In its last days, AMC lost its mind and stuffed a V8 into a tiny hatchback to create a “poor man’s Trans Am” few remember

By the late 1970s, American Motors was doing what it often seemed to do best: fighting for air in a market where the Big Three had more money, more dealers, and more room to make mistakes. In a recent video, the host of Rare Cars laid out how AMC, already under pressure, decided to answer that problem with something that sounds almost made up now – a small hatchback with a V8, rally attitude, a reused muscle-car name, and a giant hood decal meant to make people think of a Trans Am.

That car was the 1979 AMC Spirit AMX, and the more you hear about it, the more it feels like a company trying to be clever, nostalgic, practical, and slightly unhinged all at once. The funny thing is, that mix is exactly what makes it interesting now.

Rare Cars explains that AMC had gotten an early jump on the subcompact boom with the Gremlin back in 1970. That mattered. Being early gave AMC a real advantage for a while, because the bigger automakers were still distracted by the muscle-car era and were slower to jump into that smaller-car space.

But by the end of the decade, that edge was fading fast.

Cars like the Ford Pinto, Chevy Vega, and other small competitors had eaten into the Gremlin’s market. What had once looked fresh and opportunistic was now starting to look old, and AMC needed something new that could freshen up the lineup without requiring the kind of money the company did not really have.

From Gremlin To Spirit

According to Rare Cars, AMC design chief Dick Teague stepped in with the answer: the Spirit.

The Spirit was meant to modernize the idea that the Gremlin had started. It still rode on a compact 98-inch wheelbase, and it was still sold as an affordable small car, but it looked much more current. The old round-headlight face of the Gremlin was replaced with rectangular lamps and a taller, squarer grille, giving it a cleaner, more late-’70s look.

The host points out that the Spirit came in both sedan and liftback versions, and the liftback body in particular mattered here. Unlike the Gremlin, which always looked like someone had simply chopped off the rear end and called it done, the Spirit had a longer sloping tail that gave it something closer to a fastback shape.

At its core, Rare Cars says, the Spirit was practical, affordable, and not bad looking. But it was also a little dull.

That is where AMC made the move that now feels equal parts desperate and brilliant. Teague and his team decided the Spirit needed an upscale, sporty version that could reconnect the company to its more exciting past. So AMC reached back to one of its best-known performance names and revived it.

That is how the Spirit AMX was born.

AMC Wanted Muscle-Car Energy in a Small-Car Body

The original AMX, built from 1968 to 1970, had real muscle-car credibility inside the AMC world. Reusing that name on a subcompact hatchback was a bold move, and maybe an odd one, but Rare Cars makes the case that AMC did not just slap the badge on the car and call it a day.

The Spirit AMX got real changes.

Because 1979 was still deep in the performance slump brought on by emissions rules, AMC could not just build a fire-breathing street monster and hope for the best. So, as the host explains, the first place the company attacked was the chassis.

The AMX received what AMC called a GT rally-tuned suspension, with improved sway bars, adjustable shocks, revised steering components, and beefier hardware all around. The front disc and rear drum brakes were also upgraded, and the car got a throatier exhaust to help sell the sporty image.

Then came the engine decision, which is really what made the Spirit AMX memorable.

Rare Cars says AMC knew the regular 258 cubic-inch inline-six would not do the AMX badge justice. If this car was going to wear a name tied to AMC’s glory days, it needed a V8. So the company did something few people expected in that era and stuffed its 304 cubic-inch V8 into the little hatchback.

That sounds wild now, and it probably felt wild then too.

The V8 Was Real, Even If the Power Wasn’t Earth-Shaking

The Rare Cars host is careful not to oversell the stock performance, and that honesty actually makes the whole thing more believable.

By 1979, AMC’s 304 V8 was no longer the engine it had been at the start of the decade. Emissions rules, restrictive exhaust tuning, a small two-barrel carburetor, and a low 8.4:1 compression ratio had taken a serious bite out of it. What had once made 210 gross horsepower early in its life was now down to just 125 net horsepower and 219 lb-ft of torque.

That sounds weak by muscle-car standards, because it was. But as Rare Cars notes, the industry as a whole was stuck in the same miserable sandbox. A 1979 Mustang with its best available 302 V8 only made 140 horsepower, so AMC was not uniquely pathetic here. It was just playing by the ugly rules of the period.

The Spirit AMX sent that power through either a four-speed manual or a three-speed automatic, and on paper it was not some world-beating machine. But the host points out one very important thing: the car weighed just under 3,000 pounds.

That meant the AMX had one thing going for it that many late-’70s personal-performance cars did not – it was relatively light.

That does not turn 125 horsepower into magic, but it does help explain why reviewers at the time said the car was not bad by the standards of the day. Rare Cars even notes that AMC and BF Goodrich sent a pair of Spirit AMXs to the Nürburgring in 1979, where they became the first American entries in the FIA Group 1 24-hour race. With drivers including Amos Johnson, Dennis Shaw, James Brolin, and auto journalist Gary Witzenburg, the cars finished first and second in their class.

That is not the same thing as dominating overall, but it gave AMC something real to point to: the car was more than a styling joke.

It Looked Meaner Than It Had Any Right To

If there is one thing AMC got very right here, it was the appearance.

Rare Cars spends a good amount of time describing how Teague’s team transformed the Spirit visually, and it sounds like they attacked nearly every angle of the car. The AMX got halogen headlights, a blacked-out grille, black bumpers, a front air dam, a rear spoiler, flared wheel openings, and deeper, wider-looking 14×7 Turbo Cast II wheels wrapped in period radial tires.

Inside, the upgrades continued with extra sound deadening, bucket seats, a special center console, extra gauges, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, brushed aluminum trim, and a tachometer. It was a serious effort to make the car feel like more than a dressed-up commuter.

Then came the part that really pushed the whole thing into late-’70s fever dream territory.

The Rare Cars host says someone on Teague’s team must have loved Smokey and the Bandit, because AMC took obvious inspiration from the fiery hood bird on the Trans Am and created its own dramatic hood decal using a flaming AMC-style graphic. That is the part that turned the Spirit AMX into what the host calls a kind of poor man’s Trans Am.

And honestly, that is exactly the right phrase for it.

It had the attitude. It had the graphics. It had the V8. It had the swagger. What it did not have was the size, prestige, or outright performance of the real thing. But it did have charm, and maybe even more personality than a lot of the better-known cars from the same era.

Buyers Mostly Shrugged

For all the thought AMC put into the car, the market did not really fall in love.

Rare Cars says AMC built nearly 53,000 Spirits for 1979, but only 3,657 buyers chose the AMX version. And only a fraction of those went all the way to the V8.

That tells the story pretty clearly. The Spirit AMX was interesting, but not exactly a blockbuster.

By 1980, AMC kept the AMX trim package alive but dropped the V8 entirely, making the V8-powered Spirit AMX a one-year-only machine. The Spirit itself lasted until 1983, and then AMC drifted toward its Renault-era replacements before the company was finally bought by Chrysler in 1987.

That makes the V8 Spirit AMX feel like a strange final burst of personality before the curtain really came down. AMC was fading, but it had not completely stopped trying to make something fun.

That alone earns the car some respect.

The Real Fun Began After Buyers Got Home

One of the most entertaining parts of the Rare Cars video is the section where the host explains why the Spirit AMX may have had more potential than the stock numbers suggested.

Because AMC had to keep the 304 emissions-friendly, the engine came out of the factory heavily choked. Rare Cars says that with only minor modifications – a better four-barrel carburetor and a freer-flowing dual exhaust – some people claim you could wake the engine up by as much as 100 horsepower.

Even if that figure is a little optimistic, the point still lands. This was one of those late-’70s cars that left performance on the table because the factory had its hands tied. That means owners willing to tinker could get a lot more out of it without completely reinventing the car.

And the fun did not stop there.

Because AMC had engineered the Spirit to accept either an inline-six or a V8 in the same tiny engine bay, the host says there was surprisingly generous room under the hood for a car this small. That opened the door to all kinds of hot-rodding possibilities. Some enthusiasts, he says, have even swapped in AMC’s 401 V8, which turns the little hatchback into something far nastier than anyone at a stoplight would probably expect.

That may be the best part of the Spirit AMX legacy. It was already weird from the factory, which made it the perfect starting point for people who wanted to get even weirder.

Why the Spirit AMX Still Matters

The host of Rare Cars closes with what feels like the right conclusion: the AMC Spirit AMX was not just a decent little car for its time. It was genuinely unusual.

In an era when performance was down, style was weird, and many companies were playing it safe, AMC looked at its little hatchback and said, more or less, “Let’s throw a V8 in it, give it stripes, and see what happens.” That is not the decision-making process of a healthy, comfortable corporation. It is the decision-making process of a struggling company trying to stay visible — and maybe trying to remind people it still had a pulse.

That kind of car rarely becomes a sales hit. But it often becomes something more interesting later: a forgotten machine with a strong story and just enough madness baked into it to make people care decades later.

The Spirit AMX was never a real Trans Am rival. It was too small, too underpowered in stock form, and too late to the party for that.

But as a final-era AMC oddball, it may have done something better. It proved that even near the end, AMC still had enough nerve left to build something nobody else would have dared.