The Life and Death of American Motors, Nicely Told in a Six-Part PBS Series

Honestly, the obituary for the American Motors Corporation could be this short. Date it June 20, 1988: “The American Motors Corporation, after 34 turbulent years, died today, a victim of not selling enough cars. Leaving behind a long list of offspring including the Rambler, Matador, Marlin, Ambassador, Eagle, Pacer, Gremlin, Hornet, Concord, Spirit, Rebel, Renault Alliance, and AMX, American Motors was born on May 1, 1954, a result of the marriage of the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation and the Hudson Motor Car Company. The successor is the Chrysler Eagle brand, and survivors include Jeep, which became part of the family in 1970 but was adopted by Chrysler in 1987. The American Motors Corporation is mourned by the 77,000 residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where as many as 15,000 of them were once working for AMC. Its death brought to a close Kenosha’s 86-year history of building cars and trucks.”

Certainly the obit could be that short, but it deserves a much longer, more detailed account. And that’s delivered by a six-part series called The Last Independent Automaker: The Story of American Motors, created to run on the nearly 300 Public Broadcast System stations. Many stations began broadcasting the first episode on May 1, but since the stations are independent, too, each can choose when it airs the series. So, as they say, check your local listings.

On Thursday, the series became available to stream for free, in 4K Ultra-HD, via the AutoMoments channel on YouTube, starting with the first episode. A new one will be added each week.

The series is the brainchild of former Maryland Public Television producer Joe Ligo, a Hagerty contributor, who is writing several stories for this website on the AMC project. The first one runs May 29.

Ligo produced and directed the series, and he wrote it in conjunction with automotive journalist Patrick Foster, who is also listed as co-producer and researcher. Foster has written more than 30 books and is co-author of The Complete Book of AMC Cars, covering everything the company built, from its beginning in 1954 to the end in 1988.

Narrating the series, in measured, pleasant tones, is Ted Limpert, a New York City voice talent who typically makes his living doing commercials and voices for video games and animation. You may not know his name, but you may well recognize his voice.

For the series, Ligo and crew interviewed more than 30 former AMC employees, including designers, engineers, assembly line workers, salespeople, and two CEOs. Their memories, combined with some very rare archival footage and still photographs, bring to life the story of the company, whose fortunes ranged from wealthy and successful to downright desperate, sometimes shifting from one to the other almost overnight; you see the rise and fall, and rise and fall, and rise and fall again of a company that was seldom more than a niche player, no matter how hard it tried.

Ligo had to walk a narrow line to make a documentary that would appeal to a general audience and not just car buffs. The mass-audience aspect was particularly important for the series to air on hundreds of public television stations—less critical for its availability on YouTube, where viewers seeking it out are likely to be automotive content buffs not turned off by some inside-baseball moments.

Ligo’s series begins not with the founding of AMC in 1954, but much earlier, tracing the history of its origins. Prominent is Kelvinator CEO George Mason, a portly, cigar-chomping executive straight from central casting. Automaker Nash merged with appliance manufacturer Kelvinator in 1937, after which Mason sought to sell us cars as well as refrigerators. The company was too small to confront Detroit’s Big Three on their own turf, so Nash-Kelvinator had to outthink them, which becomes a touchstone for all six episodes. Like a good halfback in football, the idea was to go where they aren’t, with perhaps the first example being the 1950 launch of the Rambler model, which helped define the company for decades.

The Rambler was pivotal, along with the hiring of a smart, handsome, well-spoken young executive named George Romney as CEO. Romney is credited in the series with coining the term “compact car” for the Rambler model, countering the existing and mostly negative impressions of potential customers who had come to associate little cars with poor people who couldn’t afford anything else.

Romney stressed that it was OK to think small and attacked at every opportunity the big cars built by Detroit’s Big Three as “gas-guzzling dinosaurs.” It worked, for a while at least. It’s a common thread that winds through the series: Nothing AMC tried worked for too long.

The mercurial, appealing Romney was the exact opposite of Mason, the man who hired him. If you were making a movie about the pair, you’d cast W.C. Fields as Mason and Gregory Peck or Cary Grant as Romney. Not long after Romney’s very quick assent to power, Mason promptly died, leaving Romney briefly rudderless without Mason to support him.

As you might expect in episodes of The Last Independent Automaker, there are visits from Mitt Romney, George Romney’s son and a former U.S. senator, governor of Massachusetts, and the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2012. Mitt, who brings some needed star power to the documentary series, followed his father into politics—George served as the popular chairman and president of American Motors from 1954 to 1962 and likely could have had his pick of higher-profile jobs with the major manufacturers in Detroit, but instead he became the governor of Michigan in 1963.

AMC never again had a leader as charismatic as Romney, though it seems probable that even if he had stayed on, market forces were such that AMC’s fortunes would continue to sink. The brightest spot was the purchase of Kaiser Jeep in 1970 for the sweetheart price of $75 million, still a stretch for AMC, but undeniably a worthwhile one.

It’s commendable that Ligo and Foster worked hard to touch all the bases in the documentary series, essentially ticking off a checklist of “Important Changes” that happened to the company, including an interesting sidebar on how women and minorities were treated in the industry then. This all-inclusive mission may seem a bit tedious to the casual viewer, however, who might not be as interested as you or I in the merger with the Hudson Motor Car Company in 1954, at which point the American Motors Corporation was born. Hudson, founded in 1909, only lasted three years under Romney, who retired not only Hudson but Nash in 1957, convinced that the future of AMC was in small cars.

Or, in his aforementioned parlance, compacts.

The Last Independent Automaker works as entertainment, and it’s also instructive to watch how executives, designers, engineers, and hourly workers scrambled to change with the times, trying to hit on something that would give the company some breathing room. As such, AMC attempted everything from NASCAR, with drivers Mark Donohue and Bobby Allison (both won), in a program run by Roger Penske, to the innovative all-wheel-drive Eagle.

But that breathing room never really came. The final episode is downright mournful as we watch the inevitable end approach for the company, and for a crew that fought the good fight, and who need make no apologies. It’s an instructive primer for the sort of battle that faces startup auto companies today, led by founders convinced that they can do car building better than companies that have been at it for a hundred years.

Yes, well. Good luck.

For more information, visit the series’ website at Lastindependentauto.com.