Patrick Foster (2020) recently argued that AMC should have offered a luxury spin-off of the sporty 1974 Matador coupe. He also suggested that such a car should have been named the Ambassador.
“With tunneled headlamps and an upright grille, it would have hit the personal luxury market at exactly the right time,” wrote Foster (2020) in a recent Hemmings editorial. “Chrysler’s Cordoba — which used those styling touches by the way — was one of the hottest-selling cars of the late 1970s.”
Foster makes a good point. The Ambassador nameplate would presumably have been a better fit with a luxury coupe than the Matador. In addition, AMC could have kept in production one of the longest-running nameplates in the U.S. auto industry.
Instead, for 1974 the Ambassador line was shrunk to a four-door sedan and wagon. Already meager output fell by 49 percent, so the nameplate was dropped.
A radiator grille wouldn’t have been enough
The problem with the Matador coupe was that merely slapping on a more formal hood and grille would not have achieved the right look. At the very least, the Matador’s bulls-eye taillights would have also needed to be replaced with something more understated.
Also see ‘Joe Ligo is overly kind in Nash/AMC Ambassador film’
But even then, the car would not have competed very well against the likes of the Cordoba. A particularly big problem was the fastback roofline. The steep slope of the C-pillar did not mesh well with a landau roof and opera windows. AMC made that clear when it gave the Matador coupe a high-end Barcelona model in 1977. Even with two-tone paint, the fastback made the car look awkward rather than luxurious.
AMC needed a notchback body style to do brougham properly. However, that would have been costly because the trunk lid and rear sheetmetal would have needed more than the usual reworking.
Without all of these changes, an Ambassador coupe would have come off as too half baked. Much like the 1978 Pacer’s unfortunate facelift.
AMC made two big mistakes
The Matador coupe’s core challenge was that it did only one thing well — look sporty. This displayed strikingly bad judgment. For starters, AMC was too small to support a stand-alone body. To make matters worse, the Matador coupe targeted a small and declining market.
As Foster (2013) has noted, AMC achieved more viable economies of scale when it squeezed a high number of models from each of its bodies. The best example of that during the early-70s was the automaker’s compact platform. Four Hornet body styles were offered in addition to a shorter-wheelbase Gremlin.
The Matador coupe’s styling was too specialized to allow such a broad range of spin-offs. Indeed, the body was so sporty that it didn’t even lend itself to a four-door sedan and wagon.
This was a bad move. By 1974 AMC’s mid-sized family cars desperately needed a restyling. They were among the oldest passenger cars in the U.S. auto industry, dating back to 1967.
Foster (1993) estimated that AMC needed to sell more than 80,000 units per year to cover the cost of the Matador coupe’s unique sheetmetal. That was almost as much as AMC’s entire output of Matadors and Ambassadors in 1973 or 1972. Meeting such an ambitious target would have been a challenge even with a design that had broad appeal. The Matador coupe did not.
What’s with the fastback, Dude?
After AMC decided to offer a coupe-only body, you would think management would have at least tried to maximize sales. That would have required styling flexible enough to appeal to both sporty as well as luxury coupe buyers. One way General Motors and Ford did that was to field notchback and fastback body styles.
But what if AMC could only afford one body style? Chrysler Corporation offered a number of examples. The 1971-74 Dodge Charger was fairly successful in appealing to both sporty and luxury coupe buyers with a wedgy notchback design.
Another decent compromise was the two-door coupe for the 1976 Plymouth Volare and Dodge Aspen. The C-pillar had a sharper slope than a typical notchback, but it still looked okay with a landau roof and opera windows.
I don’t see how AMC management could have justified a full-fledged fastback Matador. The automaker already had a lovely fastback in the Hornet hatchback. Meanwhile, by 1971-72 nobody’s mid-sized fastback was selling very well. In addition, a fastback roofline worked against one of AMC’s biggest advantages in the mid-sized class — an unusually roomy body.
So what could possibly have motivated AMC to spend an estimated $40 million on the Matador coupe (Foster, 2013)?
Was AMC obsessed with stock car racing?
My best guess is that the automaker was determined to become a major player in NASCAR racing. A more aerodynamic shape would presumably give the Matador coupe a competitive edge.
Former AMC designer Bob Nixon denied that this was the case. “Racing was never a factor in deciding the styling direction,” he told Foster (2014) in an interview for Collectible Automobile magazine.
Perhaps Nixon was telling the truth. Nevertheless, I have raised a number of questions about his veracity here. For example, Car and Driver wrote the following after the magazine test drove the Matador coupe:
“The AMC public relations department is sworn not to admit it, but there’s more than an aesthetic reason to why the Matador’s lines look like the handiwork of an aircraft designer. The racing contingent in American Motors has its eye on the Winston cup for 1974, and aerodynamics are very much a key to success in Grand National Stock Car racing” (1973, p. 45)
As it turned out, the Matador coupe didn’t do all that well in stock car racing (Wikipedia, 2020). Nor did it sell well. Indeed, one could reasonably call the car an expensive flop that helped to kill AMC.
Could a luxury spin-off have saved the Matador coupe?
Foster’s (2020) argument in favor of an Ambassador coupe is compelling. Even so, I am skeptical that it and the Matador would have together sold well enough to earn a profit.
One problem is that the Ambassador would likely have cannibalized Matador sales. In addition, even a notchback variant may have been too avant-garde to be all that competitive as a luxury coupe. The ultra-long, low snout and spare side sculpting deviated sharply from the neoclassical look of Big Three offerings.
Also see ‘The downside of auto historians writing about their friends’
I have argued elsewhere that AMC should have left the mid-sized field in favor of an expanded line of compacts. But if AMC was going to stick with mid-sized cars, then they should have given their entire lineup a major redesign.
AMC originally planned to do just that. Foster (2013) showed photographs of a proposed redesign slated for introduction around 1972. With some updating, those cars could have looked okay if they came out in 1974.
Also see ‘Proposed 1972-73 design could have saved AMC from ill-fated 1974 Matador coupe’
Instead, AMC ditched all that development work in favor of the boy racer Matador coupe. Foster (2020) suggested that “management was feeling a little too cocky” because of strong sales of the Hornet and Gremlin. That’s a ginger way of putting it. I would point to the Matador coupe as yet another example of AMC management’s reckless incompetence during the 1970s.
NOTES:
Specifications for the Matador coupe were from Car and Driver (1973) magazine. Production figures were calculated from base data found in the Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975 (Gunnell, 2002) and the Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1976-1999 (Flammang and Kowalke, 1999).
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RE:SOURCES
- Car and Driver; 1973. “Matador X: It’s unquestionably, this year’s style leader. Published November: pp. 41-46, 104.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised 4th Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Flammang, James M. and Ron Kowalke; 1999. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1976-1999. Third Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Foster, Patrick R.; 1993. American Motors: The Last Independent. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- ——–; 2013. American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America’s Last Independent Automaker. MBI Publishing Co., Minneapolis, MN.
- ——–; 2014. “Bob Nixon: Designer of Iconic AMCs.” Collectible Automobile, pp. 74-81. June issue.
- ——–; 2020. “Last Ambassador.” Hemmings. Posted August 17; accessed August 17.
- Wikipedia; 2020. “AMC Matador.” Page last edited August 12; accessed August 18.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES:
- oldcarbrochures.org: AMC Hornet (1973); AMC Matador (1974, 1975, 1976); AMC Pacer (1979); Chrysler Cordoba (1975); Dodge Charger (1973); Mercury Montego (1972); Plymouth Volare (1976); Pontiac Grand Am (1973)
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