1977 AMC AM Van 4×4 Concept Vehicle
Richard Heseltine takes a look at AMC’s last hurrah of a concept, the groovy-looking AM van…
From here to obscurity
It appears achingly cool in the present day, but then it was broadly popular for about five minutes in 1977. The AM Van was a concept car, er… commercial vehicle, that aimed to inject some much-needed razzmatazz into the ailing AMC brand. This hardy independent had punched above its weight time and again, innovating out of necessity with development budgets that wouldn’t cover the catering bill for the Big Three in Detroit. However, scroll back to the mid- to late-Seventies and the wider media sensed blood. American Motors was ailing, and its management attempted to deflect attention – create positive press – by initiating a programme that would showcase how forward-thinking it was. Ignore the doom and gloom. Concentrate instead on the shiny baubles.
‘Concept 80’ was in effect a travelling motor show; a sort of GM Motorama for the Seventies, albeit on a small scale. Its raft of concept cars proved remarkably prescient too, even if not all of them were strictly new. The groovy-looking, battery-powered Electron, for example, was merely the Amitron, a 10-year-old commuter shuttle concept that had been given a light facelift and a respray. The Concept 1 was a compact two-door hatchback, the Jeep II was a shrunken off-roader that in a roundabout way foretold the Suzuki Samurai/Jimny, and so on.
The AM Van was the one that was most firmly anchored in the present, not least because of the visuals, but it still managed to hint at the near future and hit the mark squarely as it did so. This was the period when custom vans were hip. They had crossed over into the mainstream, when even music and film talked up a storm about shag-carpeted gin palaces and the freedom that came with having a motorised playpen. In many ways, the AM Van was a reflection of the times, but then AMC didn’t produce civilian vans. Instead, it went its own way and envisioned a compact van; one that was shorter than a VW Beetle. It thought of urban dwellers and the size of their garages. The AM Van had all the right trinkets – flared arches, sidepipes and custom wheels – it even had the obligatory porthole window, until a subsequent makeover, but on a much smaller canvas. Styled under the leadership of studio chief Dick Teague, its cabforward, wedge-shaped nose was ahead of its time by about a decade.
The graphics also promised four-wheel drive. That and a turbocharged engine at a time when forced-induction was still deemed exotic. AMC had seemingly pulled off a masterstroke with the AM Van. It was considered the most well-liked of all the Concept 80 vehicles when the exit polls came in from showgoers’ questionnaires. However, there was never any real likelihood of it ever making the leap into production, and the prototype was merely a glassfibre bodyshell. There was no running gear.
Remarkably though, the AM Van survived being broken up, and in time formed part of the Joe Bortz collection of showstoppers in Chicago. However, it has since been sold to a German enthusiast who is in the throes of mating the body to a reconfigured Jeep CJ-7 chassis.