Photos by the author.
Akwardness, really, was the Gremlin’s main calling card. Some people still can’t see past that aspect of AMC’s subcompact, others embrace it wholeheartedly, but even the latter group has to admit that one awkward bit could have been easily avoided if AMC had just put some more glass in those big blind quarter panels. Cue the Gremlin XP prototype that Gremlin collector Brian Moyer displayed at this year’s Hershey show.
Frequent blog readers will recall Brian as the owner of the “boomerang” Australian Gremlin that he showed at Hershey four years ago. Attendees of this year’s Hemmings Motor News Concours d’Elegance will recall him as the owner of the base-model Gremlin that appeared in the post-war American class. And for this year’s Hershey show, he re-introduced the world to AMC’s attempt to address the Gremlin’s rearward visibility quirks.
Kenosha’s solution – adding more glass, but keeping the chopback profile – became its showcar for the 1974 season, so AMC’s designers had to add a little more flair to the car, including a custom hood, a one-piece grille set in a Hornet front end, and a non-production checked black-and-white interior.
According to Brian, AMC built the XP from a leftover 1971 Gremlin – a sunroof car, no less – and performed extensive fiberglass work over the rear sheetmetal to reshape the back end. It went through two iterations: initially white with chrome trim and later the current red with black-out trim. As for that interior, Brian suspects it’s the exact same interior lifted from the Hornet GT concept car from the year before.
Despite the fact that it’s a running, driving car with a six-cylinder under the hood, the only reason AMC never scrapped it, Brian said, is because Dick Teague spoke up for it and held on to it for years afterward. Teague at one point let his daughter drive it, then sold it when he retired not long before Chrysler bought the company. Brian said he just missed buying the XP from Teague and wasn’t able to track it down for another decade, when he found it in essentially the shape it’s in now in New York state.
“I’m just trying to preserve it now,” Brian said. “If you’re to restore it, what do you do? There’s nothing like it in the world.” He’s even hesitant to drive it all that far – in fact, the trip from Brian’s home in Reinholds, Pennsylvania, to Hershey for the show was the longest he’s ever had it on the road.
While the XP never did directly influence production Gremlin design, AMC’s Spirit Sedan, introduced five years later, managed to improve on the Gremlin’s rear visibility woes while keeping the Gremlin silhouette. But no Spirit Sedan ever had the Gremlin’s, how do you say, je ne sais awquoirdness…
