1966 American Motors AMX Prototype
1966 American Motors AMX Prototype - photographed at the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.
1966 American Motors AMX Prototype - Click Photo(s)for Larger Image
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With the other American car makers having success with their pony cars and muscle cars, American Motors needed a sporty automobile. The tried with the 1965 Marlin, but the attempt was half-heatred due to the company's consevative sty;ing. Dick Teague, AMC's vp for styling pushed the board of directors to take more risks and the designers came up with the AMX, the "X" standing for Experimental.
The results were the car shown here: a prototype pushmobile (a fiberglas body with no engine or drivetrain). This protytpe was displayed at the 1966 Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) conference in Detroit and later an operational model was built for AMC by Italian custom coachbuilder Vignale.
The operational AMX prototype made its debut at the April, 1966, New York Auto Show. After some internal hand-wringing, AMC finally decided to produce a muscle car but it was the similarly styled Javelin, not the AMX. Soon after, with pressure from Teague, the AMX was produced and was sold alongside the Javelin. Both cars sold well, though in 1970 the AMX nameplate was dropped, becoming instead an option for the Javelin model. Javelin production ended after the 1974 model run.
Photo By: Douglas Wilkinson
Date: August, 2005
Location: Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland, OH
