This Is The Amazing Machine The AMC Eagle Could Have Become Had AMC Survived

If all of the Autopian staff is looking forward to watching a PBS documentary, you can sort of assume that it won’t be some snoozefest about the Great Potato Famine or a Ken Burns thing on the smallpox pandemic. No, the six-part series we’re so stoked about concerns what is one of our favorite dead car brands: American Motors.

That’s right. Film producer and Autopian writer Joe Ligo quit his job to make The Last Independent Automaker, a six-part series out now that details the rise and fall of AMC, the forgotten challenger to the Big Three that employed hundreds of thousands of people and built millions of vehicles from 1954 to 1987. Spoiler alert: it won’t have a happy ending. Chrysler bought the company primarily for the Jeep brand and let the often-innovative non-SUV products rapidly die off.

For that reason, I’m revisiting one of the first things I did for the Autopian three years ago. I imagined what the American automotive landscape might have looked like if Chrysler had been allowed to go bankrupt in 1978. This scenario almost certainly would have played out if not for the U.S. government stepping in to guarantee loans for Chrysler (but thanks to the great Lee Iacocca’s work, the Fed ultimately never had to actually shell out one dime to Mopar until the Financiapocolyps of 2008). With that member of the Big 3 gone, it’s possible that American Motors could have filled the gap with their creative thinking to combat GM, Ford, and the rising imports.

I’ve been slowly going through the alternate universe AMC models that I showed in a fake 1987 full-line advertisement that I made back in 2022:

One car in this “ad” that I haven’t dug deeper into is the next generation of one of the most iconic AMCs from what proved to be the brand’s last decade: the Eagle. This one was highly deserving of a remake, since it was a car whose time really didn’t come until long after Chrysler had put the last American Motors dealership signs into landfills. Let’s make a worthy successor to what was arguably the first modern crossover.

The Hornet On Stilts

Take a look at the parking lot (or other people’s driveways, if you work from home), and what do you see? Not a lot of sedans, coupes, and minivans, I bet. No, I’m confident eighty percent of the vehicles you see are tall-but-car-like wagon-type things with all-wheel-drive. Those didn’t exist in American until the nineties, right?

Wrong. The eighties hadn’t even started yet when American Motors launched the Eagle in the fall of 1979. The brainchild of AMC’s chief design engineer Roy Lunn, the Eagle was to be a “line of four-wheel drive vehicles with the ride and handling conventions of a standard rear-wheel drive car” on a unibody platform.

Always strapped for cash, AMC used its by-then-decade-old Hornet compact as a basis for this groundbreaking car. Oddly enough, despite AMC’s experience with Jeeps, they contracted FF Developments in the UK (makers of the awesome, pioneering all wheel drive Jensen Interceptor FF) to build a prototype in 1977.

American Motors had predicted that consumers would want something with the mild capabilities of a utility vehicle with four-wheel drive and car-like comfort, and most importantly, fuel efficiency. Their gamble paid off when the second energy crisis hit in 1979 and sales of truck-based four-wheel drive machines (like AMC’s own Jeeps) tanked. Extra traction is nice, but if you never go to Moab, why suffer a 12-mile-per-gallon monster? The Eagle was just what the market needed.

The viscous-coupling center differential gave the Eagle on-road advantages that the only other car that might be considered a remote competitor (the much smaller Subaru part-time 4WD wagon) didn’t have. Audi’s Quattro was the only car offering something similar, but in 1980 it was only available as a high-dollar sports coupe (and not in NHTSA- or EPA-compliant specification yet, anyway). After testing an Eagle, Four Wheeler magazine deemed that it was “the beginning of a new generation of cars.” The author of this article likely had no idea how right they were.

AMC sold over 45,000 units in 1980, a great number for the always-struggling firm. You could get an Eagle in a wide variety of body styles from a landau roof-clad coupe to a traditional sedan or a “poor man’s UR Quattro” SX/4 sport hatchback.

AMC even gave us a funky Gremlin-based “Kammback” Eagle model, though the five-door wagon (based on the old Hornet Sportabout body) was by far the most popular model.

In its second model year, the Eagle upped the ante and added a feature you can’t even get on most modern SUVs: the ability to cut off the front drive wheels for better fuel economy and reduced driveline wear and tear. Why isn’t that available today? Note that with early models,  you had to stop the car to switch drive modes, hence the “two handed” safety switch.

The GM “Iron Duke” inline four joined the straight six as an available motor, but sales quickly began to drop. Despite the innovation, it was hard to cover up the fact that the Eagle was a 1969 car updated on a shoestring budget. Worse, AMC lacked the funds to give the Eagle the further development that would allow it to soar as high as it deserved to. Eventually, only the wagon body style was left in the lineup, and when the last 2,300 Eagles were sold as 1988 models, AMC no longer actually existed. These final cars were sold through the rebranded “Eagle” dealer network as “Eagle wagons” to avoid being called “Eagle Eagles.”

With hindsight, we know that the Eagle, like the International Harvester Scout, disappeared less than a decade before the public was ready to embrace them as mainstream products and could have been gangbusters successes. It’s painfully obvious that an all-new Eagle in the late eighties likely would have beaten the Subaru Outback series to market and taken the cash-cow crown that it earned. Here’s how that might have happened at an alternate-universe AMC.

Hell Freezes Over: The Eagles Return

If you weren’t alive at the time, it’s hard to understate how radical the Ford Taurus was when it appeared in 1986. Just the year before, the Blue Oval’s primary family sedan was a warmed-over Fox body Fairmont-body LTD that was as literally square-looking as it was metaphorically square-looking. If a flying saucer landed on my lawn in 1986, it would have seemed less surprising than observing a dramatically aerodynamic mid-sized sedan with the motor spinning the front wheels from the often-staid Ford Motor Company. What could have upstaged that?

Well, the boxy rides General Motors was fielding at the time certainly couldn’t do it (Celebrity, anyone?), and Chrysler’s stretched K-Cars didn’t even move the needle, but we’re talking about an alternate timeline when Mopar went bankrupt at the beginning of the eighties and no longer existed anyway. No, AMC would have been the other member of the Big 3. Ousted Ford leader and alternate universe American Motors president Lee Iacocca would have taken a look at the Taurus, shrugged a bit, and then said:

“We knew we could do better. That (Ford) team made a pretty good Audi impersonator, but they missed the optional feature which makes that car truly different. We did benchmark that (Audi) car and other Europeans but, as with the first Mustang, Hal (Sperlich) and I knew that we needed something more tailored to fit the American buyer.” – (Fictional) Lee Iacocca

As the (real world) ads said back in the day, AMC and Jeep “wrote the book on four-wheel drive”, and for 1987, they’d do it again. With the by-then seven-year-old Eagle, they’d given America the first mainstream all-wheel drive car, and now they were going to make this system even more gentrified into an everyday car with a “low profile” full-time four-wheel drive system. I imagine alternate-universe Lee continuing, “I firmly believe you’ll be hard pressed to find a car with only two-wheel drive a decade from now.”

Enter V-Drive

This time around, American Motors would forsake FF Developments and utilize a patented drivetrain that chassis giant Dana had created nearly twenty years before, in 1965.

With a typical four-wheel drive layout, a driveshaft extends off the front of a mid-mounted transfer case to a differential with drive axles coming off of it (which typically need to run beneath or even through the oil pan of the front-mounted motor). That’s now the original Eagle was; you can see that front axle and large front differential here on this ghost view of an original 1980 Eagle (which is why there was only space available for an inline 4 and 6, and you can’t do an LS swap to an Eagle even today).

Dana had a different solution. With Dana’s “V Drive” system, there were two driveshafts extending in a “V” shape from the transfer case to each front wheel. Apparently, the rights to this system were purchased and company called Vehicle Engineering and Manufacturing Company (VEMCO) used this layout to add aftermarket four-wheel drive to various Chevy and Ford vans from the late seventies up until at least some time in the eighties before ceasing to exist.

Why didn’t this system catch on? There must be a reason which some of you engineers and automotive historians can tell me, but I like it for the second-generation Eagle because it would accomplish exactly what I want to do by offering a lower ride height. Also, it’s a different, rather strange and unconventional solution so it’s right up AMC’s alley. The “V-Axle” transfer case would have been an engineering marvel that took Dana’s system a step further with a viscous coupling to distribute power. I do think that the “wheel gear units” could we dramatically reduced in size to eliminate a lot of weight there.

Now, with a V-Drive a wider V8 or V6 engine would be possible without the need to raise the whole damn car. Plus, removing the oil pan wouldn’t have to be part of a $3700 ordeal that the person typing this had to endure with his last all-wheel-drive BMW wagon.

“Old’ AMC needed to rely on the kindness of competitors to get a number of their motors, or rely on their ancient standby powerplants, but as a new member of the Chrysler-free Big 3 this new American Motors would be able to develop their own engines. Our new Eagle could offer the choice of either an aluminum single overhead cam Kenosha-built “Tech-6” V6 or “Tech-8” V8, both of them sharing the same architecture as “modular” motors.

Initially, the rear wheels would connect to a coil-sprung live axle, but the subframe system would be designed to accept an independent setup available after launch; all models would get rack and pinion steering and disc brakes at each corner (with ABS being available). Additionally, a lower-cost rear-drive version might be in the cards for later years. If you look at the 1987 model lineupvin the “ad” at the top of the post, you’ll see that I’ve offered a longer wheelbase “luxury” version of the Eagle as well called the Verona to compete primarily with the Taurus-based Lincoln Continental. There’s a bit of something for everyone here.

The Dude Can’t Hate Every One Of These Eagles

With a far bigger budget available than in 1980 and with a wide range of mid-sized American cars to compete with, it’s obvious that American Motors couldn’t be looking at a one-Eagle-fits-all approach with this new mid-sized model. There would be a sedan and station wagon/crossover, though coupes were just not worth the effort to tool up for by the end of the eighties (the slightly smaller Tempo-sized AMC Calabrone detailed a few weeks back would offer that option for buyers at a two door coupe and convertible).

Is that an L.L. Bean catalog I see in your mailbox? You wear those ugly duck boots to go to Whole Foods, not just canoeing to look at Great Blue Heron? Then the Eagle with the Trailrunner package would be your jam. Bigger tires, grey fender trim, and raised ride height mimic the ethos of the first Eagle, and the Trailrunner takes it a step further with a Jeep-like grille flanked by sealed beams and a surrounding shape that looks like a push bar (a void behind the license plate could hold a winch). The style is remarkably (and unintentionally) similar to the Grand Cherokee that came a few years later.

There’s a similar “push bar” on the rear bumper as well to complete the subtle aggressive look. In silhouette it’s very similar to the outgoing Eagle model but much closer in style to the concurrent Taurus/Sable wagon competitor. Of course, you’d never take that Ford wagon where this could go.

What if the tough look of the Trailrunner version isn’t for you? Indeed, to fight the likes of a Taurus we’d need to offer a less rough ‘n ready lower-slung sedan and wagon version for those that just want their all-wheel-drive without any pretentions of flannel shirt outdoorsiness. If you aren’t plaid-clad Colorado Mountain Man ready to hit the Kebler Pass, then you’ll like the “street” version of the Eagle which would really take advantage of that “low profile” all-wheel drive system.

This “standard” sedan is shown below with your parents circa 1987 getting ready to head out onto Woodward after prime rib dinner at the (now-demolished) Fox and Hound Inn in Bloomfield Hills. They’ll drive back your home in Royal Oak, which means you, your brother and your homie Dave have exactly twenty minutes to get rid of the pot smoke and clean up all the mess you made while they were out. Hurry up!

The non-Trailrunner Eagle sits a little lower on slightly smaller wheels and tires, lacks the grey fender flares and has a much less aggressive front end with composite headlamps and a far more toned-down Jeep-style grille.

I did try an even more Renault-looking nearly grille-free “aero” nose but the pendulum was swinging too far away from where I wanted to go. I nixed the one below, but if AMC wanted something more Taurus-like for the mainstream versions this could have worked:

So are you a tough Trailrunner person or more of a suburbanite? Here’s an animation so that you to take your pick:

What you have now is something for Subaru people that need a larger car; a sort of anti-Quattro without sporting pretensions, though an Eagle X4 model with performance tires and that aforementioned independent rear suspension might be available later to offer a cut-rate Audi 5000 for enthusiasts. Again, something for everyone.

Get Inside The Eagles (Without Don Henley Suing You)

With the 1980 Eagle, American Motors did a reasonable enough job with making the outside of a car that premiered literally weeks after Woodstock in 1969 look contemporary, but the inside was really, really suffering. Even if you were sold on the all-weather concept and styling, one step inside and you’d be taken back in time by at least a decade.

Our new Eagle would take inspiration from the “grandstand-style” dash design of contemporary Renaults with a sweeping glare-reducing canopy over all the instruments and a set of high-mounted air vents to complement the lower outlets. While a column shift and bench seat would be on the options list, my guess is that most would choose the bucket seats and center console for the automatic transmission.

“Piano” type buttons for the climate control sit next to a large slider switch to engage four-wheel drive, with a button to lock the center differential below.  An illuminated schematic above these controls would show the drive mode (as well as other vehicle alerts such as washer fluid and bulbs burned out). Digital gauges and automatic temperature control are shown, but good old analog instruments and a less-elaborate manual climate control would be standard.

Look Out, Taurus: You’re Just A Car

Seriously, if you’re even a casual car enthusiast you need to watch the AMC documentary to know how much this little company offered to the automotive world. These “continuation” AMC models that I’ve sketched up over the last three years are proof that directionally this Kenosha firm (and their Renault parent) knew which way that the industry was headed. Tragically, they were too early to the market, and too late to change their fate.

This Eagle II concept is so similar to the original 1980 Eagle we had, but the subtle modernization I did could have turned it a Subaru Legacy Outback with V8 power, or an Audi Allroad that wouldn’t self-destruct, a decade or more sooner than those cars debuted. It’s a shame that Chrysler reaped the rewards of the boom in Jeep popularity within months after AMC disappeared.

Am I saying that I wish that the government hadn’t bailed out Chrysler (for the first time) in 1979? What about Vipers, GLHs, Challengers and Prowlers? It’s true that we’d have missed out on quite a bit if they had gone into the mist, though today most Mopar cars and even entire brands have sadly disappeared anyway.

No, if I had to make the choice of which reality I would have wanted for the Big 3 nearly fifty years ago, I know without hesitation which direction I’d go.

1987 AMC Eagle Trailrunner Wagon Specs

Base Price: $14,100
As Shown: $17,850
Major Standard Features:
All Wheel Drive
Air Conditioning
AM/FM Stereo Cassette with four speakers
Options Shown on Photo Car:
Metallic Sapphire Blue Paint Finish
Trailrunner Package (upgraded aluminum wheels, tires, front and rear fascias, fender trim)
Convenience Package (power windows, locks, and seats plus cruise control)
Technology package (automatic climate control, digital instruments with trip computer)
Leather seating surfaces
Premium Sound with CD player and ten speakers (coaxials in doors and rear cargo area)

Drivetrain:
192HP 4875cc SOHC V8, electronic fuel injection (3467cc SOHC V6 standard)
4 speed automatic transmission, all-wheel drive (optional locking center differential)

Chassis:
Double wishbone front suspension, coil springs
Live axle rear suspension, coil springs
4 wheel disc brakes
Rack and pinion steering