Whatever Happened to Nash Motors? The Automaker That Helped Create AMC

Nash Motors was once one of America’s most successful independent automakers. It built everything from prestigious luxury cars to tiny compacts, experimented with unusual aerodynamic styling and helped pioneer ideas that Detroit’s larger manufacturers would eventually embrace.

Then the Nash name seemingly disappeared. But the company didn’t simply go out of business. Its story leads directly to Rambler, American Motors Corporation and one of the most interesting family trees in American automotive history.

Charles Nash Left General Motors to Build His Own Company

Charles W. Nash had already reached the top of the automobile industry before putting his own name on a car. He served as president of Buick and later president of General Motors before leaving GM in 1916. That year, he purchased the Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, an established automaker best known for the Rambler. The first automobile carrying the Nash name appeared in 1917.

Nash positioned his cars primarily in the middle of the market and built the company around a simple philosophy: give customers more than they paid for. It worked. Nash expanded manufacturing, became a major producer of military trucks during World War I and by 1926 had become one of America’s best-selling automobile makes. The upscale Ambassador arrived in 1932 and developed such a reputation for quality that some enthusiasts nicknamed the cars the “Kenosha Duesenbergs.”

The company changed dramatically again in 1937 when Nash Motors merged with refrigerator manufacturer Kelvinator. George W. Mason, who had run Kelvinator, took control of the new Nash-Kelvinator Corporation and began pushing the automaker toward increasingly unconventional ideas.

Nash Wasn’t Afraid to Build Strange Cars

Under Mason, Nash became one of Detroit’s great experimenters. The 1949 Airflyte models arrived with radically rounded aerodynamic bodies and partially enclosed wheels, earning plenty of “bathtub” jokes but looking unlike almost anything else on American roads. Nash then went in the opposite direction of the industry’s obsession with bigger cars by introducing the compact Rambler in 1950. The little Rambler proved that Americans would buy a smaller, well-equipped automobile if the package was right.

Nash was also willing to look outside the United States. The Anglo-American Nash-Healey sports car combined Nash mechanical components with British engineering and later Italian styling. The Metropolitan took the idea even further: Nash conceived the tiny car for American buyers but had it built in Britain. Introduced for 1954, the Metropolitan was dramatically smaller than typical American cars of the period.

The strategy produced some wonderfully odd automobiles, but Nash remained an independent fighting companies with vastly greater resources. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler could spread development costs across enormous production volumes and extensive dealer networks. By the early 1950s, Mason increasingly believed America’s surviving independent manufacturers would need to combine if they hoped to compete.

Nash Disappeared Into American Motors

In 1954, Nash-Kelvinator merged with Hudson Motor Car Company to create American Motors Corporation. At the time, it was the largest corporate merger in American history. Mason envisioned AMC as the beginning of an even larger combination of independent automakers capable of challenging Detroit’s Big Three, but he died unexpectedly later that year. George Romney subsequently took control of the new company.

For several years, Nash and Hudson names continued appearing on cars, but AMC increasingly concentrated its resources around the successful Rambler. The final Nash-branded automobiles were produced for the 1957 model year. The Rambler name survived, eventually becoming the identity most closely associated with AMC during its rise as the Big Three’s scrappy smaller competitor.

So what happened to Nash Motors? It never experienced the dramatic collapse suffered by companies like Packard or Studebaker. Instead, Nash essentially evolved into something else. Its factories, engineers, products and corporate structure became part of American Motors, which continued building cars in Kenosha for decades. AMC itself was ultimately purchased by Chrysler in 1987—but buried inside that lineage was the company Charles Nash had started more than 70 years earlier.