An AMC Gremlin similar to this 1975 was parked on our block the other day and my twenty-three-year-old son, who could care less about cars, freaked out and said he wanted one. His mother laughed out loud about it and fondly remembered a couple of friends of hers who had them. She thinks their cute as a button. I was, frankly, good-naturedly aghast. AMC Gremlins have that effect on people; you either love them or hate them.
Much like the equally vexing Pacer, their ability to polarize has everything to do with their styling for certain what they are mechanically is nothing out of the ordinary. To say nothing of their driving dynamics.
AMC, or "American Motors Corporation", certainly didn't set out to create a highly polarizing design that they launched on, of all days, April Fool's Day, 1970.
During the mid-to-late 1950's, the company that evolved from the 1954 merger of Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson carved a fairly lucrative niche as purveyors of small or smaller cars than what GM, Ford and Chrysler, sold at the time. That all changed come 1960 when "The Big Three" introduced compact cars but AMC didn't miss much of a beat selling cars, branded exclusively as "Rambler", that were small and being kind, avant garde. There may have been some perceived superior quality as well with AMC vehicles; my father claimed their superior build was a deciding factor in his buying the 1961 Rambler Classic I remember him having when I was a young child.
However, by the late Sixties, AMC's wares had become painfully dated, outmoded even. They even started to sell larger cars to be more competitive with the Big Three this muddying their marketing position. With Volkswagen eating their proverbial small car lunch by two-to-one and GM and Ford launching subcompacts of their own to compete with VW, AMC's goose was cooked. Keep in mind this was several years before Asian brands would have more than a toehold in this country.
Enter AMC's "small" car named after a "mischievous sprite" responsible for unexplained mechanical faults. Might sound comical, if not cute on paper, but to name a car "Gremlin" under such an auspice must have seemed strange if not unusual at the time. Certainly, doesn't sound any less weird all these years later, although, we probably couldn't think of a better or more apt name for these cars.
Having spent the majority of my career working for underfunded, understaffed operations, I more than empathize with the plight of AMC in the late Sixties; there's only so much money to go around. And seeing AMC spent liberally on introducing a replacement for the Rambler American, that being the new for 1970 "compact" Hornet, you have to work with what you have.
To make a sub-compact out of the Hornet, which was all but a Rambler American with a different body, AMC hacked eight inches off the wheel-base and whipped up the funky rear end treatment to make it appear smaller. As sub-compacts go, AMC Gremlin's are pretty big.
This is what's called a Kamm tail or K-tail and is a styling feature where the rear of the car slopes down before being abruptly cut off with a vertical or near-vertical surface. This being a '75, the rear "safety-bumper" blunts that "vertical-surface". affect. The rear end on pre-1974 Gremlin's look about as good, or less bad, as the design possibly could. Certainly the "hockey-stick" styling on the rear quarter window does the K-tail no favors either. Your opinion may vary. See dealer for details.
The Kamm treatment on the rear end is offset by a too tall roof line relative to the incline of the K-tail as well. The whole thing works for some people, like my younger son and his mother, for instance. I, again, am put off by it. But it's what makes an AMC Gremlin an AMC Gremlin and not some over stylized, two-door Hornet.
The rest of a Gremlin is Seventies bread-and-butter cheapy car basic. You know the drill. Body on frame, front engine, rear wheel drive, ghastly heavy, overhead valve in-line six, rear leaf springs and so on. I don't see a power steering pump down there so you can imagine how hard this one would be to steer. It's for sale, if you're wondering, somewhere in New Jersey with an asking price of $5,000.
NADA high-retail pegs one of these at $2,150. Low retail at $500. Which, frankly, sounds more than about right. Then again, NADA guidelines aren't necessarily in line with what's going on in the real world. Like a lot of us these days, not only do we see crazy asking prices for cars, dealers and folks are getting what their asking.
I know given the opportunity and the right set of circumstances, my younger son would drop five-large on this one and have me flat on my back trying to get all the Gremlins out of his Gremlin. Which, of course, I would do with pleasure.
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