Was 1980 the worst automotive 12 months ever?

Mmm, the 1981 AMC Eagle SX/4 liftback.

Mmm, the 1981 AMC Eagle SX/four liftback. (credit score: By G.Goodwin Jr. and Snark at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Fast, what’s the worst 12 months in American automotive historical past?

Latest bias may lead you to pick 2008, when an unprecedented fashionable monetary disaster slammed the general financial system and led to a authorities bailout of GM and Chrysler (these carmakers acquired $80 billion after taking a 40 % nosedive in gross sales and having some Three million jobs in danger). However the near-death expertise yielded automobiles and automakers extra carefully aligned to customers’ wants and wishes.

Arguments may very well be made that 1929 proved far worse, because the inventory market crash and the Nice Melancholy that adopted drove many automakers out of enterprise. However that interval additionally yielded a few of the best vehicles ever produced, ones with names like Marmon, Duesenberg, Pierce-Arrow, Stutz, and lots of others. Or maybe it was 1957, when the final of the unbiased automakers, Nash and Hudson, disappeared from the market, and Packard was gasping its remaining breath as a poorly disguised Studebaker, an organization that may disappear a decade later.

Learn 45 remaining paragraphs | Feedback

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *