Collectible Automobile’s overview of the 1971-74 AMC Javelin is a good example of what John A. Heitmann describes as auto history written by a car buff. Heitmann, who is the editor of the Automotive History Review, stated that the genre tends to be dominated by “well-worn tales repackaged with little if any critical analysis and a reexamination of the evidence” (2020, p. 2).
The Javelin article, which was published in the December 2021 of Collectible Automobile’s magazine, could just as easily have been penned by a ghost of AMC’s public relations department. The story presents the defunct automaker’s second-generation pony car in only the most favorable light.
This may not bother the collectors who presumably dominate the magazine’s readership. However, the Javelin story does little to advance the study of serious automotive history. Indeed, the minimal analysis that is offered actually distracts from our understanding about how management decisions contributed to AMC’s demise as an independent automaker.
How could this happen when the article was written by Patrick Foster, who is widely viewed as the leading historian on American Motors?
Foster sidesteps whether the Javelin lost money
One of the biggest problems with the article is that it does not address in a substantive way the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the living room: Whether AMC lost money on the Javelin.
The most Foster says is that although the 1968-70 Javelin and its two-seat sibling, the AMX, “never came close to equaling their competitors, for AMC it was all profitable ‘plus volume'” (Foster, 2021, p. 63).
Left unexplained is how that was possible. The Javelin was not a relatively low-cost undertaking like the 1965-67 Marlin. That car was virtually interchangeable with other AMC mid-sized models from the B-pillar forward. Thus, even in a worst-case situation the Marlin could only do limited financial damage to the automaker. In contrast, the Javelin had completely new and unique sheetmetal. That represented a much bigger risk to AMC.
Foster (1993) has previously written that when the Javelin was launched, AMC management “had a modest goal” of selling 35,000 per year. If the Javelin’s breakeven point was anywhere close to that figure, then the car only made a profit in the first two years of its seven-year lifespan.
Also see ‘AMC’s Roy D. Chapin Jr. succumbed to the illusion of bigness’
In 1968 roughly 55,000 Javelins left the factory. In 1969 output fell to under 41,000 units and then in 1970 to slightly over 30,000. To make matters worse, output for the redesigned 1971 models barely surpassed 29,000 units — and did worse from there (at least according to the data sets I have been working with).
Of course, the Big Three’s pony cars also saw their sales fall in the early-70s. However, the much larger size of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler allowed them to more easily absorb the losses of a niche car than tiny and financially fragile American Motors.
The original Javelin represented a huge risk for AMC
Foster (2021) excuses the mostly weak sales of the Javelin and AMX by arguing that these cars “went a long way toward changing AMC’s image in the marketplace — just as intended.”
The problem with this narrative is that AMC’s image change did not translate into much better sales. Passenger-car output from 1968 to 1972 was only modestly higher than in the 1967 calendar year, when the automaker teetered on the brink of insolvency after barely surpassing 229,000 units.
As a case in point, calendar-year production in 1971 was less than 236,000 units. That was well below AMC’s breakeven point of 275,000 units. To give you a sense of how out-of-touch management was, it had projected output of 350,000 units for that year (Business Week, 1970).
Car Life magazine (1966) summed up the risk AMC took when launching the original Javelin: “More money and sleepless nights are riding on this Ponycar than on any of the rest. If the Javelin succeeds, it will pull American Motors through one of the most anxious periods in its history. And if the car fails, the company could well go with it.”
Also see ‘How American Motors abandoned its uniqueness in the second half of the 1960s’
The Javelin was long dead by the time the automaker lost its independence in the late-70s. Foster is among those who have pointed to the Matador coupe and Pacer as the biggest culprits in AMC’s collapse. I would agree with that assessment with the caveat that the Javelin played a lesser but supporting role. The pony car’s negative impacts on the viability of American Motors may have been more subtle, but they were still very real.
Ford focused more on economies of scale than AMC
As mentioned above, the biggest reason for the Javelin’s riskiness was that its body was not shared with any other AMC car besides the much-lower-volume AMX (which we discuss here). Someone steeped in Detroit groupthink could argue that a competitive pony car required a unique body. However, that narrative sidesteps a key question: Was AMC too small to afford it?
As a case in point, the Ford Mustang outsold the entire AMC passenger-car lineup from 1965 through 1969. Stop and think about that for a moment: One Big Three nameplate — for a niche car, no less — outsold AMC’s sprawling range, which in the early-70s included three bodies and six nameplates that attempted to compete in the subcompact, compact, pony car, intermediate and full-sized classes. How could tiny AMC possibly afford to stay current in each of those fields?
Ford further increased its economies of scale by sharing the Mustang body with the Mercury Cougar, which by itself vastly outsold the Javelin and two-seater AMX. Then Ford squeezed even more mileage out of the platform by basing the 1970 Maverick on it.
Also see ‘Would AMC have done better if George Romney had stayed longer?’
AMC went in the opposite direction. Its next-generation compacts — the Hornet and Gremlin — could have been based on the Javelin’s body rather than given a brand-new one. That they didn’t represented a double-barreled financial hit. Not only did AMC throw away the potential to make a solid profit from the Javelin’s body, but it also cost a substantial $40 million to develop the Hornet (Foster, 1993).
The Hornet body may have been advanced enough that it stayed in production 18 years, but its development took already-scarce resources away from AMC’s larger cars, whose output fell 40 percent between 1968 to 1971.
Remember that the mid-sized Classic/Rebel/Matador and “full-sized” Ambassador were once the bread and butter of American Motors. I would argue that their sales fell so precipitously partly because they received an inadequate level of updating.
Foster muffles his critique of Javelin’s 1971 redesign
Ironically, my last three paragraphs echo a similar sentiment that Foster once expressed about the second-generation Javelin. He called the 1971 redesign a “mistake by the AMC product planners” and head designer Richard Teague. This was because “the new Javelin did not sell as well as the old Javelin despite the very large investment in design and tooling for the car” (1993, p. 161).
Foster went on to note that the “lack of sales success hurt the bottom line in several ways. Lack of volume meant lack of profit for that car line, but it also meant that the dollars spent on the new Javelin would not be available for putting some other, potentially profitable new car into production” (1993, p. 161).
In his Collectible Automobile article, Foster largely steers clear of this critique. After noting the tight budget AMC designers had to work with, he concluded that what AMC’s “team of stylists were able to accomplish was pretty remarkable” (Foster, 2021); p. 63).
Also see ‘Richard Teague’s styling helped to kill American Motors’
Foster also reported without critique that the Javelin was given a “larger, heavier appearance.” In doing so AMC took its “cues from the market” (2021, p. 63).
What market was that? The Ford Maverick, which was introduced in mid-1969, took off like a rocket while sales of the increasingly large and expensive Mustang fell. And in 1970 the Plymouth Duster sold four times better than the all-new Barracuda despite its rather crude updating of a four-year-old Valiant body (go here for further discussion). The success of these cars was not surprising given the significant increase in import sales during the second half of the 1960s.
Yes, but WHY did the pony car market collapse?
Foster states that the Javelin was discontinued after the end of the 1974 model year because the pony car market was shrinking too much “to justify keeping the car in production let alone developing a successor” (2021, p. 73).
That’s true, but Foster doesn’t discuss a key reason why. Ford executive Lee Iacocca said it best when he later quipped, “The Mustang market never left us, we left it” (Wikipedia, 2021). The underlying problem was the Big Three’s tendency to make its cars bigger, glitzier and more powerful than what the public actually wanted.
Also see ‘Lee Iacocca got lucky with the 1964-66 Ford Mustang’
In the late-50s and early-60s American Motors went in the opposite direction by focusing on unusually practical compact cars. But by the early-70s AMC management was increasingly playing follow the leader. The bloated 1971 Javelin is a good example of this. So is the original Javelin, which was intended to compete directly against the Mustang.
What’s particularly crazymaking is that American Motors was violating its own stated product philosophy, which was to “not butt heads with the Big Three but find gaps in their markets” (Business Week, 1970).
Foster makes excuses about the Javelin’s styling
I am perplexed as to why Foster thinks the 1971 redesign was so remarkable. The Javelin was neither very original nor aesthetically pleasing — particularly compared to its instant-classic predecessor.
Part of the problem was that AMC couldn’t afford a full reskinning. In an apparent effort to compensate for that, the designers gave the Javelin a “hairy” look, such as with Corvette-like bulging fenders. While that undoubtedly drew more attention to the car, it also likely shrank the Javelin’s already dangerously small pool of potential buyers.
Also see ‘Rambler pays price for not listening to Car and Driver magazine’
In his defense, Foster does mention complaints from some buff magazines about the Javelin’s over-amped styling. Even so, he concludes with an upbeat comment from Sports Car Graphic: “The styling is something that grows on you. The more you see it, the better it looks” (2021, p. 67).
Foster does not include Teague’s own critique. When later asked whether he liked the car’s styling, Teague answered, “Not really. It got big, you know. The marketing people were after us. The Mustang had gotten bigger, too, in the meantime; and they wanted to stay up with that” (Brown, 1986; p. 133).
How much does this article reflect Foster’s thinking?
I have been pretty critical of Foster’s article, so in fairness I should offer a large caveat. This is not his first Collectible Automobile article that lacks the analysis offered in his books.
For example, Foster’s article about the 1974-78 Matador coupe (1996) steers clear of the trenchant critique in The Last Independent, which was published in 1993. In this book he had written that the coupe’s “styling was a bit odd” (p. 186) and the car — which cost as much to develop as the Hornet — sold so poorly that it “eventually ran AMC out of business” (p. 184).
Foster further argued that instead of coming out with the Matador coupe, the automaker should have consolidated all of its passenger cars on the Hornet platform. Under that scenario, the Matador and Ambassador would have been downsized. The Javelin and AMX could have followed suit.
This is a pretty robust critique — and none of it showed up in Foster’s Collectible Automobile article. Did the editors tell him to keep it out?
Also see ‘1971-78 Cadillac Eldorado: Collectible Automobile tells only part of the story’
Perhaps if left to his own devices Foster’s 1971-74 Javelin story would have been more like his 1993 American Motors book. But even if that had occurred, Foster still strikes me as having some blinders in the way he assesses the Javelin and two-seater AMX. He seems to see the cars as an important part of the automaker’s “comeback.”
As we have discussed, from a production standpoint AMC didn’t meaningfully rebound during 1968-72. The company’s line of passenger cars mainly survived the mid-70s because of the first oil crisis, which temporarily boosted sales of its smaller cars.
The Javelin was arguably a failure because it 1) did not sell very well and 2) deprived higher-volume cars (and later Jeep trucks) of badly needed development dollars. This weakened AMC at a time when the financially struggling automaker could ill afford it.
Also see ‘Might the Rambler Tarpon have sold better than the Plymouth Barracuda?’
Although the Javelin may not have been as big of a failure as the Matador coupe or Pacer, it did foreshadow AMC’s suicidal strategy of focusing mostly on prohibitively expensive and fast-fading styling exercises. Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I have not seen Foster reconcile his fondness for the original Javelin/AMX and his astute ideas about how American Motors could have achieved more viable economies of scale.
As for the 1971-74 Javelin, skip the Collectible Automobile article and go reread Foster’s 1993 AMC book (not his 2013 AMC book, which has a more superficial analysis about these cars).
NOTES:
Production and market share figures were calculated with data drawn from the auto editors of Consumer Guide (2006), Brown (1986); Gunnell (2002), Hyde (2009) and Wikipedia (2020). Figures are for model years unless otherwise noted. In instances where data from one source appeared to be erroneous, data from the another source was substituted. Hyde’s calendar-year figures were used in the text (but not the graphs) for total AMC passenger-car production because they appeared to be more internally consistent than the model-year figures from other sources. Product specifications are from the above books as well as the Classic Car Database (2021).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International, Lincolnwood, IL.
- Brown, Arch; 1986. “AMC’s Ponycar Answer. Special Interest Autos. Aug. issue. Reprinted in AMX & Javelin Muscle Portfolio, 1968-1974. Compiled by R. M. Clarke. Brooklands Books, Surrey, UK: pp. 133-139.
- Business Week; 1970. “American Motors’ crucial year.” Oct. 3: p. 17.
- Car Life; 1968. “Engineering the Javelin.” Jan. issue. Reprinted in AMX & Javelin Muscle Portfolio, 1968-1974. Compiled by R. M. Clarke. Brooklands Books, Surrey, UK: pp. 5-6.
- Classic Car Database; 2021. “Search for specifications.” Accessed Sept. 22.
- Foster, Patrick R.; 1993. American Motors: The Last Independent. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- ——; 1996. “1974-78 AMC Matador Coupe: Kenosha’s Question Marque.” Collectible Automobile. December issue: pp. 51-58.
- ——; 2013. American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America’s Last Independent Automaker. MBI Publishing Co., Minneapolis, MN.
- ——; 2021. “1971-74 AMC Javelin Aiming at a Smaller Target.” Collectible Automobile. Dec. issue: pp. 62-73.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised Fourth Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Heitmann, John A.; 2020. “Editor’s Note.” Automotive History Review (membership in Society of Automotive Historians required). Spring, No. 61, p. 2.
- Hyde, Charles K; 2009. Storied Independent Automakers: Nash, Hudson, and American Motors. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI.
- Wikipedia; 2020. “U.S. Automobile Production Figures.” Page last edited Oct. 4.
- ——; 2021. “Ford Mustang.” Page last edited Sept. 5.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES:
- oldcaradvertising.com: AMC Javelin (1971)
- oldcarbrochures.org: AMC (1971, 1974); AMC Hornet (1971, 1973); AMC Javelin (1968, 1971, 1972, 1973); Plymouth Barracuda (1968)
A good college chum of mine bought a new 1972 Jsvelin SST with the 401 cu.-in. engine. It was in a sort of (in my opinion) awful lime greenish color. I thought it looked garish. The restyle of the original Javelin / AMX was only successful (I.M.O.) in the rear styling, which did not appear to involve much sheet metal revisions. The front clip was jarring and ungainly, to my eye. In “Collectible Automobile”, the photos make it look a bit better (especially the black car photo, which hide the overstyled front fenders, but in the light of day in person, it is ugly. ugly, ugly. The restyled front clip looks longer than it has to be, like a Virgil Exner nightmare and easily Richard Teague’s worst execution in sheet metal ! As the article points out, the lowly Plymouth Duster / Dodge Demon were much better looking and were reasonably (and more) successful in the marketplace, plus, optioned correctly, could be a real performance cars that the poor Javelin could only match in the hands of Roy Woods Racing, Penske Racing’s Mark Donohue and George Follmer.
First, the Hornet/Concord/Eagle/Gremlin platform didn’t stay around because it was so advanced, but because AMC couldn’t afford a new platform. Just dream. Instead of the Javelin semi reskinning, reskin and improve the Concord somewhat to get the luxury compact look. No Matador coupe or Pacet. Then, keep the old sheetmetal for the Eagle, with some cladding and a more macho front (Think the Dodge Ram “Peterbilt” look. Put together some black ink in the books, and look for partner. SAAB or Volvo preferred.
Obviously AMC had money problems. However, the Hornet body did offer an unusually swept-back windshield that was integrated with the side sheetmetal. That fit in quite well with the more aero look of mid-80s cars. The Javelin’s more upright and squared-off windshield and two-box design would not have held up nearly as long.
But then it didn’t need to. A Javelin-based compact could have saved AMC a meaningful amount of money, which down the road could have been invested in a next-generation compact lineup.
The Matador Coupe was nicknamed “The Cuspidor” among AMC employees. It was built for Penske and the field sales force was encouraged to encourage the dealer body to sell enough of them to get the necessary homologation for racing.
JrNeymar, welcome to Indie Auto. What’s interesting to me about your comment is that the late AMC designer Bob Nixon once insisted in a Collectible Automobile interview that racing “was never a factor” in the 1974 Matador coupe’s design. As discussed further here, I don’t find that believable.
You might be interested in our other stories about the Matador coupe if you haven’t already read them (go here and here).
By the way, Patrick Foster (1993) has estimated that the Matador coupe cost around $40 million to develop and that it needed to sell over 80,000 units per year to break even. What’s your take on that?
Steve,
Thanks for getting with me. AMC was committed to racing for a short time in their tragically short history. As previously mentioned Management directed that certain sales goals needed to be met for homologation purposes. In addition, AMC had an interest in Michigan International Speedway through Penske.
All of what I am writing is from my memories of that time and is anecdotal from my life at AMC.
$40 million to develop the Matador Coupe seems high. When the car was introduced we, in the field, were trying to figure what manufacturer they brought the dies from.
80,000 projected sales? I can’t see any bean counter or marketing wizard proposing that number. I don’t remember the monthly sales numbers but we called the vehicle “Cuspidor” because we couldn’t give them away to the dealers.
Perhaps Collectible Automobile’s AMC articles by John Foster had their limitations of fact. However, this paled next to the turgid pablum imposed upon Chrysler Corp. vehicles by one Dave Duricy. These articles were primarily poulated with irrelevant filler and statistics, with a geneous dollop of backward opinions unsubstantiated by any facts or in person accounts. I dropped my subscription to CA; these Duricy articles cast a stench over the entire publication.