1969 AMC Rebel - Green Machine. (Or Is it Blue?)

This mossed over 1969 AMC Rebel SST is part of a bumper crop of interesting enough to blog out Facebook Marketplace finds I stumbled upon recently. Are my recent pot-of-gold-discoveries a sign that FB Marketplace is returning to its glory days where relics like this, good or bad, popped up with regularity? I doubt it. More than likely it's a sign that spring is coming, and folks are fixin' to push their junkers off one someone. 

In the classic car universe, coupes and convertibles are most desirable meanwhile most (car) people could care less about four-door sedans. Even station wagons get more love than "three-box" cars with four-doors do. That fact underscores the absurdity of the $7,500 the poster of the ad is asking for this. The only upside is with it being down in bucolic, rural Harriman, Tennessee (near Knoxville), it'll be fairly rust free. Seeing the shape this is in, it's not running, that asking price is over the moon even if this was a blessed coupe.

American Motors Corporation, or "AMC", the result of a merger between Hudson and Nash in 1954, had carved out a nice niche in the mid-to-late-Fifties as purveyors of compact and quasi-intermediate sized, fairly quirkily styled automobiles. Once GM, Ford and Chrysler started selling smaller makes and models, AMC's goose was all but cooked. They countered cratering sales by offering larger and more mainstreamed styled wares. 

Although most of AMC's mid-to-late-Sixties designs were derivatively styled, AMC never quite shook off all of the "off-beatness" that harkened back to the Nash "bathtub" days. Even this literal garden variety Rebel has enough "out there" in its flanks to be somewhat off-putting; ha, as if being a sedan wasn't bad enough. Fear not, AMC got back on the truly wonky styling-train come the mid-Seventies. 

In retrospect, at least AMC tried to bolster itself and if they were successful would have been a great story. They hung in there only because they bought Jeep (on the cheap) from Kaiser in 1970. And when Chrysler swallowed AMC up in 1987, they ditched all of their cars (for the most part) and simply kept Jeep going. 

AMC's "Rebel" replaced the Rambler Classic nameplate starting in 1967, known as the Rambler Rebel in 1967 and simply "Rebel" from 1968-1970, Rebels could be had in coupe, wagon and of course, like our green machine here, sorry, I think it's actually blue, four-door sedan. AMC replaced the "Rebel" nameplate in 1971 gluing "Matador" to a car very similar to the 1970 Rebel. 

Update: this is still available, and the price has been reduced to $5,700. Still too much if you ask me.