1978 AMC Matador Wagon - Non Playable Character

From my, "you sure don't see many of these around these days" file, I bring you this very generic looking blue-on-blue station wagon. It's so run-of-the-mill, save for that "WTF front end", it's almost like a non-playable-character in some video game. But this isn't an "NPC", it's an AMC Matador wagon from the last year long gone AMC pushed them out, 1978. 

I'll do my best to adjust my ocular nozzles to see this thing through my woe-be-gone, "Wonder Years" goggles and what I remember was that any folks who had one did so because they were less expensive than anything The Big Three offered. Value first and then they were somewhat less large than what GM, Ford and Chrysler sold as well. Therefore, I could surmise, I'm somewhat amazed my father didn't have one because an AMC Matador, sedan or wagon, has my old man's name written all over it. These also came in a funky, not in a good way, two-door coupe that rode on a shorter wheelbase and shared not a single body stamping. 

Same buyers of these things not unlike purchasers of anything from Hyundai or Kia today - they see value first and foremost. Or they did. Hyundai has certainly come a long way, make that a very, very long way, in shoring up their brands in the public vernacular as being more than affordable. I still would never be caught dead in one. 

AMC, which in a good year might have sold half of what Chrysler did and Chrysler sold about half of what Ford would do, sold many a Matador sedan and wagon to fleets; particularly police departments who found them to be quite reliable. Such a deal for local municipalities who'd buy then en masse. Of course, Sherriff Taylor would park his Matador behind the station at night and drove home in his Ford or Chevy. 

"AMC", an acronym for "American Motors Corporation", the result of the 1954 merger of Nash and Hudson, had cut it's front grill at first on being purveyors of compact and midsize models. Once The Big Three dipped their bumpers in their world, their golden goose was cooked. They countered with somewhat mainstream looking designs that were all but rehashes of what The Big Three baked up. The Matador, which replaced the Rebel in the AMC portfolio, was perhaps AMC's best attempt to make inroads in the lucrative family sedan\wagon market. 

For 1978 buyers had a choice of a gaggle of compacts at AMC from the Concord to the Pacer, the Gremlin and then the big jump up to the "full-size" Matador which was sized around what The Big Three marketed at the time as a mid-size car. Well, that was until GM started the great down-sizing epoch. Anyway, AMC even had a sporty version of the Gremlin they called, "AMX". Note to self, find a 1978 vintage AMX with the AMC 360-cubic inch V-8 to blog about.  

Plunging sales of the Matador, no doubt due to swanky and heavily marketed smaller wares from GM and Ford, forced AMC to the pull the plug on the whole fleet for 1979. That's not to say they went about flopping around like a fish-out-of-water. AMC rolled out their game changing four-wheel-drive Eagles for 1980; they had the hardware for it in house since Jeep was part of AMC at the time. Hard to understate what a seminal vehicle those homely-as-sin things were. 

AMC was absorbed by the Chrysler Corporation in 1987 who only wanted the company for one thing - Jeep. Chrysler promptly rebranded any existing or then in the pipeline AMC products as "Eagle"; the bones of the Eagle Premiere eventually underpinned the Chrysler "LH" series that debuted to great fanfare in 1993. 

I found this 1978 Matador wagon on Facebook Marketplace and is for sale with an asking price a pie-in-the-sky $9,500. It has only 47,000-miles on it and appears to be in great shape. Perhaps someone would see the "value" in this much like the original owner did.