I hope no one out there is hoping for a second helping of Matador Coupe vintage shots. Even on this post, there aren’t many images, just a scant four. But heck, as everybody knows these things just didn’t sell well. About 100K from 1974 to 1978, burning a considerable hole in AMC’s pockets. Yet, much to my surprise, a few Matador Coupes appeared while I scavenged for online images. Being at hand, we might as well give them their due.
Only the Matador in our lead pic appears in action (which looks suspiciously like a film capture). Our second Matador sits idly with a couple of young men, in a shot probably taken in the ’70s. Then, we have an ‘action’ one, serving for KFWB News and already with a couple of dents. Finally, a not-so-vintage shot, somewhere in Latin America.
I may be on the fence regarding the Matador Coupe’s aesthetics, but every time I came across one I won’t deny I got excited. “Damn! That’s a Matador Coupe!” For better or worse, it’s distinctive and there’s no way to mistake it for anything else. Which I guess says something in its favor.
Further reading:
Curbside Classic: 1975 AMC Matador Coupe – The Matador & Me
Curbside Classic: 1975 Matador Coupe X- Great X-pectations
Curbside Classic: 1974 AMC Oleg Cassini Matador Brougham – That’s A Matador?
Wot, no Scaramanga Flying Toreador?? Que queso!
That’s cheezy.
USAF Colonel Steve Austin (a cyborg) owned a bright red Matador X with white stripes on the TV show, “The Six Million Dollar Man.” (Steve also owned a Mercedes-Benz 450 SL.)
Not good looking cars .
I thought the early Matador sedans looked fine .
-Nate
Personally speaking, the styling of these Matadors is nothing short of a hot mess. Thought so then and still do. Kind of the love child of a 2nd generation of Camaro and an AMC Pacer. The butterscotch and pastel colors typically seen on these does them no favors.
Kind of garish.
It seems to me they wanted the taillights to mimic the rounded housings of the headlights.
The swooping side feature is just dumb, and the fastback roof, if trying to take away market from the Charger or something, was just done poorly. The great big wheel openings just added to the confused look.
What could have been a more trim car, in the size of the Hornet perhaps, was just not done properly.
There is an article about Richard Teague in the latest Packard Club newsletter. Apparently he was a very kind person who enjoyed interactions with the general public. The thing that stood out from the article was he was apparently especially proud of the Matador Coupe, whereas he thought that AMC engineers had ruined the Pacer.
This is a puzzle, because in my mind, whereas I can kinda see the neat features of the front half of the Matador Coupe, the rear half just looks unfinished, as if the designer couldn’t quite figure out what to do, so just put in a bunch of features and lines that don’t quite fit together. Maybe what this really says is that the design language of the 1970’s was confused, or at least confusing to our eyes. What seemed to look right back then to a lot of designers (I presume), from the Mustang II to the mid-1970’s Dodge Charger to the Monza Coupe, to all the various Japanese offerings such as the F10, just don’t look right in the present day.
A neighbor had one of these, though I don’t remember it ever moving, but I was fascinated by it’s googly-eyed presence.
I’m not sure the F10 ever looked right.
It looked like an “F10”, as did a “B210” look like a “B210”. (individualistic)
The mid 70s Charger simply looked down on by way of the name debasement, the Cordoba doesn’t really get any grief, as it’s an appropriate design within the context of PLCs. All the PLCs look like dinosaurs today but the matador was a particularly challenged dinosaur, not the T-rex or Raptor a kid would want to have an action figure of.
I think Teague was a great and imaginative designer, but sometimes that comes with being overly indulgent, same with Exner. I didn’t know Teague shared his feelings on these cars but I’ve seen the pure Pacer concept posted here and it was even weirder with its little stub of a front end, I never thought the production Pacer was ugly, not until the facelift anyway, its biggest problem was it was ostensibly an economy car but it wasn’t very efficient or practical, and its underpinnings were nothing like any other production AMC and surely cost the company a fortune that they never recovered. The Matador coupe was a money loser too but at least it shared its bones with the sedans, which dated back to 1967.
I think what makes 70s styling look confused is there’s so little uniformity to it. Ironically as car enthusiasts we deride the era as malaise but there’s actually more visual variety in cars and colors from a single given year in the 70s than just about any era before and after. In the early to mid 70s you saw trends ending, trends emerging, segments emerging or coming into their own, and imports becoming the norm with their own national languages. Plus of course the bumper laws forcing hasty restyles that often made things go from weird to just plain ugly.
The result was many cars that emerged from that era that were already typically playing “catch up” to the bigger players didn’t know what to draw from as design leaders weren’t necessarily leading edge anymore, so instead they drew from all of them at once, the Matador coupe might be the ultimate example, an amalgamation of sleek intermediate coupe, formal personal luxury coupe and ponycar in one confused package. It’s there too in the Mustang II with its Monte Carlo like bulging fenders whilst trying to look sporty like a Celica, but also its self referential “mustang” touches that were revived due to popular demand. It wasn’t like the 60s where Elwood Engel made the Continental clean and boxy where every car including economy compacts was obligated to immediately follow suit. Once the sheer look hit then order began to appear again in followup designs
Gym, swimming teacher had a orange/brown one in high school. Was a “75ish” model I believe.
The Matador design works out better when scaled to the Hornet/Javelin 108″-110″ platform. with the rear overhang bobbed by half its length.
The primary objective of the Matador coupe restyle was to capture a piece of the burgeoning popular-priced personal luxury coupe segment exampled by the Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme coupe, Ford Torino Elite, etc. Teague should have recognized that any design that didn’t include the neo-classic features was going to be a non-starter. Even Chrysler figured that out, the Cordoba gave them that in spades!
Teague, and AMC management, realized that an AMC Monte Carlo wasn’t going to go very far in the market. There was little point in AMC offering what buyers could get at their local Big Three dealerships.
Teague had the right idea – offer something different from the Big Three intermediate coupes. The problem was the execution. The car looks best in the “X” version, but even the X models are painfully awkward from some angles.
There are some good ideas here, but they never come together to form an attractive, coherent design. In that respect, the Matador coupe is like the 1960-62 Plymouth Valiant/Dodge Lancer.
I’ve read that “AMC offering them something different than the Big Three” management scenario, which was laudable except that AMC was too small a player to make that approach work. At least potential buyers wouldn’t have been put off by a polarizing design had it been more mainstream attractive. AMC didn’t need to supply them with another reason not to buy an AMC car.
In truth, the Matador offered nothing not available at a Big Three dealership except a quirky design. Those ‘love it or hate it’ designs from small automakers are more likely to get the latter reaction….and generate lousy sales.
The only direct experience I ever had with one was a 1975 V8, base trim, 40K miles original. After a short drive to determine if the repairs it was in for had taken care of the problems, it had. I was asked what I thought of it, my response: “What a junky car!” The only saving grace was most of the competition was just as junky in the Malaise Era!
Like the Edsel, this was a completely unnecessary car, not just in hindsight. AMC already had tolerable sporty coupes in all of its lines. The ’73 Hornet hatchback was beautiful. They didn’t need an UGLY sporty coupe to compete with their acceptable and beautiful sporty coupes!
The money spent on the Matador coupe would have been better spent on updating the Matador sedan and wagon. Some chassis upgrades and new sheet metal would have helped those Matadors compete better in the market.
Don’t forget Officer Pete Malloy’s ride in the later seasons of Adam 12. 😉
(Yes, it’s a TV show but the car did exist in the real world.)
Found a photo…
I believe this notion has be brought up here before, but to me it is as if the car came out about 3 years too late. Styling-wise it seemed to be more of a conpemporary to cars like the ’71 Charger and Montego, and that era of sporty mid-sized was rapidly being eclipsed by personal-luxury coupes like the Cordoba, Monte Carlo, and Cutlass Supreme. Perhaps if this style of Matador had been introduced in ’71 it would have had a few years of strong sales early on. AMC must have seen the trend, it didn’t take them long to ‘refine’ the Matador into the ‘Brougham-ized’ Barcelona editions. Unfortunately, a stand-up hood ornament, padded vinyl roof, and smaller ‘formal’ quarter windows couldn’t really hide that swoopy body. Ironically the Barcelona package looked much better on the Matador sedan. Matador sedans not surprisingly are often seen in the last few seasons of the Adam-12 T.V. show, but occasionally officer Malloy is seen driving a yellow Matador coupe.
I don’t think there is a car other than the Matador where 4 round taillights looks dorky on, but somehow AMC pulled it off. Seriously, I know most people find the front end the most offputting but to my eye it’s everything from the windshield back, every line and detail is spaced curved and proportioned weirdly in that region of the car, whereas I feel like the front end would have worked as-is if it had a more formal Monte Carloesque body treatment.
As a fan of pop culture, I love products that enjoy a brief meteoric rise to fame, and begin their fade to oblivion fairly quickly. Ensuring, they become a perfect timepiece for the era.
The Matador coupe fits this bill, especially well. ‘Clap for the Wolfman’ of cars.
I don’t think I ever saw a gas station in the US like the one in the top photo, even then. It’s obviously a leftover from prewar days. Maybe pre-WWI days even.
I thought the big headlight look that Exner liked (1963 Dodge Dart, related Dodge cab forward vans and pickups, and the Turbine Car) was cool but that was over by then. And the curved under front end with the chromed bumper floating ahead of it on projecting mounts thing ended with the 1951 Studebaker. Plus the whole thing was just too sprawling for no reason. I thought all of that back then.
AMC had been known for the 1956 Rambler and its many facelifts over the years – a design that emphasized room inside (close to Big 3 dimensions) while cutting all the excess outside. By this point AMC was doing the opposite.
Michael ;
This was a very standard thing through the late 1940’s ~ they’d convert a conveniently located house to a filling station .
There’s a similar one I drive past every week and wish I could buy ~ it’s a garage with two pump kitty – corner island that’s shaded just like this .
It was never a residence but I’d live in it easily .
-Nate
I always thought these looked like an overinflated pinto, I still do
I remember reading that AMC wanted a reasonably aerodynamic design for the Matador so it could be competitive in NASCAR. Hence, the low nose, fastback roof and jumbo wheel wells that could accommodate big fat racing tires but looked ridiculous with itty-bitty street tires. Roger Penske’s team raced Matadors for a short while.
True as the original Penske AMC Matador raced in 1972/73, nicknamed “The Flying Brick” was at a disadvantage on superspeedways:
https://www.allpar.com/attachments/matador-at-riverside-1973-jpg.3962/
It did well on short tracks, and Mark Donohue scored his one and only NASCAR win in one at the road course at Riverside, CA in 1973 but AMC wanted bigger and better.
Bobby Allison managed four wins over 1974/75 with the Matador you pictured. But by 1975 AMC was hemorrhaging cash and pulled out of supporting NASCAR and Penske.
I’m not sure the F10 ever looked right.
I can see how a small company would want to make a car that’s more eye-catching and distinctive than handsome, but just how drunk were the designers and the executives who approved it?
When I did classified work for a defense contractor in a previous life, each safe had a magnetic lock/unlock sign you’d flip over to reflect its condition. We were told to slap the sign on at an angle so it would draw the eye to it. That’s what the back half of the Matador does, in spades.
The Pacer is a lot of car. What’s not to like? It checked all the boxes: really big, curvy, big-shouldered, of questionable reliability, retro, 2-door coupe, inefficient. It’s a car that seems brown, even when it isn’t. It’s rolling irony. It’s a caricature of a car, which seemed to be the dominant design theme coming out of Detroit at the time. Sure, the money spent on the Pacer’s implementation could have been spent on something more strategically useful, but the Big 3 were making money hand over fist selling the same schlock. Seems to me that AMC executives made a very rational decision. On paper, the Pacer should have been a hit. In retrospect, though, I do wonder if Teague was being a bit tongue in cheek with this (not to mention the coffin nosed sedans). One could argue that this was just a ‘jump the shark’ moment, but you never know what’ll stick. Who would have predicted the monstrous front ends of light-duty trucks now on sale, after all. Those things look at least as absurd as a Pacer.
The Matador coupe would have looked much better if it had been 7/10ths the size, per one of my best ACCD instructor’s, Harry Bradley, shortly after the car was unveiled. After he put it that way, I certainly had to agree with him! 🙂 DFO
It’s a MATADOR
I know that most of the people here are pointing out how the Matador Coupe was intended to grab a piece of the personal luxury car market, and while that is certainly true, the Matador Coupe had to do double duty as both a mid-sized personal luxury coupe, and also as a mid-sized non-personal luxury coupe. Its most direct competitors were the Chevelle, Gran Torino, and Plymouth Satellite coupes, rather than the mid-sized PLCs of the era.
Car magazines of the 1970s showed drawings of “future” Matador 4-door sedans and station wagons that used the Matador Coupe’s front-end clip. I suppose AMC ran out of money before they put them into production.
I feel as though AMC was trying to cover two or three market segments with one in-between-styled car. It was a sort of sporty-looking intermediate for the few who still wanted one, was unconvincingly awkward as a Broughamoid PLC in Barcelona trim, and just looked plain weird in NASCAR trim.
Perhaps the stupidest part of the design was that long, long front overhang, which was totally unnecessary. You could easily chop six to eight inches off of that and the car would look all the better for it. Less weight cantilevered way out front, too.
Runner-up would be the rear side window shape, which always gave the impression it was fitted a few degrees out of kilter. Even worse with a vinyl roof!
But having said all that, there’s something compelling about the design. Compelling in the sense of “How could they get it so wrong?”
Great build!
You know, I kind of liked the extended front overhang in a way. Lent a bit of an aggressive forward thrust, Great White or Hammerhead shark quality to its look. It would have looked timid without it.
I owned a 76 Coupe with the 360 in Brougham trim. Ran beautifully, so much so I bought a 79 AMX which I still have with 572, 000 kms on it. AMC made their own motors and bodies, every thing else was off the shelf. They won Trans-Am two years straight against every thing that the Big 3 could throw at them which made Ford, GM and Chrysler decide to take their cars and go home. Not bad for a very small car company.
I also think this is a good time to point out that AMC did a surprisingly good job of meeting the 5 mph bumper requirements on the Matador Coupe. The bumpers on this car were just the right size to meet the requirement, unlike some of the over-sized battering rams attached to the front and rear of so many other cars of the time. It was neat how AMC decided to leave a space between the bumper and the car body, instead of sticking a piece of vinyl painted to match the body in between.
It is the case that the confrontation in the bullring does not always go the way of the matador, and the disfiguring can be considerable. Quite why AMC decided to immortalize that result in a car is a question for the historians, but this X marks the spot where it happened. Still, it cannot be denied that the startled eyes of the victim at his final moment are captured for eternity in the sheetmetal and glass of that face, and it is in truth vastly better than many a vaunted sculpture on the subject that one might see in a gallery.
I wonder, if this oddball coupe had been made by, say, Renault, at half scale, would it be considered an eccentric Euro-glam object? A thing like the Renault 17 of the same era is in any objective measure a hot aesthetic mess, but is considered (then and now) to be cool. Well, cool to Euro-snobs like me, but at least I’m aware the Renault is in fact knocking insistently on the door of ugly.
For the record, I rather like the eccentric X coupe. I suspect that I like mostly that one has to look at it a lot to form an opinion: that alone means it’s an interesting thing. If it was just ugly, one wouldn’t take that time.
Okay, fine… I’ll be the one commenter to say they like these. Color, wheels, options, lack of vinyl top – these things can all combine to make a very attractive coupe or one that looks very awkward. Dark colors work best on these, and with the AMC slotted mags, these are great looking cars. Being in the minority on these must basically assure me of their affordability should the right car and time come along.
I’m with you. First year Matador X in red, was one of the best looking domestic cars of the era. With slotted mags, or AMC road wheels, trim rings, and white-letter tires. Combined with the AMC 360 V8, a desirable American car for 1974.
One of the better-looking examples on the web.
FWIW, Bob Nixon, the head of AMC’s passenger car design under Teague, seemed quite satisfied with the Matador Coupe. In a 2014 interview, he commented:
“I think for its place and time it was pretty good. It was unique and different. We had not only the tunneled headlight motif, but we carried that through to the taillights, and teardrop-shaped side windows. I think it worked out fairly well.”
Good looking from this forward view! The back, not so much!
Almost Vega like, but bigger!
Pretty sharp interior too!
One more try!
File was too big! Sorry for all the repeat posts!
A guy down the street from me in the 70’s when I was a kid had one of these. Rarely seen outside of his.