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1975 AMC Hornet
The United States car market was suffering
another of its down cycles, this one was made worse by inflationary
pressures on car prices. The new 1975 compact car, the Pacer,
would have to be a hit or things would start to unravel at AMC.
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The recession and low consumer confidence was taking it's
toll on the industry as a whole. New car sales for the industry
had fallen from 11.8 million in 1973 to just 8.2 million cars
for 1975. Things were looking bad, especially for America's
last independent!
With so much riding on the success of AMC's new addition,
the Pacer, the Hornet line would be a carryover from it's
previous year. |
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Of more Historical interest is what
was no longer in AMC's product line for 1975.
- The Ambassador was dropped all
big car sales would now be Matadors
- Javelin and the AMX were gone
Patrick R. Foster, author of the book American
Motors the Last Independent, made an interesting remark
about the Javelin and AMX that I thought confirmed the brilliance
of the Hornet's shared chassis design.
"It's curious that no attempt was made
to build them on the Hornet chassis, which would have made
them viable products."
The Hornet design had proven itself.
And although all car sales were tumbling, the Hornet would
yet again be counted on to tow the company line. The Hornet
line wore the same styling for 1975, now six years old, with
few mechanical changes. |
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Some of those changes included a new
grille with vertical bars and an "overdrive" option
for the automatic transmission (see visitor comments below).
The list of options as always is very
impressive. This is what allowed the new buyers of Hornet
to personalize it to their tastes. Power plants continued to
be offered in 6 cylinders or V8. |
Visitor Comments:
I just wanted to point out that in several pages on your web site, you mention AMC having an "overdrive" Automatic Transmission. This statement is completely false. The closest AMC ever came to developing an AOD trans was when they started using lockup torque converters in the late 70's.
However, the Overdrive you may be thinking of is a 3 speed MANUAL transmission with an Overdrive Unit bolted to the back of the three speed. It was electronically controlled with a single push-button on the Turn signal wand. Once in 3rd gear, pressing the button essentially "turned on" the overdrive unit. When speeds dropped below 45 mph, the brakes were pressed or the driver downshifted to second, the overdrive unit automatically switched out of Overdrive back to Direct.
Provided courtesy of
Darrin K.
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