Richard Teague was responsible for a number of attractive automotive shapes. The best to reach production was the Hornet. Super minimalist, long hood and tight tail, coiled-fist boxy, flares you can see from the moon. It oozes handsomeness and purpose.
There is one thing, however, that irks me. Those short rear doors.
It started with the Cavalier in 1965.
An exercise in symmetry, whereby the doors and front/rear fenders were interchangeable. This negated the sedan profile’s dynamism, making Cavalier appear inert.
The only interchangeable things on the Hornet were the front and rear bumper stampings.
It’s not uncommon for four-doors to share c-pillar with their two-door variant, but here it seems like an exercise in cost-cutting.
Limited though they are, here are the choices:
A – Get off my lawn
M – Clapping hardtop using same c-pillar keeping short and long doors, as per the RX8
C – Revised c-pillar and rear door, citing the symmetry of Cavalier
…
It’s not just the C-pillar that is shared, it’s the whole roof stamping.
Sorry, I like the original. The overall shape of the car is definitely one of the more attractive of its era. I’ll admit, I’ve always had a fascination with the rear ‘suicide’ (I hate the term) doors because they do allow a better ingress/egress. With seatbelt usage, modern door locks, and internal door beams, I don’t see where they’d be such a safety problem anymore.
I always assumed the problem with “suicide” doors is that if you are a rear seat passenger and open the door to get out on the street side, a car driving too close would slam the door shut against you, unlike with a standard door, where the door would be pulled away from you.
With that said, I have always loved doors that open away from each other. You shouldn’t be exiting on the street side if possible anyway.
The other problem with suicide doors is that if they are opened at speed the wind catches them and whips them open causing damage and the chance of occupants falling out of a moving vehicle.
You been watching “Perry Mason” too much..lol Someone always exiting, entering the car on the passenger side.
Like the “intrigue” of the “suicide doors”, version though.
Not to be nitpicky, but something between A and C (Not B). Too-long rear doors give the body an ungainly, stretched-out look that ruin the sporty lines. This was a problem for the 1964-1967 GM A-body sedans as well as for the Maverick 4-door in my opinion.
Of course, the bigger turn off for me is the fact that it has the innards of an AMC.
I think the problem with C is we are so used to A that C seems odd.
I personally love M, with the suicide doors and hardtop – very much a mini 1961-1969 Lincoln Continental (which was not a hardtop, BTW).
The reality is that suicide doors are very impractical, especially on small cars, and hardtop windows leak wind and water at the seals.
AMC probably made the correct choice with A.
I agree and Choice C’s profile reminds me quite a bit of a Granada/Monarch, especially the roof line. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but I too think A was the correct choice.
The short lived, one on the “Saturn” coupes seemed to work out. Surprisingly don’t /didn’t seem to leak.
Something that’s not a feature of the short Hornet rear doors is they don’t climb into the rear quarter panel and have a much straighter line down to the rocker panel.
Today’s vehicles, particularly small CUVs, all seem to have a rear door which continues back over the rear wheel arch. Besides making entry and exit more difficult, it provides a prime spot for the rear door to leave a very nice, pointed door-ding in a vehicle parked nearby.
I vote M. With the windows down, the unequal sizes of the doors is far less noticeable. And I’m a sucker for both suicide doors and hardtop sedans.
Of course, it would have been put together by AMC, perhaps the last American outfit who should have attempted a suicide door / hardtop combo.
But then Fiat and Simca did those (admittedly not frameless, but without a B-pillar) for years, so it might not have been impossible for the Kenosha folks to make it work…
I don’t have a problem with the actual solution, and option B just doesn’t resonate on a cheapish compact. I’ve been looking at C for a while; initially it didn’t work so well for me, but the longer I look the more I like it. It does vibe the Cavalier some, in a good way. I’m not sure I’d ultimately pick it over A, but it is an excellent alternative.
I remember when the Cavalier came out in newspapers; it stimulated some intriguing mind exercises in 12 year old me, on the obvious manufacturing benefits, but it also made me realize that there is a reason front doors on 4-door sedans are so much longer than rear ones, and the seemingly endlessly long one on the Cavalier just didn’t work.
The symmetrical concept can work, but seemingly only on very short and inherently goofy (in a good way) micro cars or such. But not on a bigger sedan.
The FIAT 128 4 door reminds me of a mini version of the red Cavalier above.
I wonder who was looking over who’s shoulder.
The Original.
Although I understand what you are getting at with C – A works better because with C – that C pillar and door is visually too far back. I also don’t care at all for the Cavalier. It looks forced.
I love a four-door hardtop, but I feel like the original Hornet sedan got the look just right, shorter rear doors, and everything. Great editing work.
I’d go with C, although the production version doesn’t look bad to me.
The Cavalier with its interchangeable driver/right rear passenger and front passenger/left rear passenger door interchangeability was very much along the same lines as Brook Stevens’ prototype of a future Studebaker Lark replacement from 1962 that never reached production, which also had this . Although the beautiful Spectre coupe from this time is more famous, Stevens also designed a Lark sedan and Wagonaire redesign at the same time. There are several views of it here: https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2016/03/16/the-sceptre-the-cruiser-and-brooks-stevenss-radical-plan-to-save-studebaker
As for the best Dick Teague design to reach production, the Hornet is up there, but lets not forget about the vehicles that bookended his design career, the ’55-56 Packards (actually just an extensive facelift) and the ’84 Jeep Cherokee (XJ) which would get my vote.
Agreed on the 55/56 Packards, plus there’s Javelin Mark One. Also a big fan of this Rogue concept
Can I pick the 2 door SC360 with a 4 speed?
I lived with the original solution in the Concord I owned, it was a little tight in the back but not terrible.
While C looks nice enough, it won’t have enough room in the door cavity for the window to wind down much at all, let alone completely. It’d need a fixed quarter-window at the rear of the frame to let the main pane roll down, somewhat complicating the sleeker look.
Also not sure M would have enough room in the doors for the larger pillarless/frameless glass panes to roll down completely, at least for the rear doors.
The silhouette of C’s greenhouse is very nice indeed but is ruined by the proportions of the windows themselves. The rear glass appears larger than the front. Too heavy and distracting to ignore.
Choice D. No rear doors. But I always prefer two door cars, so there’s that.
A choice E might work too. The longer rear door of C (well, maybe not that long, but longer than the original A), with the hardtop look of no B pillar like choice M would look cool too.
I’m not liking the suicide doors. A ’61 Lincoln can pull off that look. Not an AMC Hornet.
Great work Don. As ‘Kim in Lanark’ stated, if version C was the style introduced for production, I would have found it likeable, and attractive. Though, I feel the rear door width, may be extended a bit too much, in your example.
The Hornet-variant roofline I liked the most (by far), was the six window version shared between and the Eagle and later Concord sedans. Would have been wonderful, if they offered it in a non vinyl-roof version.
Front three-quarter view. IMO, significantly more modern-looking, than the original Hornet C-pillar.
Agreed! It would’ve looked odd in 1970, but by the time they brought this out, it was a brilliant update.
The few ’80-up Concord sedans (never seen an Eagle) without vinyl tops, built exclusively for fleets had the Hornet 4-window profile. I suspect they were hand-cutting those windows on the line and the puffy vinyl top was needed to hide the resulting crudeness.
The doors never bothered me, but then I never saw many Hornets. What did bother me was the width of the C-pillar. Which leads me to option C.
But, we much consider the position of the front seat relative to the B-pillar. On the production Hornet, the driver’s head is alongside the B-pillar (unless the seats are reclined, which you probably can’t because cheap, but then again it’s AMC, so perhaps you can). Shorten the front doors and shift the pillar forward to balance the proportions, and all of a sudden you might have a problem with access. Rather than opening the door and just sliding in, it looks as though you’d be ducking behind the pillar, like in some smaller sixties Japanese cars.
The original does have a muscular look though. Sort of a sporty compromise between a two-door and a four-door. Now if you’d offered the four-door in SC/360 trim… I’d like to see it with a few more inches of wheelbase. How tight was the rear seat in these – anyone know?
It looks as though the front doors haven’t been messed with at all.
AMC considered this Lincoln Continental-like roof for the 1984 Concord, a design that never happened. Reminiscent, of the Chrysler Fifth Avenue as well.
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/article/the-last-concord
Proposed 1984 AMC Concord convertible roof. Reminiscent of the Dodge Mirada faux convertible roof. Not too shabby, at all. Though being an AMC, likely would have still struggled to find sales. And automotive press reviews, would have rightfully continued calling it obsolete.
That’s not too bad. Vastly better than the wretched opera-window treatment the Concord did get.
their was always the amc sundancer if someone really felt the need to have a Concord with a folding roof
The cancelled Mirada/Cordoba, offered a near identical-looking roof. Failing to sell, with much more modern-looking sheetmetal than the Concord. Perhaps, if this roof style had been offered on the Concord in 1978. Rather, than proposed for 1984.
Shades of Bill Blass in these examples here, Daniel…
Option C.
With all they did and tried with the sedans, what they really should’ve shelled out for is a larger hatch for the wagon that opened all the way to the load floor. Given that the Sportabout with the compact-wagon market to itself early in its’ run made up half of all Hornets some years, and the wagon was by far the bestselling and last surviving Eagle, that’s where the investment should’ve gone.
As an aside, it’s interesting that the front-end treatment of the production 1968 Chevy Nova resembles that of the 1965 AMC Cavalier (especially if a full-depth bumper were to be substituted in place of the bladed bumper on the AMC):
Not bad, but it might be more accurate to say that the 1968 Nova was more of Chevrolet trying for a compact, dual-headlight, family resemblence to the 1967 Impala.
True, and the 1967 Impala’s front end was derivative of the 1963-64 Buick Riviera’s front end.
A is an okay compromise, M is quirky-cool, C reminds me of the Chrysler 180 (in a good way!):
Good call; I was gonna say Vauxhall Victor FE.
C works best, but with a slightly shorter door and more muscular er, C pillar to maintain the rather muscular look.
I was previously unaware of the later six-light variant. Looks even more Subaru!
I really liked the styling when the car first came out, but here in Wisconsin they did not hold up worth a damn. The American from 1964-1969 was a far superior car.
There’s a lovely ancient English radio sketch somewhere out there wherein a rather posh-voiced person begins singing the Gershwin’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”, but he becomes increasingly wavering because he pronounces “tomato”, “potato”, etc, in the same way each time, arriving inevitably arriving at “potato potato tomato tomato, let’s call the whole thing off” and he finally trails off and says “I really don’t see what’s wrong with these people!”
So it is with A, Dr Don: I really don’t see the difficulty. Well, not entirely. I did notice the shape as a kid and thought “something is…different”, and it is the rear doors, but with all due respect, your C reveals an altogether blander machine. It seems that it’s the rather upright rear line of the door and glass that gives the impression of a kind of wedge, or an interesting forward-rushing dynamic to the shape.
It’s perhaps a bit the like the Australian constitution, a document of compromise and some unwieldiness, a camel designed as a horse by a committee – scholars have said you really wouldn’t set out to design it that way in an ideal world, but in reality, the tension between Sate and Commonwealth rights may well be what has kept us stable for 120 years. By chance, it works BECAUSE of the oddness, as does the Hornet: fix it, and it doesn’t.
(I have some confidence that this will be the first time that a nation’s constitutional legal arrangements have been compared to the design of an automobile, and, in the hope of a world freed of over-stretched analogies, I promise it to be the last from me, at least).
Option M, then C and then A. M probably loses out in the real world for practicality and conformity.
Also, the second photo, of the 1965 Cavalier is giving me a lot of Ford Cortina MK3 vibes
Hardtop yes!
Suicide doors and unibody no!
Tom, I was aware that suicide door Lincolns had a b-pillar. However, didn’t some come with sedan doors and some with frameless hardtop doors? In later Ford literature for LTD and Galaxie models of the 70s I recall them using the term “pillared hardtop”.to describe the variant.