08/11/2025
On April 1st, 1970—April Fool’s Day—American Motors Corporation (AMC) rolled out something the world had never quite seen before: the AMC Gremlin.
Some people honestly thought it was a prank. After all, the name “Gremlin” evoked the mischievous little troublemakers from folklore who supposedly wreak havoc on machinery. But nope—this was no joke. The Gremlin was real.
It was one of America’s very first subcompacts, built to go toe-to-toe with VW Beetles and the flood of small Toyotas and Datsuns arriving from overseas. Its look still gets a chuckle today: from the front, it was a pretty standard coupe—but from the rear, it looked as if someone had taken a giant axe and chopped the car in half. That’s because, in a way, they did. AMC built the Gremlin off its Hornet sedan by lopping off the back end, leaving a stubby, two-seat (optional rear seat) runabout with barely any tail at all.
AMC leaned into the humor in its marketing, calling it “the first American import”—suggesting it had foreign-style fuel economy but homegrown roots. One clever quirk: the passenger door was about four inches longer than the driver’s, making it easier to climb into the back seat from the curb side. Another unusual feature for the time was the rear hatch—just a piece of lift-up glass instead of a conventional trunk lid. In 1970, that was fresh thinking.
Reviews were… mixed. Some applauded AMC for guts and for the price—just $1,879 base, the cheapest car in America. Others poked fun at both the design and the name. One popular wisecrack: “The Gremlin—named after the problems it comes with.”
Still, the little oddball stuck around for eight years, selling over 670,000 units—not bad for AMC. Today, it’s a quirky cult classic, a rolling piece of ‘70s eccentricity, and probably the most successful “April Fool’s car” ever built in earnest.
