[CPNE]

It's simply a marketing promo designed to keep the factories running and move vehicles off the lots in the 71 model year. Build a bunch of similar vehicles with no options other than some bright-work and pinstripes to "dress" them up (Cheap to do without much extra labor). Price them low and get your dealers to buy a bunch of them to put on the lot. Then support your dealers by building a marketing campaign around the "fear" of the day, which was inflation. GM figured not only could they move the vehicles but gain some marketing good will at the same time.

To understand this you need to understand the economic climate of the day. Here is an excerpt from the cover article in Time magazine in Dec 1970:

Americans are learning again how to make do—and do without. Denver wives are passing around the questionable tip that a 35¢ can of vegetable shortening works just as well as expensive cold cream for removing makeup. Newspapers are filled with advice columns on how to beat inflation (do your own sewing, shop for advertised food specials). Martha Patton of the Chicago Daily News recently advised her readers, "Never market when hungry." Hunt-Wesson Foods offered a cost-paring booklet of recipes called "We'll Help You Make It" —and got 850,000 mail requests. Only half jokingly, some Manhattanites stage "Beat-Inflation" parties, at which the menus consist of specialities devised in the days of World War II rationing: canned tomato soup and cheese on Ritz crackers or sweet and sour Spam.

Expensive restaurants are sparsely populated; at night one of the two dining rooms in Manhattan's Four Seasons is completely empty. Street-corner hot dog stands are enjoying a revival, and some of their best customers are executives whose expense accounts have been chopped. Many families have simply given up trying to cope. Between July and October, there were 63,600 personal bankruptcies, up 14% from the equivalent period last year.

Many Americans are doubly victimized, both by inflation and the battle against it, which has led to layoffs. The new unemployment has struck particularly hard at those least accustomed to it: clerks, technicians, management trainees, and even executives of the mostly white middle class. Unemployment lines bulge with not only out-of-work laborers but also veteran $20,000-and-up scientists and engineers, particularly in centers of advanced technology like Southern California, the Pacific Northwest and Boston.

Here is the magazine cover: