I haven’t mentioned how much I hate the AMC Gremlin for a while. Does this mean I’ve mellowed? Have I allowed distance and time to soften the edges? Have I changed my mind? Hell no! I still hate ‘em!
I watched this review and was flooded with all the bad memories of AMC cars. It’s easy to forget the complete and utter level of suck that only Detroit and the cars of the oil embargo could produce. If you weren’t there to see it for yourself you simply must witness the fullness of the AMC’s Godawful majesty. Enjoy!
My older brother had a Gremlin when he was in High school in the late ’70’s. Actually he had two…one was a parts car that lived in the barn lot.
apparently it was cheaper to buy a whole second car to strip parts off of than it was to buy the parts needed when the “daily driver” broke down…at least when the second car had been totaled by an insurance company after a crash that bent the frame.
Anyway, AMC did make at least one decent car…the Javelin. If you watch the “Breaking Bad” spinoff “Better Call Saul” one of the gang banger characters drives a beautiful red one.
I grew up in rural central Indiana where virtually all the roads make up a 1 mile by 1 mile grid square. Every road being flat and straight means “every road is a drag strip”. It was pretty much our teenage pastime to go out to some random remote location and race our cars.
I had a ’73 Dodge Charger SE. The only two cars that beat me more often than not were a white ’74 AMC Javelin and a ’68 GTO that beat everyone every time.
Unfortunately that Javelin ended up wrapped around a tree before we graduated high school (the owner was banged up but lived to tell the tale), but it was a nice car.
The older ones just looked to me like Nova knock-offs, but the ’71-’74 models had a unique look and I loved the lines.
Anyway, back to the Gremiln…I honestly don’t see how it was any worse than the other “economy” offerings of the time. One of my best friends had a ’72 Chevy Vega that was absolutely a piece of crap. That’s the car we always took out partying because if we bounced it off a tree or drove it into a creek, no one would miss it. The most interesting thing about that car is that the friend who owned it had probably twice as much money in the bangin’ stereo in that car than the car itself.
The other car of that time that immediately jumps to mind is the Pinto, which was a great car if you didn’t mind being burned alive when it exploded in a rear end collision…other than that it was awesome [/sarcasm].
Not saying your hatred of the Gremlin was misplaced, but that there were many candidates in that era to despise (I still shudder at the thought that Ford desecrated the name “Mustang” by putting it on that four cylinder abomination they called the Mustang II in 1974.
I still look back on the muscle car era with nostalgia and if I had money to burn, I’d find an old GTO or Charger or Mustang to fix up…but to be honest, modern cars simply blow the old “muscle cars” away in every category. Heck, my wife’s vanilla 2011 Taurus with its V6 is quicker off the line, has a higher top end, and handles worlds better than either my high school ’73 Charger or my mid-life crisis ’70 Mustang ever did. The only thing those cars did better was burnouts. A real wheel drive car with most of the weight up front can really get those tires spinning and smoking.
I guess the great thing about the muscle car era was you could still work on them. You could tweak them, you could trick them out. You could make a ten second car out of one of them if you had the time, knowhow and money. Now days you have to have a computer engineering degree to do anything other than change the oil or service the brakes, so there’s that.
Anyway, thanks for the memories.
I remember it as, “Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?”
Gremlin….an appropriate name to be certain.
I think the Pacer was worse. It was actually uglier than the Gremlin.
Hear, hear! To me the Pacer always resembled an upside-down toilet. My friend Eric had a Gremlin that he spiced up a bit – performance wise (I’m not sure what he threw in it, but it moved.) and he painted it black with the gold “hockey stick” down the sides.
I’m in total agreement on the ’71 Javelin AMX, I would love to have one but I’ve seen them listed for 45k in good condition.
I would own one and drive it! I had a 1972 Hornet Sportabout which was T-boned and totaled. I bought a 1976 Hornet Sportabout with a 232cid (The larger 6cyl was a 258cid) I replaced the manifold and carburetor with a Jeep Hi rise Edelbrock manifold and a 450cfm 4 barrel and put on a hooker header and dual exhaust and I had a screamin’ ride! I pulled a floor shift 4 speed out of a wrecked Javelin and replaced the 3 speed tranny. I admit the Hornet looked better then any of the Gremlins. It had the brown interior like the vid and found a Gremlin with Black interior and swapped all the interior from it. The black looked better with the bright yellow exterior paint. Only car I ever owned that I got more tickets from as it was too bright and noticeable to cops…
When we were in high school, a friend of mine had a Gremlin with a 390 stuffed into it. The torque at idle threatened to turn the thing over.
Worst car I ever owned was an AMC Spirit, or the Spiritless as my friends called it. The design engineers for AMC should have been designing kids toys not cars.