Electric Pacer
Ever since I was little, I've always wanted an AMC Pacer. It has such a space mobile style. While trying to convince Joel that a Pacer is far cooler than a BMW 2002 he almost bought, I stumbled on this page chronicling the creation of a fleet of Electric Pacers. Called the "Change of Pacer," the EV Pacer was a 1970s oil crisis coup of maker culture. The cars were electrified by Electric Vehicle Associates (EVA), launched by a group of high school vocational education teachers as a student project in Cleveland, Ohio. From AMCPacer.com:
The Pacer was strong, large on the inside, and small on the outside (for the 1970's). The large interior volume was ideal for carrying the lead acid batteries, battery charger, and motor controller that was required for the vehicle. The Change of Pace was a stellar performer. Top speed was in excess of 55 mph, 0 to 30 mph was achieved in less than 12 seconds, and the range was 30 to 50 miles, per SAE J227A schedules...The Electric Pacer
The batteries required significant maintenance. The batteries had to be fully recharged after every use, or would be damaged. Recharging required several hours, depending upon how much the batteries were discharged. The batteries had to have water added every few weeks, depending upon use. The batteries posed the biggest problem for the Change of Pace. EVA stopped production of the Change of Pace, when the Pacer was no longer available from AMC, and EVA went out of business shortly thereafter.
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I'm a big round man, I got a big round car.
You don't want a Pacer. My dad bought one (new) when I was a kid. I have more memories of the loaners the garage gave whenever my dad took the Pacer in. The one clear memory I have is the carpet in the back coming loose for no reason other than the staples popping out.
And to think, my dad's choice was down to the Pacer and the VW Thing. Ah, what might have been.
I saw one of these back in the 1980s that had been gutted and turned into a small greenhouse.
Those lead batteries must load so much extra weight onto the front of that car. I wouldn't want to take a fast curve on that thing. The tires might blow.
Grimc @2:
Heh. Saw a VW Thing on the way home from the office the other day. The vanity license plate said "HMMVW". Took me a minute to figure out the word play...
I used to work at a crusty old hardware store in the 90's, and my crusty old boss got a vintage beige Pacer for free somewhere. It looked like it had never been driven before! He put huge shiny mag rims on it and always (sarcastically) referred to it as the "Moon Car"! When the freon in the A/C gave out, he recharged it with propane instead 'cause he was such a tightwad. Apparently it worked great, but I suppose if he ever got into an accident it would've blown up the car. He was quite a character...
You don't want a Pacer.
But with that huge picture window in the back, a Pacer would make a mean herpetarium.
Oh, yeah, 0-30 in less than 12 seconds, that's blistering performance.
It's like a pacer, but only less practical! :D
Your dad's choice was down to the Pacer and the VW Thing ? That's like choosing between an armchair and a pogostick. I have a VW Thing, and a Pacer would be like a Bently in comparison to the Thing.
@9
Ah, but for a 8ish-year-old? Convertible > comfort. :)
When I was a little kid I thought the Pacer was really cool and space-a-riffic.
Didn't hear about their reputation for crappiness until years later.
I always wanted to get one, paint it swimming pool blue, and then etch aquarium scenes on all the windows (well, except the windshield).
You know, cuz they look like fishbowls! Har!
I SO FUNNY!
Obviously the Bimmer twenty 'ought two is way cooler.
Amazing what battery tech has done in the past thirty years.
This reminded me of the Mars II electric car I saw at a car show in August. I don't really have much to add, but it really impressed me that an electric car that was pushing 40 years old was still running.
Gremlins!
A better car.
I remember fondly the bumper stickers on mine (Corrosion of Conformity, anti-Iran/contra, and sundry others), the dangerously loose engine mounts, the ability to yank the keys out of the ignition at any time while driving. And the cool stripe.
I loved that car.
Lest there be any doubt:
http://www.decodesystems.com/gremlin-premier.jpg
(mine was black)
The pacer was craptastic wonderful stuff.
But, a Gremlin? I was hitch hiking in the early seventies, a Gremlin with some kind of blown small block stopped for me. It was his first drive after the engine was installed. Let's just say Mr. Toad's wild ride was just the beginning; the front end would barely stay on the pavement.
Is that a criticism? It won't stand, sir.
Such rampant lies! The 2002 is an icon of 70's style.
But! (heh.) Would you buy a Pacer based on this ad? I'd be mighty tempted.
All this, and not a single one of you so far actually OWNED one? I did; 1975 Pacer X, silver, no roof racks. How did it run? I had only a few problems with it, but nothing compared to the world of hurt I've had with others. From the mechanical standpoint, it had flaws. But you can't fault it for its looks; compare its silhouette to those of 1980's-1990's Hondas and there is more than a passing resemblance. It was all about aerodynamics, friends and boingers; a drag coefficient of .32. That was signicant! Too bad AMC had to settle on another engine instead of the one it was designed for (a Wankel).
It was not a sport car, it certainly did stand out, and perhaps it was an acquired taste (like Vegemite on ice cream) for some, but I loved my first car.
My sister had one; it really could have been used for a greenhouse. The inside of that thing got really hot.
Anthony @15, The Gremlin does not give me moonage daydreams.
It's looking like I might be getting an '02 tomorrow. :)
Is your ugly, round, unreliable AMC Pacer not bringing in the expected amount of abuse, ridicule and public humiliation? No problem! We now offer the AMC Pacer in this new high maintenance electric model! No more of that 'time for friends' or 'going out on a date' since you will be spending most of your time repairing you car and without ANY of the cool factor stigma of an MG or MGB! Constant repairs alone does NOT mean constant levels of uncool.
AMC PACER! It's The UNcooler!
Good call!
The Pacer. Second worst car ever. GM had been asleep at the wheel while the Japanese built small cars that didn't suck, so they tried to build a ‘small’ car by downsizing a big one. Epic Fail.
i'm assuming that the bmw "Joel" was buying was a Cooper Mini. I would go with a Cooper Mini but I was born in the '70's so I'm an '80's kid and a car buff. I always new some one must like the Pacer. Cool.
I love the pacer. But I did not have to fix one either. And I always thought that an pacer could be electric. The pacer is the nerd's nerd car, and was in fact the car of "Wanes World." It was on sale on ebay earlier this year;
http://www.chromjuwelen.com/de/partner-und-mitglieder-blogs/blog.cardomain.com/excellent-wayne-s-world-pacer-on-ebay.html
I'm not sure that it could get dates though.
@27...
Frank, AMC (American Motor Cars) made the Pacer, not GM. When AMC folded, they became part of Chrysler with that company's acquisition of AMC assets, primarily for Jeep.
And I still maintain that it wasn't such a bad car, not even a bad looking car. There are very popular cars out there that while they look better, have as many (and sometimes deadly) problems. The Pacer was just born a decade and a half too soon (and yes, it did get hot; I live in Florida).
Nyah!
By the way, sorry my last post seems so snarky. First cup of java, it's Election Day, and I'm cranky. I loved that car... sniff. Would have kept it longer, too, had a local mechanic not killed the transmission.
Going to go play with my diecast Pacer now...
I inhereted a Pacer from my Dad back in the early 80's. Unfortunately it wasn't the much coveted "sports" model the "Pacer X" (Alloy rims, groovy paint scheme). AMC cars were notorius pieces of shit. Mechanically, the engines had tons of torque and when were tuned properly were actually quite lively. It was everything else about them, the electrical systems, cooling, vacuum/hydraulics and most of all, the fit and finish...all complete shiite. The engineering was abysmal. The doors were FAR too heavy for the hinges that were used so once a little rot set in, the doors had a tendency to sag and not close all the way. The crank up window mechanisms would seize up and the handles would snap off necessitating one to replace it with a set of vise grips. Mine was a standard 3 speed transmission....on the column. It eventually dies when the cooling system quit. The car had stalled on the highway. When I opened the hood I looked down and the engine manifold was WHITE hot and glowing. fuel was dripping and caught fire. It burned up in a spectacular fashion right on route 95 in providence one snowy evening back around '82 or thereabouts.
*wipes away a fond tear*
@32
Yeah, you did have to treat them kindly; they didn't take too well to having anything go amiss. I was fortunate in that my family were notorious motorheads, and I was to an extent (not as much my late brother). We just stayed on top of all of our cars. But, yeah, well aware of their reliability. Still beat the crap out of the four (count 'em, 4!) Ford Tempos I owned in rapid succession!
#4, the suspension and tires were upgraded for the extra weight -- as is still done today when ICE cars are converted to EVs. No problem.
#14, the Mars II cars were converted Renault R10s, built for utility companies by Bob Aronson's Electric Fuel Propulsion. The electrical components were so dead simple that the surviving Mars IIs will probably still be running another 40 years from now -- if they're still in one piece.
However, they probably won't be. THOSE little cars really WERE severely overloaded, carrying around close to a ton of lead batteries. A friend of mine worked for Electric Fuel Propulsion back then, helping to build those cars, and he said they were like elephants on roller skates. I know of one case where the car still ran in the mid-1980s but was undriveable -- the unibody seams literally began to open up.
EFP's later conversions were mostly based on big, heavy Detroit iron, which could handle the massive piles of lead much better. Bob built a yachtlike GM conversion for Arthur Godfrey, calling it the "Silver Volt."
See http://apolloenergysystems.com/images/cust_05.jpg
My grandmother taught my sister and I to drive in her Pacer. ("It shifts like a cow. If you can drive this, you can drive anything." To this day, I'd rather drive a stick-shift than an automatic. We loved that car. We had it for 11 years.
I'm with Joel on this one. A 2002 oozes class. This oozes... I dunno, maroon?
I have a Pacer in my garage right now that needs some work. Some of the derogatory comments above provide incentive for me to put it back on the road. In the late 1970s I owned a 1977 Pacer wagon for about four years and put over 80,000 miles on it during that time. It only let me down once due to a hole in the carburetor float. Yes the interior had cheap basketweave type fabric which always looked soiled and the carpet in the cargo area of the wagon was very thin with no padding.
The car ran and drove well though. It had rack and pinion steering which was still novel in the 70s. It rode like a much larger car too. The comment about the sagging doors was due to the weight of the doors placed on hinges not really designed for the weight. You need to replace the door hinge bushings when the doors begin to sag. Other cars and trucks have this problem too, but the Pacer doors were heavier than those on the other AMC cars and AMC didn't change the hinge design significantly. Sagging doors causes you to apply extra force to the door handles to open the doors. The die cast handles will break due to the abuse. I never experienced an overheating problem and we drove the car in the mountains of Colorado frequently. Overheating is generally due to poor maintenance or a leak in the cooling system. I hope to get my second Pacer back on the road by spring. Joe
Yeah, it's standard operating procedure to slam the Pacer (and to confuse the Gremlin with the Pacer). Yes, it had many problems but nothing like the silliness posted here.
The maker, AMC, was tiny -- Ford made more Model T's by 1923 than AMC made cars in it's entire 30-year history -- but of those few cars AMC had more positively notable models than any other American manufacturer -- more, percentage-wise, than GM Ford and Chrysler (in the same time period).
1957 Rebel -- first muscle car. The cute'n'corny Americans; the Typhoon; Rogue; SC/Rambler; AMX (true American sports car cf. Corvette); Javelin; ...
They took chances. They made some notable oddballs and underdogs -- what, BBers only side with big winners? -- Gremlin, a SUCCESS made from a chopped-down Hornet; the Pacer, an all-new design with great successes and alas, many failures, but groundbreaking nonetheless.
AMC engines of the 60's and 70's were as good or better than any US motor. The six introduced in 1964 survived into the 1990's as the Jeep 4.0 with shockingly few changes -- it was robust and well designed. (And hackable as hell -- you can put the 1991+ fuel-injected cylinder head onto the 1964 engine with near-zero changes!)
The entire AMC series of cars are wonderfully hackable -- great conservative robust engineering, and decades of interchangability. 1980 disk brakes bolt onto a 1960 car with no problems.
AMC died from a combination of bad business (not engineering) decisions and bad timing. It was their own fault, largely, but they're a prett interesting company.
I just don't get the near-religious sidedness of American car nuts. It's really tedious and uninteresting.
I was a Gremlin owner, Back in the Day, and a friend of mine later had a Pacer, and I felt sorry for him. He had the problem of stuff melting in the car, all the time. There was so damned much glass that even in winter, the heat build-up was enough to slag any plastic object you mistakenly left in the car.
My Gremlin lasted 5.5 years until some bastard ran me off the road during a Massachusetts snow storm. Like the Pacer, it had all the interior room in the world- I could seat five easily, and got a sixth person into the Way Back from time to time (hello Spike MacPhee and Paula Lieberman!), and it didn't get bad mileage (16 mpg) either. I wish I'd rescued the gas cap- it had a really nice gremlin graphic that always looked like Big Daddy Roth's style to me.