1971-1973 Hillman Avenger/Plymouth Cricket

You couldn't blame Hillman. It was never their idea to try to sell Avengers to Americans. The company's Eisenhower-era Minx sedans and Husky station wagons, styled by Raymond Loewy and looking something like miniature Studebakers, had failed to set the U.S. market on fire, though they were best-sellers back home. The rear-engine Imps of the mid-1960s, marketed as Sunbeams to the States, had gathered dust on dealer lots here while Volkswagen sales boomed. Was there any reason to think that things would have been any different in the 1970s?

Chrysler Corporation, which became Hillman's parent when it snapped up the Rootes Group in 1967, viewed things differently. Chrysler knew that Ford and General Motors had been pouring huge sums of money into their Pinto and Vega subcompact programs, while Highland Park had nothing in the pipeline. Rather than let the corporation get caught flat-footed, someone at Chrysler struck on a brilliant idea: Why not slap a Plymouth badge on the Avenger, and sell it to Americans?

The idea was not as far-fetched as it might have seemed. Chrysler already had a substantial stake in the Rootes Group when Hillman began laying the groundwork for its new Avenger, intended to slot between the Mini-sized Imp and the larger Hunter. The styling, influenced by Chrysler, drew on Detroit themes, with a mild Coke-bottle shape and a semi-fastback roofline--this was not something that would look out of place in Peoria. Neither would mechanical complexity be a barrier, with a front-mounted, pushrod inline-four driving the rear wheels.

In 1965, when the Avenger was conceived, the competition was not the Pinto or the Vega, but Britain's highly competitive small-to-medium sedan class that included such best-sellers as the Ford Cortina, BMC 1100/1300 family, and Vauxhall Viva. Comfortable, cheap to buy, and cheap to run were the watchwords. Hillman's cast-iron, 1,248cc four was new, and employed a high camshaft and short pushrods, allowing a relatively high redline of 7,000 rpm. The gearbox was a conventional four-speed unit, and a live axle was mounted at the rear.

The Avenger could claim a more sophisticated suspension than most of its rivals, with a four-link rear suspension in place of the usual leaf springs and anti-roll bars front and rear. The unit body, one of the first designed with the aid of computers, was unusually stiff, aiding the ride and handling. Though lightweight, the car showed excellent crashworthiness. The Avenger went on sale in the U.K. in 1970. Acclaimed by the critics, it became the success that Rootes so desperately needed.

Plymouth tweaked the Avenger for duty in the Colonies. It was decided that only the four-door sedan and the station wagon would be offered in the line; for some curious reason, the sporty, two-door coupe sold in England would be excluded, even though two-door subcompacts were popular with U.S. buyers. It was also decided that all Crickets would have the four-headlamp front end of the upscale GL and GT model Avengers, because the two-headlamp version of the base cars did not meet federal safety regulations. Plymouth knew that the 1,248cc engine would be too scrawny for American tastes, and so specified the 1,498cc, single-carburetor engine as standard, and threw in the optional-in-the-U.K. front disc brakes. To satisfy federal safety requirements, front seats incorporated headrests, their tombstone design unique to the U.S. market. (When British-market cars acquired headrests several years later, they were of the separate, adjustable type.) Side marker lamps, a seat belt safety buzzer system and, later, rubber-tipped bumper overriders were further concessions to safety laws.

The first shipment of 280 Crickets arrived stateside on November 20, 1970. Plymouth ads announced it as "The Little Car that Can," playing up its roominess, handling, braking and unit-body construction. In the market, though, the Cricket was nothing more than a bystander to the rumble between the Pinto and the Vega. When the dust settled, the final sales figures for the 1971 model year were: Pinto, 352,402; Vega, 274,699; and Cricket, 27,682.

The Cricket's $1,915 base price was competitive with the Vega's $2,090 and the Pinto's $1,919, but its 70hp engine paled in comparison with the 2-liter, 100hp four offered in the Ford, or the 85hp, dual-carburetor four offered in the Chevrolet. The power shortage was especially acute when the cars were equipped with air conditioning and automatic transmissions. Worse, the cars developed a reputation for poor build quality, with premature rust and water leaks common. Cricket production slumped to just 13,882 in 1972. Plymouth addressed the power shortage, bumping up the compression ratio from 8.0:1 to 8.5:1 in 1972 and making a dual-carburetor version optional that same year, but it wasn't enough. After the 1973 model year, the Cricket chirped no more.

Back in Britain, the Avenger continued to sell well. Nearly three-quarters of a million had been built by the time production ended in 1981; it was even rebadged as a Talbot when Chrysler sold its European operations to Peugeot in 1979. Even then, the story wasn't over. When Volkswagen bought Chrysler's factories in Argentina, it kept the Avenger in production until 1994--as the Volkswagen Dodge 1500. Today, Crickets are nearly extinct in the U.S., and the memories of Chrysler's English connection nearly forgotten.