On This Day in History: April 1
The Gremlin
“Hey, honey, I just bought you a brand-new car. Check it out!” “Haha. Very funny.” “No, really. This car is all yours.” “Yeah, right. I checked the calendar. It’s April Fool’s Day. That thing looks like a dump truck had sex with a Japanese toaster oven.” In the 1970s, in North America alone, AMC sold almost a million of the ugliest car you ever saw.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 1, 1970--
I shit you not, the design chief for AMC sketched their internal combustion catastrophe on an airline barf bag. Really. AMC was not one of the motor vehicle behemoths yet wanted to compete with the foreign compact cars flooding the American market. So, they came up with this godawful mess and released it on April 1, 1970. Considering the 70s was the decade that all sense of taste forsook, it fit right in.
Just to fuck with people, they called it the Gremlin.
Five days after launch, Newsweek wrote about it saying, “Detroit fights back.” Was the intention to get one’s competitor to laugh themselves to death? The designer said people would see the car as either “cute or controversial, depending on one’s viewpoint.” I think he meant depending on how many drugs they’d taken. He referenced it being “perfect for the free-thinking early 1970s.” There is free-thinking, and then there is overdosing on LSD.
Even the name was fucked. Merriam-Webster defines a gremlin as “a cause of error or equipment malfunction.” Equipment malfunction? This is a fucking car! That’s a bad thing. But young people are stupid and don’t use dictionaries, and the “cute and different” marketing strategy worked, with the under-35 crowd buying a shitload of them. I mean, people bought pet rocks and shag carpets back then too, so I suppose it makes sense.
Yet it didn’t live up to its glitchy name; the car was actually pretty reliable and considered good value for the money. What’s more, in a decade where most other cars blurred together for their style esthetic, the Gremlin stood out for its hideousness and I guess in this case there really was no such thing as bad publicity.
The car was discontinued in 1978, and in 2007 TIME Magazine put the Gremlin on their list of “The 50 Worst Cars of All Time,” describing that the back end looked like “the tail snapped off a salamander.” But the fucker still sold. Hell, both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush drove Gremlins.
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My first car, I was sixteen. It was purplish. I bought off a fellow dishwasher at the cafeteria I worked in 1980. It was in bad shape, and the brakes tended to lock up, but I loved it.
The teenage girl down the street - the one all of us tweens on the block wanted either to be or to date - had one her daddy bought her. It was gold. Sparkly gold. It made her seem even more rad than she had before.