So, are you sick of the AMC Matador coupe? Too bad, because I had to share this would-be Matador sedan, posted to Jim Grey’s Matador COAL writeup, in the comments. For those of you who missed it, CC regular Tim B created this 1975 Matador Cassini Edition. Looks awfully production-ready to me. I have to admit, I kind of like it. But wait, there’s more!
In the Barcelona II commercial post, I mentioned that the ’77-’78 Barcelonas must have had every Brougham styling cue, except for opera lamps. Tim reminded us all that it also needed a fake Rolls-Royce grille, and obliged with this photoshopped proposal. Just the thing for Huggy Bear to drive in Starsky & Hutch, don’t you think? The fake Lucas headlights are very Broughamy, but I wonder what it would look like with hidden headlights? Darn, there’s another Brougham cue the factory Barcelona IIs were missing!
Thanks Tim, for sharing these modified Matadors. Nice job! And for all of you CCers who can’t stand these Matador coupes, this is the last post for a while, I promise!
I’m still loving that sedan…!
Not bad, but the sedan would look better in my eyes if the B-pillar was more squared off in the front half of itself. Also, I would like the coupe sans brougham-pimp-mobile package.
It looks EXACTLY like a Torino of the same vintage, only with a more jacked-up nose. They might have sold about 3 of these had they actually made it.
Not a million miles away from the Maverick sedan too. When checking if the Maverick was facelifted or replaced by the Granada, I found they were sold alongside each other for a few years.
The Granada was supposed to replace the Maverick but since the Maverick sales picked up due to the gas crisis they decided to keep it in production and market the Granada as a premium/luxury compact. It wasn’t a bad idea as both cars sold in good numbers, the tooling was paid for on the Maverick and they were able to fatten up the profit margin on the Granada.
I recall a 1975-ish Motor Trend article on possible future offerings from AMC, and there were 3 renderings of possbile Matador sedans, and this looks exactly like one of them.
I tried to copy the intent of the sketch (posted elsewhere) as much as possible, including the B pillars. It wasn’t exactly a blueprint LOL.
This might be too tasteful……some cars(Marquis de Sade) had appliques on the hidden head lights, just to junk up a cleaner design?
Nice. The hidden headlights help. Definitely an improvement over the coffee-cans that made the final cut amongst the artistic geniuses in Kenosha.
I’d still thin out that roof padding by a few inches, though.
If only someone could find that Motor Trend article with the 3 proposed Matator renderings…. 🙂
That 4-door rendering have a better design then that one at http://www.matadorcoupe.com/images/CoupeProto.jpg
And to explore more “what if?”… at http://amccars.net/yabbfiles/Templates/Forum/default/xx.gif
Also, AMT released a customized toy car version of the Matador. Picture founded at http://arcticboy.com/Pages/arcticboystoys.html
I still say that roofline is something straight outta Studebaker’s design studio.
That kind of works. A huge improvement over the boxy old sedan they actually did produce.
The sedan looks pretty good! The front-end treatment on these Matadors never looked quite right to me, though. They always looked like cars with the hide-away lamps stuck in the Up position. It would either need to lose the full-width grill or go to hide-away headlights.
Yeah, would have loved to see these in LAPD colors; they had famously bought a bunch of early 1970’s Matadors as squad cars, which inevitably showed up in a lot of TV cop shows at the time.
Looks better than the coffin nose, but that’s not saying much.
Next!!
What? No side pipes. Huggy needs side pipes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stutz_bearcat_2.jpg
How about a suitably ironic yet breathless title like, “The car that could have saved AMC!”
I’m lovin’ that black sedan. So many disparate design cues come together to create something that I find quite desirable.
The sedan certainly looks better than the Matador sedan that AMC did sell after 1973. At least it wouldn’t have looked like a desperate attempt to keep fresh a body shell that debuted for the 1967 model year.
The big question, in view of the coupe’s ultimate failure, is whether it would have sold well enough to pay off the tooling. The answer is still most likely, “no.”
I like it! Even though it’s a straightforward “stretch” of the AMC coupe, it somehow manages to pick up the flavor of the 4-door Ford Torino and GM Colonnades (say, a Malibu Classic) and combine them. I think it would have sold, certainly better than the coffin-nose model offered at the time!
I think that black sedan looks a lot like that awkward Avanti 4-door someone was building in the early 90s…
Reminded me of that, too.
I actually saw one of these — silver, with oversized chrome rims — driving in West LA maybe 12 years ago. Which was before I knew there was such a thing as a four-door Avanti. I was talking to a girl on the sidewalk where we just met for a movie. She noticed I wasn’t looking at her while she was talking because I was distracted by something down the street. So she asked “What are you looking at?” And I answered “A car that’s not supposed to exist.”
I love the sedan. The rear treatment reminds me of the lines of an Excallibur sedan that I saw pictures of some time ago.
Interesting how the what-if Matador sedan shows that AMC managed to replicate the big mistake Studebaker made in 1953. The groundbreaking ’53 Stude coupe was a totally different body from the sedans, which were actually carryovers from ’52 bodies facelifted to look as much like the new coupes as possible, but the proportions were all wrong. The sketch below shows how much sleeker a ’53 sedan based on the coupe body would have been. The ’74 Matador coupe wasn’t the artistic masterpiece that the ’53 Studebaker was, but it did generate some showroom buzz when it first appeared. However, AMC’s sedan and wagon offerings were warmed over 1967 designs. The hypothetical Matador sedan looks good, maybe needing a tweak or two at the B-pillar area and that’s it.
On the Studes, I agree with you mostly. The 53 sedans were indeed all new. However, there had been a program for a new 53 in place for quite awhile. They were to be similar in dimensions to the 47-52, but were indeed completely new. Only after Loewy’s proposal for the Starliner got the green light did stylists go back to the in-progress 53 sedans to apply many of the details from the coupe.
This “what if” proves the adage that you can lose weight but you can’t lose ugly. You can remove all kinds of stuff to make it lighter……………
“Tim B”: You did an incredible job with this illustration! It is so professional, at first glance I didn’t even notice the four-doors! Awesome work! (I owned a 78 tan Barcelona coupe.)
1975 Matador Cassini is always been my favorite car and I think in style and looks none other car can defeat it.
Duha storage