Was Mac’s Motor City Garage wrong about the 1974-78 Matador coupe?

Fred (2018), a Mac’s Motor City Garage commentator, argued that a story about the 1974-78 AMC Matador coupe was riddled with “typical mistakes that get repeated again and again” by “one hack Internet report after another.” This is an unusually pointed critique, so let’s take a look under the hood.

Fred’s first complaint was that the story did not accurately describe the Matador coupe’s market positioning. Author Bill McGuire (2018) had stated that, “(a)mong other things, the Matador coupe “would give AMC an entry in the profitable personal luxury class then dominated by the Pontiac Grand Prix and Chevrolet Monte Carlo.”

“This car never ever was intended to compete against the Grand Prix, Monte Carlo or Cordoba,” Fred countered. “This car was priced in the low intermediate sporty coupe market, Chevy Chevelle, Ford Torino and Plymouth Satellite. Those were the cars AMC was marketing against, in the $3,000 price range, not the $5,000 price range of the personal luxury cars you mentioned.”

The Matador coupe did not fit neatly into one niche

As the graph below shows, Fred was correct that the Matador coupe’s price range in 1974 was aligned with the Chevelle rather than the Monte Carlo. Even so, by 1977 AMC’s prices started higher than most low-end nameplates but topped out below the personal luxury coupes.

I think that McGuire (2018) was on target in suggesting that the Matador coupe gave AMC a foothold in the personal luxury coupe field — “(a)mong other things.”

The strategy that apparently drove the Matador coupe was similar to what Dodge had pioneered with its 1971-74 Charger. That car received unique sheetmetal but offered a wide range of models, from entry-level and sporty to luxurious. The top-end SE model had a lower list price than the Monte Carlo, but it arguably exuded a more sophisticated persona than a Malibu Classic (go here for further discussion). So did the top-end Matadors.

The Chevelle coupe’s market positioning was constrained, both because it had to share sheetmetal with family cars and leave room for the Monte Carlo. Because the Matador was free of such constraints, it could more aggressively straddle market niches. AMC’s initial cautiousness on pricing makes sense because it was new to the mid-sized personal coupe market and was viewed as a low-priced brand.

The Matador didn’t dominate NASCAR racing

Fred (2018) also criticized the story’s summary of the Matador’s racing career. “(A)gain, you’re spewing incorrect information. What helped the Matador in it’s (sic) first two years was the fact that it had 13 top three wins in NASCAR 1974 and 1975 season.”

Also see ‘Should AMC have given the 1974 Matador coupe a luxury spin-off?’

McGuire (2018) had stated that the Matador coupe turned in “respectable but hardly dominating performances. Pilots included Penske contract drivers Mark Donohue, Gary Bettenhausen, and others, but the most successful was NASCAR veteran Bobby Allison, who claimed three victories in 1975.”

Donohue posed in marketing materials but reportedly did not race the Matador coupe before he died in 1975 (Wikipedia, 2021a). However, McGuire is arguably correct that AMC did not dominate NASCAR.

Patrick Foster wrote that in 1974 the Matador coupe “had an inauspicious first year. Fielded by Roger Pensky Racing, the Matador spent the year gradually working its way up through the NASCAR standings before Bobby Allison bagged the team’s first win in the season finale at the Los Angeles Times 400 in Ontario, California” (1996, pp. 54-55). Then, in 1975 the Matador had its best year, with three wins and 10 top-five finishes (Foster, 1996, p. 60).

Yet for all of AMC’s efforts, in 1974 Chevrolet still won the Manufacturer’s Championship and in 1975 Dodge took the prize (Wikipedia, 2021b). And from 1976 on AMC was a marginal presence at NASCAR.

Matador output collapsed while the market soared

Fred also took issue with McGuire’s (2018) contention that the Matador coupe’s unconventional styling resulted in a sales arc that “took a sharp turn down.”

“On the sales numbers, you’re comparing Apples and Oranges,” Fred (2018) argued. Sales totals for 1974 and 1975 “were very close to each other.” He stated that the reason why was because “the 1974 Model year for AMC was 15 months vs. 9 months for 1975.”

Also see ‘1974 AMC Ambassador: GM envy to the ZiL degree’

It’s true that the average monthly output for the entire Matador line was similar in 1974 and 1975 if you divide total production by the above-listed number of months. However, Fred didn’t mention that coupe production still fell by 40 percent in 1975. Sedan and wagon output counterbalanced that drop, perhaps because the discontinuance of the Ambassador shifted buyers to the Matador.

Fred also didn’t mention that if cars built on AMC’s mid-sized platform had a normal 12-month model year in 1973, average monthly production was 2 percent higher than in 1974 and 22 percent higher than in 1975. In other words, AMC didn’t get a real sales bounce from the 1974 redesign, which reportedly cost $40 million (Foster, 2013).

Fred (2018) went on to argue that the Matador’s drop in sales after 1976 was “no different than the other manufactures (sic).” He added that the end was near for AMC’s mid-sized cars “not because of design but because of buyers (sic) preferences for smaller cars and fuel economy.”

In actuality, mid-sized luxury coupe output went up like a rocket from roughly 770,000 units in 1974 to almost 2 million in 1977. During that same time period, Matador coupe production fell from around 62,000 units to under 7,000 units.

Mid-sized luxury personal coupes did appear to take sales away from lower-priced two-door models from Chevrolet, Ford and Plymouth. All three brands saw output fall by around 38 percent between 1974 and 1977. Even so, the Matador coupe’s output dropped by more than twice as much — 89 percent.

The overall mid-sized field (including sedans and wagons) saw output decline in 1974-75, but it shot up again in 1976-77. Meanwhile, production of all models based on AMC’s mid-sized platform dropped from a peak of almost 125,000 units in 1974 to under 31,000 units in 1977. There were no zigs and zags — it was all downhill.

AMC’s market share of the mid-sized field shrank from 5.1 percent in 1974 to only 0.9 percent in 1977. Note that this occurred prior to any of the Big Three beginning to downsize their mid-sized lineups.

The bottom line is that the Matador coupe sold more poorly than all of its mid-sized competitors even though it had newer styling than most of them. McGuire was entirely justified in blaming the car’s unconventional looks.

AMC was indeed a very small fish in a big pond

Fred closed out his comment by insisting that “AMC wasn’t that small. In 1975 excluding Jeep Sales, AMC had 5% of the car market in the USA. . . . That’s not a small number.”

In a 1979 brochure, American Motors touted itself as “among the 100 largest manufacturing corporations.” That sounds impressive until one recognizes the exceptionally large scale of the auto industry.

Also see ‘Richard Teague’s styling helped to kill American Motors’

For example, in 1975 AMC fielded four nameplates on four distinct bodies that spanned four market niches in the low-priced field . . . but produced less than 274,000 passenger cars. That was roughly 50,000 less than the output of the Oldsmobile Cutlass — which was but one nameplate on one body targeted at one market niche produced by only one of General Motors’ five passenger-car divisions.

AMC was so small that arguably the most important historical question one can debate is whether the automaker had adequate economies of scale to survive regardless of how well it was managed (go here for further discussion).

All in all, Fred’s critique adds more heat than light

Although McGuire could have included a bit more analysis, he offered a reasonable — and fairly sympathetic — overview of the Matador coupe.

My punchline is much harsher: The Matador coupe was an Edsel-like failure that played a crucial role in killing AMC’s viability as an independent automaker. Heads should have rolled for such a flagrant exercise in managerial incompetence. Instead, Roy D. Chapin Jr. and his team were given the chance to make an even bigger mistake with the ill-fated Pacer.

NOTES:

Production figures were calculated from Gunnell (2002), Flammang and Kowalke (1999), the auto editors of Consumer Guide (2006) and Wikipedia (2020). The Ambassador was included in the total production of AMC’s mid-sized platform even though the automaker mostly marketed it as a full-sized car. The price graph includes the Cassini package because of its prominence in marketing; Hemmings (2012) stated that it cost $299 on top of the Brougham package.

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RE:SOURCES

• Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International, Lincolnwood, Ill.
• Flammang, James M. and Ron Kowalke; 1999. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1976-1999. Third Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
• Foster, Patrick; 1996. “1974-78 AMC Matador Coupe: Kenosha’s Question Marque.” Collectible Automobile. December issue: pp. 51-58.
• ——; 1996. “The Racing Matador: NASCAR’s Lonely Bullfighter.” Collectible Automobile. December issue: pp. 59-61.
• ——–; 2013. American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America’s Last Independent Automaker. MBI Publishing Co., Minneapolis, MN.
• Fred; 2018. Commentator in “Fish Out of Water: AMC’s 1974-78 Matador Coupe.” Mac’s Motor City Garage. Posted 10:31 a.m., May 12.
• Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised Fourth Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
• Hemmings; 2012. “Cassini Meets the Matador.” Hemmings Classic Car June issue.
• McGuire, Bill; 2018. “Fish Out of Water: AMC’s 1974-78 Matador Coupe.” Mac’s Motor City Garage. Posted May 6.
• Wikipedia; 2020. “U.S. Automobile Production Figures.” Page past modified Oct. 4.
• Wikipedia; 2021a. “Mark Donohue.” Page last modified June 12.
• Wikipedia; 2021b. “List of NASCAR Manufacturers’ champions.” Page last modified June 19.

BROCHURES & ADVERTISING:

• oldcarbrochures.org: AMC Matador (1974, 1976, 1977); Chevrolet Chevelle (1974); Dodge Charger (1974)