Car Spot: AMC Eagle

A touchdown pass that came too late in the game …

This is one of those “I was there when it happened” stories. For any of you who follow me regularly, you know I’m a huge American Motors geek and that’s because my dad worked there from 1963 to 1989. Those early years were booming for the company. Everything was clicking. AMC had 441,508 sales in 1963, up almost 10 grand from the year before. Motor Trend magazine selected the 1963 Rambler line as their “Car of the Year.”

Dad worked as the Fleet Manager at the Parts Distribution Center in Milwaukee. Things were going so well that the company bought Jeep in 1970. In the 1980’s it all started to unravel making AMC take bigger swings for the fence in its fight for survival. One of those is this week’s spot, the AMC Eagle.

It was one of their “off-the-shelf” creations with a mix of new stuff. I remember my dad telling me what was coming. It would be the first 4-wheel-drive car and the first crossover SUV ever! They were creating a market for something that wouldn’t be mainstream for almost two decades. Some will argue that it was just a 4-wheel-drive car, but I’m going with the camp that says it’s both.

Created by Roy Lunn from Jeep Engineering, a British expat who had worked on the Ferrari-beating Ford GT40. … Hey, that wasn’t in the movie:)

In 1972, he cobbled together an AMC Hornet with a Jeep Quadra-Trac drive system. The combination was a great idea but needed refining. AMC almost shelved the project because Lunn asked for another million bucks, $7,313,181 today, to build a second prototype. That was a ton of money for a company that was cash-strapped, but they ponied up the cash and he came up with another system that worked.

While Lunn was an engineer, he also had a keen marketing eye and noticed an increasing disconnect between the way Jeeps were marketed and the customers who actually bought them. Writing years later in a technical paper for the Society of Automotive Engineers, he said: “It was evident that many consumers coming from the 2WD segments were buying the vehicles, like Jeeps, for the security they offered for on-highway driving, although the only vehicles available were accented to off-road usage. This out-of-context purchase, particularly in high volumes, raises the question of whether there was a need for a new type of vehicle with a different balance of compromise accented to highway usage.”

Does that sound familiar? In other words, commercials showing people driving up mountains, but in real life, they only go to the grocery store or the mall. Soccer moms drive a lot of them like the Audi Allroad, VW Passat Alltrack, Volvo XC range, and Subaru Outback and Forester. They are now a huge profit center for today’s manufacturers.

The concept was an instant best-seller, AMC selling 46,379 Eagles in the first year, increasing AMC’s total vehicle output by almost 20%. The base price for the wagon was $7,549 and loaded up was just under $10 grand. The Hail Mary turned into a cash cow and AMC quickly developed a number of similar models using the same basic formula, a 4×4 drivetrain and lifted suspension fitted to an AMC road car. Based off the Concord, it came as a wagon, sedan, two-door, and a two-door based on the Spirit. I owned an ’83 SX/4 like the one below.

It was equipped with AMC’s sturdy 258 cu. in. straight-6 engine mated to a 3-speed automatic transmission that sent power to a Dana 30 differential up front and a Dana 35 differential in back.

It came with a lot of standard equipment like power steering, power front disc, and rear drum brakes. Options included air conditioning, a rear window defroster, halogen headlamps, an AM/FM stereo, and an adjustable steering wheel. Dad even had one that had a CB radio in it. Remember CBs?

RELATED Spot: The car the Concord was based on, the Hornet.

Eagles came off the assembly line in Kenosha, and later Brampton, Ont., from 1979 until 1987 and then were discontinued after Chrysler Corp. bought AMC in 1987. The final car rolled out of AMC’s original Brampton Assembly Plant on Dec. 14, 1987.

During its three-decade run, AMC had so many firsts for automakers and this was its last. Sure, there were times when they zigged when they should have zagged, like the Pacer and Matador, but the dependability of the cars they built was pretty much on par with the Big Three. Have you read about all the recent Ford recalls?

The Rambler emphasized quality, reliability, and value and at one time in the early 60s was the No.3 US auto maker, ahead of Chrysler. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, AMC put out muscle cars like the Javelin, Scrambler, and Machine that competed with the Big Three and are rapidly increasing in value in the collector market.

AMC even created the lowest-priced sub-compact in America in the Gremlin by loping off the back of a Hornet.

AMC’s legacy lives on. Ok, I’m a homey but this is my blog post so I’m going to just cover one other thing AMC did that was actually credited with saving Chrysler after the merger.

Lee Iacocca, then head of Chrysler, kept the former AMC units like engineering completely intact. Additionally, AMCs’ Head of Engineering, François Castaing, was made head of all engineering and completely dismantled the existing Chrysler groups. They were not happy, naturally.

Castaing replaced them with, AMC’s “platform team” concept. As closeknit cross-functional groups, they were responsible for the whole vehicle, as contrasted with Chrysler’s highly dysfunctional structure. Old-school Chrysler people believed that the company’s reputation as “the engineering company” was being destroyed and they were right, but not because of this.

By the 1980s, in former Chrysler President Bob Lutz’s view, only tough choices were going to change Chrysler’s failing reputation. It was Chrysler’s purchase of American Motors that laid the critical foundation to help re-establish a strategy for its revival in the 1990s. Those platform teams are now also used at General Motors.

RELATED Spot: The car that cost AMC dearly, the Pacer.

My dad worked at the National Parts Distribution Center in Milwaukee and ran the fleet of trucks that went to all the zone offices across the country and there were a lot of them. Chrysler’s fleet wasn’t even close to his in efficiency and they used my dad’s final two years, 1988 and ’89 at the company to streamline its fleet.

RELATED: Cool article on what AMC might have looked like if it had made it.

Where can you find an Eagle now? The wagon can be found for well under $10 grand, with the SX/4 harder to find. The Kammback is almost impossible to find since they were only made in 1981 and ’82.

There also was the Sundancer where the top was removed it was converted to a Targa. It was available on both the Eagle and Concord and was also the first AMC convertible, sort of, since the 1968 Rebel nearly a decade and a half earlier. It never sold well, roughly 200 examples for the 1981-’82 model years. If you can find one in good shape, they sell for nearly $40 grand now.

Eagles are now being discovered by collectors and some of them are going for crazy prices. At a Mecum auction last year this ’87 Limited with 72,000 miles on it sold for $35,200

Thanks for stopping by and checking out this spot on an AMC. Check back next week for another one along with some of its history and have a great weekend. Check out our videos on Savageonwheels YouTube channel too.