at Lordstown, Ohio and Baltimore, Maryland) suffered serious problems with workers not doing their jobs or in some cases even intentionally sabotaging the line or the cars on it. Mind you, things weren't all that much better at Ford or Chrysler - both suffered problems with industrial unrest as well, with Ford suffering its Rouge River plant in Dearborn being shut for two months as a result of a major fire in April 1970 and the Atlanta plant being shut down for seven weeks after an electrical fire and explosion in November 1970, and Chrysler's Hamtramck plant being ordered closed by OSHA in April 1971 for a variety of safety reasons. Despite strong sales, the problems were real, and by now management, happy through the 1960s to ride both technological and marketing trends, now had to confront its internal problems.
American Motors was by now the third-placed of the big four, but George Romney's skill at running the firm was proving to be its greatest strength - and perhaps most notably, AMC was not suffering the problems from labor unrest that its Detroit rivals were, largely through the good relationship between Romney and UAW leader Walter Reuther. AMC also added to the Detroit problems in 1970 through the introduction of its "compacts for the 1970s", the excellent Gremlin and brilliant Hornet.
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The Hornet is an excellent small sedan, and continues the trend of American Motors using its long history of expertise to make another car which Detroit will undoubtedly seek to chase. The Gremlin is perhaps an even better idea, as its a smaller car still and had the benefit of better-still fuel efficiency, and while the tail of the Gremlin might be controversial, to our eyes the two cars complement each other nicely, and really do work. Ford and Chrysler have rivals coming, sure, but this is AMC leading the way." -- Motor Trend, June 1970
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The Gremlin was a surprise to us, as we had the Pinto nearly done, but we didn't figure AMC had the chutzpah to invest like they did. They deserve that credit, I'll give them that. They should know that we're gunning for them now, but we should be hoping for success for them, as it will keep Volkswagen and the Japanese at the docks." -- Ford Senior Engineer Donald N. Frey, In an Interview with Motor Trend, March 1974
A 1972 AMC Gremlin X, with the supercharged I-4E 2.0 engine
Romney and AMC had bet big on a big score for the Hornet and Gremlin pair, introduced in April 1970, and they were not disappointed. Romney had sought to have their twins beat GM and Ford to the market, as well as take on the growing sales of Japanese imports such as the Datsun 510 and 1200 and the Toyota Corolla. Despite the need to get ahead, Romney had insisted in the design being good, fearing the car be a mechanical nightmare that would hurt the company's reputation. When they came out, both cars were easily as influential as the Corvair had been a decade earlier. What most set apart the AMC cars was the engine - AMC's I-4E, newly developed, was a class apart from its rivals. A twin-overhead cam four-cylinder engine, it used individual carburetors and four valves per cylinder, as well as an aluminum engine block (with iron liners) and aluminum cylinder head. The Gremlin and Hornet started with 1.7-liter and 2.0-liter versions, followed in 1972 by a supercharged version of the 2.0-liter engine. The base 1.7-liter unit made 115 horsepower - an amazing power output for a car of its day with that size engine, and the I-4E proved to be just about as nuclear bunker-tough as the AMC inline-six and V8 engines. Both cars were nearly-identical from the front to the B pillars, and here that was no real problem - four wheel independent suspension with sway bars, Bendix disc brakes and Uniroyal Tiger Claw radial tires. In addition to the cars' solid assembly quality and very reasonable price, they added up to what was sure to be a hit for American Motors - and so it was. The Gremlin's truncated tail indeed even became something of a style statement, with many owners commenting that they liked the fact that the Gremlin resembled a small muscle car with a hatchback body tacked onto it.
GM and Ford were well along in their responses when the Gremlin hit the ground running, and it showed. Chrysler, still investing in large cars, made a late response into the small car game with by importing the Simca 160 into the US Market starting in 1973, naming it the Chrysler Arrow, as well as the even-smaller Hillman Avenger, named the Plymouth Cricket. Neither were a huge success, and the combination of that and Chrysler's underlying financial problems would go on to harm them badly late in the 1970s. Ford and GM, however, had better plans in the Ford Pinto and the Chevrolet Vega. The original small Chevrolet Nova had moved up in size by the end of the 1960s, while the Corvair had largely abandoned its small car genesis and was aiming to be a small sports car more than any other (a point assured when the third-generation Corvair entered production in May 1971 as exclusively a two-door coupe, though a 'family coupe' Corvair with pickup truck-style swing out doors entered production in October 1972), which resulted in Chevrolet building its third attempt at a competitive small car in the Chevrolet Vega, introduced in September of 1970.
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I wanted the Vega to work so badly that I did everything in my power to do so, even placating those damn thugs at Lordstown. I remember the calls at Lordstown to make it hard for us to sell the Vega, and I called Reuther directly about it. He knew of the problems there, but I wanted him to know that if they made my life easier, I would do so for him, too. Nobody on the fourteenth floor wanted to give an inch to the UAW, particularly after the 1970 strike, but by now everybody had heard such stories about our cars that if we didn't hit that problem square in the face from the off, we'd have more problems down the road. By then, we could see what was going on at AMC, and saw that Romney was kicking our asses. We couldn't let that slide. Small cars had been loathed by Detroit, but in 1971, they were all anyone could talk about, because they were saving our asses." -- John DeLorean, On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors, 1984
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I couldn't forget being called by DeLorean and having him want to work with me to stop the problems at Lordstown and Baltimore. Lots of my guys, especially Doug [Douglas Fraser, Reuther's successor at the head of the UAW] and Leo [Leonard Woodcock, influential UAW leader], wanted me to drop the hammer on DeLorean, but I could see that if GM was wanting to speak to us about issues at times other than negotiations, it was probably in our interest to at least hear them out. It also didn't take me long to realize that the reason they were talking to us was because of what we were accomplishing at AMC. I didn't always see eye-to-eye with Romney, but I am well aware that without him, I would not have been able to start burying the hatchet with General Motors." -- Walter Reuther, There's an Auto Man In Us All, 1985
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John DeLorean was a man of genuine vision at General Motors, just as he is today. He's nobody's fool....I knew that sooner or later what we were able to do with our workforce was gonna break through that god-awful cocoon that the upper management at General Motors operated inside of. Reuther knew that the days of the past were dying away, and that for the UAW to prosper they had to make sure the company did as well. I think Ed knew that, too, but the rest of the fourteenth floor at General Motors was almost myopic. Most of them had sent a lifetime at the company and knew no other way of running a car company and dealing with the UAW then the one that had been doing since Alfred Sloan and William Knudsen had been in charge. AMC knew long before the others that the UAW could be our partners or they could be our enemies, and its not like the management can make all of the cars on their own." -- George Romney, Powers, Faith, Hearts and Steel, 1991
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The Americans are capable of much when they work at it, but the problem is the same as it is with so many of us, that being those who are so sure of their ways get too confident and lose sight of what lies beneath, what can either be their saviors or their destroyers. It is in the interest of the company to advance the sale of cars in America, but it is important that we remember that the men who run the makers of cars in America are not fools, and they are not to be underestimated." -- Yutaka Kamayata, President of Nissan North America, in a memo to Nissan President Katsuji Kawamata, 1972
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The Vega is a worthy rival to the Gremlin and a worthy successor to what the Corvair was born as, a handsome machine of the first order which could well be just what the doctor ordered, and a very dangerous rival to the Gremlin and the Japanese. AMC loves to talk about their success, and they have reason to do so, but they had better be aware that GM can still play the game as well as any." -- Autoweek, August 1971
The Vega was a new machine for GM in a great many ways, namely because of the fact that it was GM's first attempt at an all-new small car since the Corvair, and the Corvair had been a technological marvel with few rivals and by 1970 was something of a Detroit legend. The Vega would face the Pinto and Gremlin right from the off, as well as the Japanese and Volkswagen - and by now, VW was working on a big series of new models to replace the ancient Beetle, a fact well-known in Detroit. The Vega was designed to be a more handsome, stylish car than the Gremlin, as well as being set to take on the Gremlin's modern new engine. The Vega used an aluminum-block engine, but learning from the problems Chrysler and AMC had both suffered in testing (and GM's own problems with the early Corvairs leaking oil), GM used steel liners inside the aluminum block, and the Vega's extensive testing proved two serious problems - the cooling system was inadequate and the engine had a tendency to backfire when engine vibration loosened the screws on the carburetors. Both problems were fixed early on, but the biggest problem was that Fisher Body, responsible for making the Vega's unibody, didn't do a great job of rustproofing - a fact made worse when the finance department vetoed the usage of liners on places where the Vega was most susceptible to rust. This was soon apparent, and after replacing tens of thousands of prematurely rusted-out fenders under warranty, GM fixed the problem by 1973 by completely overhauling the rustproofing assembly for the cars, adding galvanized steel fenders and rocker panels, plastic liners between body components, expandable sealers in joints (this was done on all GM cars for 1972). Making matters worse for the Vega early on was a 1971 safety recall for a problem where an emission control component could fall into the throttle linkage, jamming it open. Nader was again one of the harshest critics of the car, and despite GM's diligent efforts to improve the Vega, the engineering issues being solved did nothing to solve the persistent problems with build quality of the cars coming off the lines at the Lordstown and South Gate plants, which was almost always abysmal, a problem that would persist for some time to come.
Despite the rusting problems and frequently-terrible build quality, the Vega got a lot right. Its buyers quite frequently liked its styling, and the Vega proved to be an excellent platform a good handling car, with strong suspension components (The Vega used a very similar front suspension as the Corvair and a very similar suspension design to the Camaro in the rear), four-wheel disc brakes (with ABS standard for 1974) and a low center of gravity, and while the original Vega 2300 engine did have some issues with coolant passages in the head, these were largely solved by 1972.
A 1973 Chevrolet Vega GT
As the Vega entered the market, another problem for Detroit emerged, one which hit the Vega, and which had an ingenious solution. The Clean Air Act, enacted into law in 1963, was significantly enhanced in terms of authority and enforcement in 1970, which GM, Ford and Chrysler responded to by taking the government to court, saying meeting the proposed laws were impossible. (AMC, quite pointedly, did not do this - they believed that they could meet the proposed laws.) GM's engineering staff, proud of their previous accomplishments, went through dozens of Vega engines as the car was being launched, as well as numerous other cars, trying to find a solution, most of their proposed fixes involving additions to the car's engine, which had the effect of reducing efficiency - no real problem for the Vega engine, which had plenty of power for its class in 1971, but which would be a real problem later on.
But in the middle of this came a solution that had to be heard to be believed. Soichiro Honda, the legendary founder of Honda Motor Company, visited Detroit dealers in August 1972, and while he was there he took his first look at what his upcoming Civic and Accord cars were up against, namely the Vega, Pinto and Gremlin. Honda was impressed by the Gremlin, but the Pinto and Vega were rather less appealing. During this time, all of the Detroit makers were struggling to meet the demanded emissions standards, and Honda's new CVCC cylinder heads could make cars pass the emissions standards - a fact known to all of the Detroit makers - but GM's CEO at the time, Richard Gerstenberg, commented about the CVCC system "Well, I have looked at this design, and while it might work on some little toy motorcycle engine…I see no potential for it on one of our big GM car engines." That statement got back to Soichiro Honda while he was visiting Detroit....and the result was Soichiro buying a Vega and an Impala and shipping them to Japan, and having his engineers design new heads for them. The Impala, which used the Chevrolet 350 engine, saw its cylinder heads, intake manifold and carburetors replaced, resulting a slight improvement in horsepower and fuel efficiency but a dramatic improvement in emissions. The Vega, however, gained a 16-valve SOHC cylinder head based on recent Honda motorcycle practice, as well as greater compression as a result of a thinner head gasket. The use of CVCC chambers in the engine made for a tall cylinder head that necessitated a bulge in the hood, a problem that quad carburetors added to. The result of the new heads and intake system was dramatic - the Honda-headed Vega 2300 produced a stunning 151 horsepower and torque to match, and it was simply a rather better unit. Honda didn't change much to the Vega outside of its engine - indeed, many Honda engineers admired its handling and brakes - but when GM saw the results of EPA and ASME testing for the re-engineered cars, they were struck stupid by it. Both cars were bought back, along with a sizable sum of money for the head designs, and when the design became a production reality in 1974, GM made a point of presenting one of the first Vega GTs with the head design to Soichiro Honda after his retirement from his company in 1974, making a point of having it rebuilt by its special operations division and shipped to Japan for Honda. Indeed, in 1980 Pete Estes made an offer to completely buy the Honda Motor Company, which was politely declined. Honda himself was by 1974 well-regarded in America as well as being a legend in his homeland, and by the end of the 1970s when he spoke, people in Detroit listened.
Ford's experience with the Pinto was a completely different story, though. The Pinto, pushed into production in 1971, was a very conventional car. The demands by Ford product boss Lee Iacocca for a low price and simple mechanical components meant that while the car came with disc brakes, it used live-axle rear suspension and older-design inline-four engines. The Pinto was the cheapest new Ford in over a decade, but the Pinto's conventional nature and design, and its uninspiring performance when compared to the Gremlin and Vega, led to it not being much of a sales success - and then came the problems with exploding fuel tanks, which was made worse with an infamous memo by Ford about the cost of paying off victims of Pinto accidents versus the cost of fixing the car's known flaws with exploding gas tanks. While this was in some ways overblown, the publicity this got, with it being run by numerous newspapers and news magazines in 1972 and 1973, damned the Pinto forever - and worse still, it also damned the Mustang II project, which would spend its four-year life tryign desperately to distance itself from the Pinto and Maverick, a particular problem with the Javelin and Camaro remaining on their bespoke platforms. Ford spent the money on an all-new Mustang for 1978, but the Pinto died in 1976.
Ford had to respond to this, as Pinto sales by 1975 had sank to under 80,000 - against 325,000 Vegas, 310,500 Gremlins and Hornets, 148,000 Corvairs and 115,000 Chrysler Arrows in the same year - and the Maverick was sinking as well. Ford decided its only real option was the European Escort Mark II, which got a restyle for the 1977 models, and Ford decided to bring the Escort, Fiesta subcompact and the Capri sports coupe to North America, making the Escort in the same plant in Edison, New Jersey, that had built the Pinto, while the Fiesta went to Ford's facility in St. Thomas, Ontario in Canada. It was a Hail Mary play to be sure, but Ford got savvy with the marketing and didn't advertise it as much - instead, the Fiesta was a car for the modern city dweller, the Capri was a sports car for the times and the Escort was advertised as "proven all over the world, and now you can buy it, too". The tactic worked, and while the Escort was a very small car, its excellent handling made it a dream for the enthusiastic driver, and both the Capri and sporty Escorts gained in America much of the love they had come to have in Europe. Indeed, the Ford Escort RS2000 would come to be one of Ford's enthusiast cars of the 1970s, and convince even somebody as hardheaded as Henry Ford II was that "world cars" were viable propositions in the United States. As for Iacocca, he was fired from Ford in 1978....and completely redeemed himself by saving Chrysler not long afterwards.
A 1979 Ford Escort RS2000 Coupe
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It took bloody long enough for the Escort to replace the Pinto, but let's just say we're happy it did. This car and the Pinto should never be compared in the same sentence, because the badge is about all that they share. The Escort is a fabulous little runabout, with all of the nippiness and agility of the Vega and Gremlin, and better street cred than either of them thanks to years of owning the world's rally stages. Welcome to America, Escort, and we're happy to have you." -- Brock Yates, writing in Car and Driver, March 1977
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Small cars like this, people say, shouldn't be sold in North America, because our families and homes and roads and people are too big and our fuel bills are too small to justify ever puttering around in cars like this. Yeah, that's what they say. And we're here to tell you that statement is complete BS. This thing came to North America with the same engines as the Escort, tougher gearboxes and better interiors than the Europeans, simply because Ford knows well who this car is being sold to, and it ain't a skinflint. This is meant for somebody who spends a lot of time braving the congestion of a major city, and around Los Angeles this little car feels so at home its almost ridiculous. It'll keep pace with highway traffic without breaking a sweat, cuts through traffic in a way most cars can't, and it feels well-built in a way the Pinto never could....This is a step up from the past, and it can't not be the very thing GM and Chrysler fear, that Ford's European cars will start making an impact stateside. Well, Detroit, get used to it. They are here now, and you will brush them off at your own peril." -- Motor Trend, in proclaiming the Ford Fiesta XR2 as its 1977 Car Of The Year
A 1978 Ford Fiesta XR2i
The oil crisis brought to a head all of the problems that Detroit was now starting to deal with. Despite advancement of their car models almost across the board, the fact that the majority of American cars were still enormous, fuel-inefficient brutes came to a head with the 1973 oil crisis. In response to President Nixon's support of Israel after it was attacked by its Arab neighbors in October 1973, The Arab members of the OPEC oil cartel embargoed the United States and jacked up the price of crude, eventually extending it to most of Western Europe, Japan, Australia and South Africa. This had the immediate effect of jacking the price of fuel by over 40% and serious shortages in the winter of 1973-74. Things were worse in Europe, but in America the hit was quite real and painful. The economic problems that this caused added to the problems in the economy in 1973 and 1974. This made matters worse for everyone.
Beyond the problems with sales and economic problems, one of the infamous events of this came down with GM at its troublesome Lordstown plant. After the sudden economic problems of 1974, GM was racked once again with problems with labor problems, which despite the demands of both the UAW leadership and Detroit's management reached a head in the summer of 1974. It blew up massively into the open after a racially-biased fight broke out at the trouble-prone Baltimore assembly plant on August 9, 1974, which blew up into a full-on battle involving over 600 workers which resulted in three dead and ten million dollars in damage to the plant. The problems simmered, blowing up again at Lordstown two weeks later on August 22.
GM's response to this was to announce that they would begin moving production of the Vega (built at Lordstown) away to another plant, GM having had about enough of the mess that Lordstown had been since it was built eight years earlier. On September 4, 1974, Lordstown workers angrily stopped work on the morning shift, refusing to do their jobs. GM angrily the next day fired the workers at Lordstown's day and evening shifts, but on the morning of September 9, 1974, all hell broke loose. GM workers came back to the Lordstown plant enraged, preventing people from coming to an information session at the plant. The fight turned into a vicious brawl, where enraged GM workers beat a jobseeker to death and hanged him from a telephone pole. Ohio State Police tried to break up the melee but wound up under attack themselves. The mess took over six hours to stop, resulting in seven people killed, serious damage to the plant and over a thousand arrests - and worst of all, the image of the hanged jobseeker was national news for days.
Both the UAW and GM were sickened by it all, and GM closed Lordstown immediately, hurriedly transferring Vega production to South Gate, California, Lansing, Michigan and Oshawa, Ontario. Walter Reuther loudly and angrily demanded the violence stop but also told GM that they wanted to work out deals so that what happened at Lordstown never happened again. GM, having made a deal with the UAW the year before, turned it down and angrily accused Reuther of instigating the riot at Lordstown. This battle got ugly fast, and worse still exploded far beyond GM, with plants for Ford and Chrysler soon appearing to be in the middle of the mess.
The aftermath of the Baltimore Riot, August 9, 1974
Into this, George Romney jumped in. On October 21, 1974, Romney went on CBS News and proposed using the contracts AMC had hammered out with the UAW as a baseline for the whole industry to use, and stating that if the companies' were willing to look at workers as part of the company's assets instead of what many UAW members said GM felt of them - "meat bags who made cars" - that Detroit would have fewer labor problems, pointing out that AMC had had little labor trouble in a decade. Detroit loudly turned down the idea, and furthermore continued to toss insults at Romney. Reuther defended him, saying that he didn't want to bankrupt Detroit but he was committed to getting the share his people deserved. Coming at a time when American public perception of the world around them was about as poor as it could get, it seemed that Detroit and its workers could end up being at it for a long time.
Ed Cole's retirement from GM was postponed in an attempt to handle this, but pressured by his board and stockholders, he took a hard line with the UAW's requests for new negotiations. Having worked as hard as he had to get Lordstown working properly and then having seen it blow up so spectacularly, Cole's hard line was the last straw for DeLorean, who resigned from GM on November 12, 1974, tossing away an almost-certain likelihood of him taking over GM's Presidency. In the middle of this, the UAW sat down with AMC to show how the whole process could work. Relations between AMC and the UAW were cordial, and the negotiations for a new four-year contract flew through and were easily ratified by AMC workers in February 1975. But Detroit still refused to budge, particularly thanks to the thought that the companies couldn't give in to thugs at their plants.
Romney made his legend here. Upon his retirement from AMC on February 28, 1975, Romney immediately began calling automaker executives and asking them what they wanted in negotiations with the UAW to end the messes, and saying that he would be the mediator if it would help end the messes that by now were doing real harm. Cole agreed to go for it, but he insisted on also speaking to Reuther himself - which Walter had no issue with. Over 1975, numerous negotiations, which ultimately resulted at one time in George Romney being hospitalized for exhaustion, led to real agreements between Detroit automakers and their workers, which included some huge changes and concessions - the most notable being a commitment to profit-sharing programs and advancement ladders, as well as more vacation days and company promises to improve the working environment in their plants. In return, the UAW had to limit absenteeism, and the companies would all shift work around to plants that showed the best quality, as well as giving up the cost of living allowance which had defined the UAW negotiations for decades. The profit sharing problems didn't work well at Chrysler for a while, but at GM and Ford it had a real, and quite positive effect. Cole's successfully singing a deal in November 1975 was hailed by the company's stockholders and narrowly approved of by the rank-and-file, but by the time the Baltimore was refurbished and the new plants at Tacoma and Bowling Green opened in 1977-78, the UAW's workers began to get a good idea of what was coming for their working conditions, and most approved.
One of the first places to get the makeover for GM was Baltimore. Baltimore Assembly was a plant built in 1935 in center city of Baltimore, which was having quite real economic problems at the time. GM's decision to go here first was a decision of Pete Estes, who took over GM's leadership when Ed Cole retired on November 30, 1975, who wanted to make a new future at a plant which had caused a massive riot. Baltimore was expanded in size and renovated, stealing many of the ideas and advances used in other industries. Re-opened in 1977, Baltimore Assembly as refurbished with painted floors, higher ceilings where possible, completely air-conditioned, natural light from skylights and the usage of covered lights to improve the natural environment. A strong showcase of what GM had in mind, Baltimore Assembly returned to work making the Corvair, with production transferred there from the overcrowded Willow Run, Michigan facility. The Corvair was produced there from 1977 until the last ones were made in the spring of 1981.
Lordstown was not returned to being a GM plant - the company decided the facility's stigma was too much to handle. GM's attempt to sell the facility never went far - Lordstown had become a buzzword for an infamous incident in the history of industrial relations in America. Unable to sell it, the plant sat vacant until 1978 - when the man who had fought hard for the plant's security took it over.
John DeLorean's dream after leaving GM had been the building of a "ethical sports car", which began to bear fruit in the late 1970s. The DeLorean DMC-12 began as John's dream, and as his dream took shape in the late 1970s, John made an audacious proposal to take over the infamous Lordstown plant was the place which would build the DMC-12s sold in North America, while ones sold in Europe and right-hand-drive would be made in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. DeLorean loudly went to the media, seeking the guys who had lost out from the actions of the thugs, saying that he would hire them back to make the new cars - and Lordstown's huge size was such that the facility would be used for everything to do with the cars, including making some parts. This decision and his years of service to GM also meant that he could use GM parts for his car - and thanks to John Judd and a smart idea by him, the DeLorean would have its own engine, a 4.6-liter V8 made from the cylinder barrels of two Vega 2300 engines. Lordstown made its first DMC-12 in April 1980, and Lordstown would end up assembling many of the first Irish-built cars because of their rather poor build quality. Lordstown would redeem itself for DeLorean, making over 75,000 DMC-12s between 1980 and 1989, and DeLorean's company would up being a success, against most of the odds.
If anything, part of the reason the DeLorean was a success was the car's engineering. The car's chassis had been developed by Lotus, and DeLorean's company had spent a lot of resources developing ways of building the car in a way which made it work better. The heavy stainless-steel bodywork necessitated both a strong structure and a powerful engine, and the DMC-12 as a result got a forged-aluminum body spaceframe that was attached to the car's backbone chassis, and the new engine resulted in the car having a new gearbox arrangement between the seats, necessitating dry-sump oiling to lower the center of gravity. The DeLorean chassis bore many similarities to the Lotus Esprit, though with a wider track, and the car got better brakes and ingenious chassis stiffening components to handle the power, needed as the DeLorean V8 proved to be a powerful unit. The car was later getting to production than it had been hoped, but more than anything was DeLorean's insistence of the car being engineered properly and built well.
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Nobody believed that it would actually succeed, and I think most people were surprised when it did, and you know what, a large part of that has to go to the guys at Lordstown and Dunmurry. The people who work there now never were bad people, aside from the horrible thugs. Today, we are saying that when people talk about the great places of sports cars, an industrial town in Eastern Ohio is now joining the list. Even beyond the car succeeding, the people succeeding, that feels better still." -- John DeLorean, talking to Time Magazine, March 1986
A 1982 DeLorean DMC-12
Lordstown had become a place where stigma ruled, a small town in Ohio where auto workers angry that some other auto workers didn't join their wildcat strike killed seven others and hung one from a telephone pole for the TV cameras to see before attempting to torch the plant, all because GM was unwilling to continue dropping money into a facility that had produced the most shoddy workmanship of any place GM made cars at. It was worse than pathetic....When DeLorean came, he saw an empty, damaged plant that marked ashes of his old dreams, and decided it needed to be part of his new dreams. It says much about him that he did that, and I think the people in that part of the world appreciated it....the UAW did come back to Lordstown, but when they did they knew that John's dream would die if they didn't help him out, and Lordstown would die with it, so the locals did a deal, agreeing to make good cars if DeLorean would do a good job selling them, and he was good at that....It was a classic case of turning a sad past into a brilliant future." -- Denise McCluggage, writing in Car and Track's article about the DeLorean DMC-12 after the end of its production in 1989
The 1970s would start with prosperity but would struggle in the 1970s as first government concerns and then labor problems and changing consumer tastes combined to cause major issues for the four Detroit automakers, but as the UAW and Detroit began to bury the hatchet with each other, and the automotive improvement of the era would pay dividends into the future, and as the 1980s began, many signs pointed to the decade to come being one of prosperity, and the fact that General Motors set the production record for the Corvette in 1979 (selling 64,438 units), reset the record for the Corvair Monza (46,543 units sold) and the DeLorean entered the world of cars with 9,000 deposits for the cars, said much about what the future of sports cars in particular would be....