It’s sort of crazy now to imagine an America in which a sporty, 4-wheel-drive wagon didn’t fly off dealer lots. But in the early 1980s, nobody seemed to want the AMC Eagle. The Subaru Outback before there was a Subaru Outback. Were they reliable? Lol, no. Were they cool? Oh, heck no, not then. But they might be gaining a foothold on retro coolness now. Yes, the inline 6-cylinder is underpowered, but look at that wood paneling. Look at that spartan, almost mid-century modern interior. But more importantly, look at the incredible ads.
There’s a growing market for these cars, not growing like the market for 80s Toyota pickups or anything, just a small sliver of the population who longs for carbureted wagons with lift kits and knobby tires. You can have this one here, in fact, if you act quickly enough.
My grandma had a fuel-injected ’87 Eagle (AMC Renault) Premier 4-door sedan that my mom inherited after she died 10 years later. She sat under the carport for most of that decade. She actually did alright at Gifford Pinchot driving on snowy wilderness roads, even though it wasn’t designed for such conditions. (Several freshly-cut Christmas trees were strapped to its roof and transported to Grandmom’s mobile home in what was then Camas.)
Unreliable as fuck though, especially after mom got the car and actually started driving her extensively, in the transition period between mom’s very high-milage Subaru GL and her recently-deceased ’97 GMC Yukon. The trunk was also pathetically undersized (like, “why the fuck even bother” small), one of the biggest complaints mother had, which made packing for family road trips a legitimate challenge.
But its stock radio/cassette had fully AMAX-compliant AM stereo. (Hey, it was the 80s…) The local America’s Best Music affiliate (KKSN 1520), which was a very well-processed station in the late 90s and early 2000s, sounded fantastic on that system.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/EaglePremier3.jpg/800px-EaglePremier3.jpg — This picture is of an ’88 model but there really wasn’t much difference between the late AMC/Renaults and early Chryslers. Grandma’s car also had that same dark-gray paint initially, but mom had repainted light blue.
This is great. Beautiful car, too.
It looked great and was very comfortable to ride in (the upholstery was very plush), but by god was it problematic. The transmission was replaced at least once (first one didn’t have very many miles on it) and the engine would often flood if you looked at it wrong. Often times either transmission would randomly drop out of gear when stopped for longer than a few minutes, leaving you effectively stranded at intersections and car parks. I don’t know if these were just problems with that particular car or inherent to the entire model line. Driving in crowded downtown Portland streets definitely became quite the harrowing adventure.
They also had to have the computer module (whatever the technical name for it is) replaced at one point because the old one had just abruptly given up the ghost, which (of course) also affected the fuel injection. The Premier was built early in the days of computer-equipped cars so I think they were still trying to figure out the tech. It was so early it didn’t have OBD! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/1992_Eagle_Premier_ES_Limited_interior.jpg — The little 1×7 alphanumeric green LED display between the Jensen radio and tachometer, directly below the steering wheel in this shot, is the computer monitor. Under normal conditions all segments would light up for a second when initialising (starting the car) and by default would show “MONITOR” when working properly. (It also has a stopwatch and a couple other features I don’t recall off the top of my head.) When it doesn’t show anything, bad things are likely to happen.
Mother did love the way it handled, though, and much preferred it over the old ’84 Subaru despite its laundry list of flaws.
By the way, your “load more items” function makes posting comments extremely problematic when Javascript is enabled (such as when replaying to a comment). It keeps wanting to load more links to other articles (like Youtube does, for example), infinitely causing the comments section to move farther down the page….. making it inaccessible because scrolling down past a certain point makes WordPress automatically load more, pushing the comments ever further down. Changing the layout to put the comments section above the links section may fix it. This is not a problem when Javascript is disabled in the browser, i.e. running Noscript.