Originally Posted by
DHfan
It wasn't through choice - Dodge threatened them with legal action. They abandoned the Dart name altogether, it was the SP250 everywhere.
Presumably the Nash and Rambler Ambassador were basically the same car? I had a vague idea Nash became Rambler which was sort of right when I looked it up.
I'm now wondering why a small English boy would have been aware of that around 60 years ago - and remembered it!
Not in the "brand engineering" sense more common recently. As w/ General Motors, which happened earlier, there was consolidation in the auto industry post-WWII. My 1949 Nash, and a shallow refrigerator w/ all glass shelves and no detail on the inside of a plain sheet door except a War Board price label, were made by the Nash-Kelvinator Company. At least the Nash part went to Rambler, which went to American Motors (which also got Jeep, which was why Chrysler wanted it), which (Jeep) went to Chrysler, which went to Mercedes Benz for a brief period before merging with Fiat...and now some further changes in the works I think I read somewhere.
Technically, there seems like a certain innovative trend in engineering that carried through from Nash through Chrysler. (Nash had early uni-body, front seats that folded to make the whole interior a large bed, a piece of exhaust tubing for an exhaust manifold and no arches in the front fenders for turning of the front wheels...which required a narrow track, created an odd appearance, and probably killed the brand. Chrysler had torsion bar suspension for awhile, which may have come from Packard or someone else they absorbed?)