Article: Small Blunders: 1971 AMC Gremlin X, 1973 Chevrolet Vega GT, and 1972 Ford Pinto

August 9, 2025

By Frank Markus in MotorTrend

[This story originally appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of MotorTrend Classic] A big, nasty storm struck the American automotive market in 1959. It washed some 615,131 imported cars ashore, breaching 10 percent of the automotive market for the first time in history. The nation responded by hastily building seawalls bricked with Corvairs, Falcons, and Valiants. These smaller, less-profitable cars successfully stemmed the tide of quirky European and even quirkier Japanese cars.

Read Mor: Click Here to read more about the Gremlin, Pinto and Vega that were produced to fight this imports.

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