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"We have the widest choice of car sizes available," says William Benton, general manager of the company's Ford division, appropriating a boast long made by GM. "There are customers who do not want to compromise the six-passenger comfort and the many other attributes of the family-size car. We are going to continue to meet this sizable market."
The Ford LTD is as big as ever, and a new, luxurious 1977 Continental Mark V is as long (but not as heavy) as its predecessor. Thunderbird, however, is 10 in. shorter this time to compete with the snazzy intermediate Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Chrysler Cordoba. A new LTD II replaces the Ford Torino in the intermediate camp, where cars sell for less than GM's barely larger full-size cars, in the hope of winning over former GM drivers.
Chrysler lost $260 million in 1975 and so would not have had the money to make extensive changes this year even if its officials had wanted to. They did not; back solidly in the black, thanks largely to the success of the intermediate Cordoba and the compacts—Plymouth Volare and Dodge Aspen—Chrysler is tinkering with the three only a little. Volare, for example, gets a "super six" engine that is 20% more fuel efficient than its old 318-cu.-in. V8.
American Motors, whose best hope, the squat Pacer, was a terrific sales disappointment, lost $43.2 million in 1975. It has stretched the Pacer 4 in. to make it a station wagon. Gremlins and the intermediate Matadors are newly sweetened by having some of last year's options as standard equipment.
In their internal struggle for sales, the domestic four have little reason to worry that cheap imports will walk off with the prize. Foreign cars took 18% of U.S. sales in 1975, but are getting only 13.8% now. What is more, nearly all the foreign automakers last spring were targets of complaint to the Treasury that they were dumping cars in the U.S.—that is, selling them for lower prices than in their home countries. To escape a tariff increase, most of the foreign makers agreed to raise their U.S. prices—by coincidence or not, about as much as Detroit's prices will go up.
Whoever wins the great scrap of 1977, all the automakers are already at work down-sizing their cars for 1978 and later years. GM will reduce the size of its 1978 intermediates, then its 1979 compacts. The smallest cars will have front-wheel drive to eliminate the transmission-train "hump" that decreases back-seat leg room. Next spring Ford will trot out a pint-size Lincoln called the Versailles and in another year will be bringing over its subcompact Fiestas from Europe (TIME, July 12). In 1979 both Ford and Chrysler are expected to introduce new full-size models no larger than their 1977 intermediates. American Motors has a subcompact even smaller than the Gremlin on the boards, probably for 1979.