1984 AMC Eagle station wagon

Sales of traditional sedans have plummeted; now it's all about crossover SUVs. Love it or hate it, the AMC Eagle was the car that popularized the crossover.

There's a good article on curbsideclassic.com about the 1970 AMC Hornet titled, "Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life." The title speaks to the fact that AMC, unable to invest the capital needed to create new car bodies, re-envisioned the Hornet compact first as a "luxury compact" called the Concord in the late 70s, then again as the Jeep-like 4x4 Eagle sedan and wagon in the 80s. The wagon pictured below carried AMC all the way to its demise at the end of 1987.

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1953 Hudson Hornet

Today begins a run of what will be many, many posts with pix of cars from the Greenwood car show. Every year Seattleites bring some the the rarest and most interesting vehicles ever made to this show, and this year I'll be covering them in detail.

Hudson shocked the industry in 1948 when they introduced the first car with a floor lower than the door sills. This gave the car a very low center of gravity that helped it dominate early NASCAR racing, despite the fact that it did not have a particularly powerful engine. This '53 is not significantly different from the original "step-down" Hudsons of 1948, and the car would get only a mild makeover in 1954 before the sun set for good on the brand. There would be a few more cars called Hudson, but they were merely copies of Nash-Ramblers.

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1979 AMC Concord DL

Perhaps you've seen the Simpsons episode Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield, in which Marge repeatedly alters her Chanel suit because she can't afford a new one. Apply that same idea to a car, and you've got the AMC Hornet-Concord-Eagle.

In the fall of 1969, AMC introduced its new Hornet model as a compact car for the budget-minded. Now flash forward a decade. Compact cars are becoming more popular, and AMC is trying to stay in the game but they don't have the money needed to engineer new models. So AMC adds plush seats, a vinyl top and... um... color-coordinated wheel covers to the Hornet. Now it's a unique "luxury compact". Sounds crazy, right? Incredibly enough, this gambit actually worked - this car sold 100,000 copies in 1979 alone. Who can explain anything from the 70s?

And if that isn't unlikely enough, AMC pulled the same trick again a couple of years later when they put the same old bodies atop their new Jeep-derived chassis, thus creating the Eagle - the first four-wheel drive "crossover". Even the old Gremlin got turned into a 4x4. Good times!

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1977 AMC Hornet Sportabout wagon

The Hornet was a new car for American Motors in 1970. This same basic station wagon body staggered all the way to the 1988 model year atop the all-wheel drive Eagle chassis. Chrysler Corp. then purchased AMC and closed their Kenosha, WI factory.

The most famous Hornet is of course the 1974 model X used in the corkscrew-jump in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun.

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