Inspired by $4-a-gallon gas and tanking SUV sales, Ford Motor Co. has promised to build more small cars.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Bill Vance (ENLARGE)

The easy-to-pick-on AMC Pacer, from the '70s.

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No disrespect to Ford, or to its very hip-looking new Fiesta, but American car manufacturers have never accomplished small things in a big way.

From the exploding Pinto to the unsafe-at-any-speed Corvair, domestic compacts and subcompacts have a spotty track record.

For a sampling of opinion, one could go to the Edmonds.com automotive research Web site, which called the Ford Pinto and the Chevrolet Vega "among the worst heaps of quick-rusting, self-immolating parts ever sold as 'cars' in the United States."

Or you could ask the person who has owned one. Even those who loved their small cars did so with reservations, the way one might cherish a particularly ugly, incontinent household pet.

Although it dropped parts like a deciduous tree, "I thought it was the best car ever," Alan Berman said of the 1971 Chevy Vega he bought brand-new when he was 17 years old. He drove it for six glorious years.

The upside: It was Corvette yellow, had a Camaro interior and got 30 miles to the gallon (at 37 cents a gallon). The downside: It spewed coolant, and the fenders rotted off in a matter of two years.

"The car was made of rust dust and pretty much disintegrated," said Berman, an east Cobb County resident who survived that car to become a consultant in automobile marketing and sales.

Other owners of vintage American small cars have a similar split-brained fondness for vehicles they admit had gross flaws.

Barbara McMillan and her husband both owned Mercury Capris in the 1970s and '80s. Hers almost drove itself into a tree when the cruise control wires melted and fused. This incident happened on the way home from the dealer.

His was also no prize. "It started falling apart on day one," said Barton McMillan, a home builder from the Northlake area. "It was a perfect example of planned obsolescence." The car was stolen once but, to his chagrin, the police found it and brought it back.

Oddly enough, when seeking a car for their teenager, J.R., the McMillans bought a used baby blue 1980 Pinto Pony station wagon from an elderly neighbor. "It was cool," said J.R. "It was terrible," said his dad. But the price was right: a $100 donation to their neighbor's church.

Is small un-American?

Why are so many American small cars so mediocre?

Perhaps the concept of the small car is, itself, un-American, said Roger Casey, vice president and provost at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. The author of "Textual Vehicles: The Automobile in American Literature," Casey points out that bigger is better in American culture.

"The second thing is, historically, in American culture, the automobile has been associated with masculinity," said Casey. And, when it comes to masculinity, "small is not the preferable direction."

More important, American manufacturers make more money off of bigger cars, said Jim Hossack, of the California-based AutoPacific, an automotive product and marketing consulting company. "They dig where the gold is."

As result, American builders have focused on full-size vehicles. During the 1990s and 2000s, as worldwide oil trouble fermented, American vehicles became even more gargantuan.

Hossack's colleague Ed Kim pointed out that most domestic small cars are an afterthought, created by the Big Three manufacturers — Ford, GM and Chrysler — to allow their companies to adhere to Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards.

In 1975, new federal standards required manufacturers to introduce fuel-efficient cars, to enhance the overall fuel-performance of their product lines. The "econo-boxes" they built as a result were bare bones and hastily conceived, Kim said. Low price was the small car's redeeming characteristic.

"Small cars were the stepchildren," he said. "The Cavalier, the Escort, those vehicles helped manufacturers meet CAFE goals but didn't do a lot toward adding value to their brands."

In comparison, Japanese manufacturers created better value in their entry-level cars, Kim said. The Corolla, he said, displayed a fit and finish approximating the Camry's.

The legendary Pacer

And then there were the small cars that were just plain weird.

The late, great American Motors Corporation didn't have a monopoly on these but produced some winners, including the Gremlin and that masterpiece seemingly made of Pyrex, the Pacer.

Frequently named among the worst designs of all time, the AMC Pacer was wide, slow and a gas hog. The ubiquitous curving glass windows and the under-powered air conditioning made for unpleasant summertime driving. ("[I]t was like being an ant under a mean kid's magnifying glass," wrote a Time magazine critic.)

Still, not surprisingly, even Pacers have their adherents. Jeff Puras, a descendant of AMC employees and a former resident of Kenosha, Wis. (home of AMC), picked up a semi-abandoned Pacer station wagon from a Norcross parking lot recently to add to his AMC collection (which includes a '68 AMX and a '79 Spirit).

In some ways it was kind of a sympathy purchase. Certainly, Puras, 61, who these days builds race cars out of carbon fiber for Elan Motorsports in Braselton, is an unlikely champion of this rolling fishbowl.

And he's not unaware of its goofy reputation. "We're just glad Pontiac came out with the Aztek," he said, "so there's an uglier car out there."

Ultimately, the consumer moves the market, and Americans don't buy many small cars. The small car share of U.S. passenger car sales dropped from 20 percent to 17 percent during the last 20 years. American-made small cars had an even smaller share, dropping from 10 percent to 5 percent since 1997, according to AutoPacific.

A new generation?

Industry watchers expect those numbers to change, but not for the expected reasons. Kim said a "tidal wave" of 76 million Generation Y consumers, ages 14 to 30, are coming into the first-car market. "Typically the first-time buyer starts with [a] small car," he said.

Coupled with greater demand for fuel efficiency, the two forces should push the market to 3 million units in 2008 and 3.6 million in 2013, he said.

It may be happening already. GM, stunned by the drop in the market for trucks and sport utility vehicles, recently announced it is looking to cut $10 billion in expenses in the next year and a half. But the company is adding 3,600 employees to a Lordstown, Ohio, plant that builds the compact Cobalt, according to The Wall Street Journal. The same plant will also build a new compact car, the Cruze, in 2010.

If American manufacturers want to stay alive, they need to take the current situation to heart, AMC collector Puras said. Take a snapshot of the slumping car market and high gas prices, and then take action.

"They need to, they have to, come up with small cars people want," he said. "They just have to."