AMC, Mopar’s Red-Headed Stepchild

In the six months I’ve been contributing to CarDomain, I’ve become known as the one with the odd-car gene. Pontiac Fieros, station wagons, and especially AMCs—my avatar pretty much says it all. And I’ve learned that Jen also seems to have a similar affliction for the odd cars from Kenosha, particularly the ahead-of-their-time all-wheel-drive Eagles. More AMC action after the jump!

In doing some research for an upcoming feature on a 1957 Rambler Rebel, arguably the first true muscle car by definition—big engine in an intermediate-sized car, sub-7-second 0-60 time which in 1957 made it the second fastest car built in America after the Corvette—I went back into my archives and found a CD of images taken in 2002 of Rambler’s 100th Anniversary celebration in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where more than 1,200 of AMC’s finest showed up to celebrate its centenary.

Over at Automotive Traveler, I’ve posted some of the images I took six years ago in Kenosha, like the world’s first unibody compact shown above, simply because there are so few places online where one can view in one location a broad cross-section of the cars that AMC built from 1954 when Nash and Hudson merged to form American Motors, through the acquisition of Jeep in 1970, until the bitter end in 1987. AMC, which had been building M-Body (the Fifth Avenue, Dodge Diplomat and Plymouth Grand Fury) Mopars for two years under contract in Kenosha, was ultimately bought by Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca from Renault to capture the Jeep brand and the Grand Cherokee which was already in development. See more of these amazing machines in my galleries: these are AMC’s I’ve shot for magazine features over the years, while the second and third are of the 2002 Kenosha show and are reserved for members of Automotive Traveler—click the button at either of these sites to register for free. Enjoy!