Automotive Firsts

It’s been more than three decades now since the last of the American Independent car makers was absorbed into a larger company, its intellectual property absorbed, its institutional memory discarded for new ways. Because it’s been so long, we forget: For decades, the Independents struggled to do things that the Big Three weren’t doing (or couldn’t, or wouldn’t do). They had to be different; why do the same thing that everyone else was doing, on a scale that an Independent could only dream of? Sometimes their muse led to success, and sometimes their thinking led them down a rabbit hole to their demise. Either way, American Independents produced some of the most remarkable and memorable automobiles of their time.

But even within those storied marques, there are cars that stand out. Whether it’s because of their individualistic styling, for their performance, or for their out-of-the-box thinking that predicted trends years or even decades ahead of America’s needs, every marque has that car that stops and makes you picture it when you hear the name. Oh, it’ll be different for everyone —some may think Gremlin or AMX when we mention AMC, for example — but some cars transcend their marques, their time in