American Motors Corporation

American Motors Corporation (AMC; commonly referred to as American Motors) was an American automobile manufacturing company formed by the merger of Nash-Kelvinator Corporation and Hudson Motor Car Company on May 1, 1954. At the time, it was the largest corporate merger in U.S. history.

American Motors' most similar competitors were those automakers that held similar annual sales levels, such as Studebaker, Packard, Kaiser Motors, and Willys-Overland. Their largest competitors were the Big Three—Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler.

American Motors' production line included small cars—the Rambler American, which began as the Nash Rambler in 1950, Hornet, Gremlin, and Pacer; intermediate and full-sized cars, including the Ambassador, Rambler Classic, Rebel, and Matador; muscle cars, including the Marlin, AMX, and Javelin; and early four-wheel drive variants of the Eagle and the Jeep Wagoneer, the first true crossovers in the U.S. market.

Regarded as "a small company deft enough to exploit special market segments left untended by the giants", American Motors was widely known for the design work of chief stylist Dick Teague, who "had to make do with a much tighter budget than his counterparts at Detroit's Big Three", but "had a knack for making the most of his employer's investment".

After periods of intermittent independent success, Renault acquired a significant interest in American Motors in 1979, and the company was ultimately acquired by Chrysler in 1987.

In January 1954, Nash-Kelvinator Corporation began the acquisition of the Hudson Motor Car Company (in what was called a merger). The new corporation would be called the American Motors Corporation. An earlier corporation with the same name, co-founded by Louis Chevrolet, had existed in Plainfield, New Jersey, from 1916 through 1922 before merging into the Bessemer–American Motors Corporation.

The Nash-Kelvinator/Hudson deal was a straight stock transfer (three shares of Hudson listed at 11+1⁄8, for two shares of American Motors and one share of Nash-Kelvinator listed at 17+3⁄8, for one share of American Motors) and finalized in the spring of 1954, forming the fourth-biggest auto company in the U.S. with assets of US$355 million and more than $100 million in working capital. The new company retained Hudson CEO A.E. Barit as a consultant and he took a seat on the board of directors. Nash's George W. Mason became president and CEO.

Mason, the architect of the merger, believed that the survival of the U.S.'s remaining independent automakers depended on their joining to form one multiple-brand company capable of challenging the Big Three as an equal. The "frantic 1953–54 Ford/GM price war" devastated the remaining "independent" automakers. The reasons for the merger between Nash and Hudson included helping cut costs and strengthen their sales organizations to meet the intense competition expected from autos' Big Three.