Junkyard Find: Parade of Doomed Eagles Continues
With the AMC Eagle being such a historically significant car, let’s hope at least a few of them survive the next decade. We saw this brown ’85 Eagle wagon last week, and this black ’84 wagon will join it in a Fujian steel plant soon enough.
If AMC had been able to scrape up more than $1.42 in the Eagle’s styling budget and made the car look less like a jacked-up Concord and more like something that didn’t hurt the eyes quite so much… well, things might have been different. However, you could apply that statement to just about the entire AMC product line by the mid-1970s.
As it was, the hit-by-ugly-stick Eagle was highly competent in the snow and mud and reasonably civilized on the street. The AMC six installed in most Eagles was quite reliable (if you overlooked the maddeningly flaky Carter carburetors), though the GM Iron Duke versions managed to combine blender-full-O-roofing-nails noise with donkey-trudging-through-quicksand slowness.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Looks like someone snagged those unique to AMC door handles. I always thought they were cool very unique and ahead of their time. AMC might have used other mfg parts bin stuff Mopar Torqueflight, GM Saginaw etc. but at least they wer original with the door handle
I too, think the Eagle wasn't a bad looking car at all. It was dated even by early 1980s standards, but still handsome in a rugged sort of way. It was unique, something that can't be said for a lot of other cars from that era.