Vintage Car Life Review: 1967 AMC Marlin – Beating A Dead Fish

Introduced in mid-1965 in clumsy attempt to jump on the sporty car bandwagon, AMC’s midsize fastback Marlin had never found an audience, and by the 1967 model year, it was flopping on the dock. This snarky road test from the April 1967 Car Life took a hard look at the final Marlin — no longer called a Rambler — and dissects the many ways the big fish missed its mark.

Before we begin, I think a content warning is in order for diehard AMC fans and Marlin defenders (there must still be a few): This is not a kind review.

In fact, by Car Life standards, it’s a much meaner-than-average review. Car Life in this era was published by John R. Bond, and had a lot of editorial overlap with Road & Track, differing mostly in focus: RT was mostly concerned with European sports cars, while CL covered domestic cars, with a few exceptions on both sides. Car Life had some dubious editorial flourishes from time to time, but their usual style was deadpan sobriety. They weren’t Motor Trend, which tended to respond to every press release from Detroit with the meek obsequiousness of a state media arm, but unlike Car and Driver in this era, Car Life didn’t do stunts and they didn’t do hatchet jobs.

 

Except, perhaps, for this review. There’s a lot of acid here, and I can’t decide if the editors were really so appalled by the ineptitude of the Marlin or if it just seemed like an easy target, especially since they must have had grasped that its end was near and even some AMC executives would probably be glad to see it gone.

The production figures presented here are all from the Automobile Manufacturers Association (AMA), which compiled this data each year and released it to the automotive press as well as publishing an annual booklet called Automobile Facts and Figures. Those figures reveal that AMC was in the process of shedding market share like a space capsule sheds its ablative heat shield on reentry. AMC production went from a still healthy 391,366 units for the 1965 model year to 295,897 for MY1966, and 1967 would be still worse: 235,522 for the model year, 229,057 for the calendar year. The company had lost about $12 million in 1966, leading to the “major personnel and financial revisions” mentioned in the first paragraph: Both board chairman Bob Evans and AMC president Roy Abernethy had agreed to bow out, succeeded by Roy D. Chapin Jr. and William V. Luneberg.

 

Abernethy usually shoulders most of the blame for AMC’s ’60s missteps, and he was certainly to blame for the Marlin, which Car Life called “the product that most reflects the roots of the corporation’s difficulty.” In 1964, AMC had contemplated building an awkward-looking fastback coupe called Tarpon, based on the platform of the new Rambler American, which would theoretically have given AMC a competitor for the Ford Mustang. Abernethy had insisted on instead moving the Tarpon design to the bigger midsize Classic platform and raising the roofline for greater hat room, thereby hatching the Marlin. Car Life remarks:

The Marlin was born in haste and hope in mid-model year 1965. The haste was in the hope that a fastback sportster could play catch-up, could compete in the mushrooming youth market among the glamor cars of the Big Three. AMC wanted a piece of the action that was resulting in best-ever sales years for GM, Ford and Chrysler.

To quote Mr. Spock from the well-known Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action,” what they got turned out to be “a minuscule … a very small piece.” Rambler dealers managed to sell 10,327 Marlins for 1965, but that was about all the market would bear. The 3,998-unit figure the text quotes for 1966 is a calendar-year total — the 1966 model year total was 4,547 cars — but being outsold by Checker was ignominious. (Piece of what action?)

 

The text repeatedly compares Marlin sales to those of the Dodge Charger and Plymouth Barracuda, emphasizing that those rival fastbacks were selling comparatively well.

This is meaner than it might sound if you don’t recall the sales figures for those cars. Plymouth sold 64,596 Barracudas for 1965 and 38,029 for 1966, at a time when Ford was churning out between 40,000 and 50,000 Mustangs in an average month. The Charger, which had been new for 1966, accounted for only 37,300 units for the model year and 39,074 for the calendar year. The latter figure beat the Marlin by almost 10 to 1, but that was nothing to brag about.

 

Car Life goes on:

These figures are offered only as evidence that similarly shaped cars, both more and less expensive, more and less powerful, more and less plush, sell in vastly greater numbers than does Marlin. Why?

That’s really the central question of this road test, and this page begins what will be a lengthy list of failings:

1. The original 1965–66 Rambler Marlin didn’t offer anything more powerful than the 327 cu. in. (5,354 cc) AMC V-8, “what a horsepower snob might term ‘an adequate little engine.'”
2. Until 1967, the Marlin didn’t offer a four-speed gearbox, turning off the kind of youth market buyer who “at least considers purchase of a 4-speed do-it-yourself gearbox for his new acquisition, whether he needs it or not.”
3. The 1967 Marlin was longer, lower, and wider, “just when major developments were occurring in the realm of smaller cars.”
4. “The Marlin for 1967 has the configuration and styling that were considered magnificent on the 1942 Chevrolet Aero sedan. In short, the Marlin lacks the 25 years of refinement apparent to varying degrees in competitors’ products.”

 

Ouch. Now, I happen to like the 1942 GM fastbacks quite a bit, but I’m looking at them from the perspective of another century. In 1967, they were clapped-out old cars of a design that had lingered in production for at least five years past their usual sell-by date due to the war. Who wanted to lay out new car payments for a brand-new clapped-out old car?

Car Life‘s editors were not sold on the aesthetic virtues of their test car’s full-length black vinyl top, a $99.50 option, and I have to agree. Before anyone gets too mad at me, I actually like the overall shape of the ’67 Marlin, but the vinyl top is like a bald man forgoing his fitted hairpiece in favor of painting a swath of black acrylic across his bare head: It’s such a weird thing to do aesthetically that it goes beyond the merely tasteless into the outright inexplicable.

 

The text continues:

Bright-metal accent strips flanked the black vinyl, rimmed the half-elliptic windows, beaded the rear fenders, encircled the wheel cutouts, framed the vast expanse of rear window and windshield, striped side panels and set off the stacked twin headlamps. Add an overabundance of exterior chromium plate to the excess of vinyl and the sum is a surfeit of non-functional decoration. The impression is that AMC stylists drew a rather smooth, conventional fastback and gave it simple horizontal lines in grille, taillights and bumpers. Then others, perhaps some in a 1950s-oriented management, vied to see where additional chromium could be slathered on the car. The result was a thorough and unfortunate breakup of an inherently clean exterior design.

That’s probably more or less what happened during the design of the 1967 Marlin. I’m not convinced that a radical de-chroming would be an improvement, but the overall effect is of a car that’s been decorated more than actually designed, and it does clutter up a reasonably pleasant shape.

 

The CL editors were no happier with the interior:

INSIDE THE MARLIN, a plethora of unrelated things also prevailed. … Usually, good taste is considered to be harmony through a minimization of the numbers of elements. Elegance stems from understatement. The interior of the Marlin was so filled with textures and projections, angles, bends, ribs and grooves, shades, tints and tones that any sort of harmony was lacking. A run-of-the-mill Pontiac Grand Prix appears Spartan by comparison to the Phase 2 Marlin. … Scratch, too, the part of the market that exchanges money for the smooth simplicity of true uncluttered luxury.

AMC was into very ornate brocades in this period — this was the point where some AMC models even came with matching throw pillows, to complete the impression of being in the sitting room of your elderly Aunt Mildred. Today, the kitsch value is irresistible, but I don’t suppose many young people of driving age at this time had the necessary appetite for Camp to contemplate buying such a thing on purpose.

 

Next, the editors interrupt their outpouring of scorn for a bit of unmerited praise. The 1967 AMC Rebel/Marlin platform was somewhat less archaic than before, having finally abandoned the ancient torque tube drive (which had forced you to drive like your elderly Aunt Mildred lest you set the driveshaft hopping), but crediting AMC for “a great deal of sound, contemporary engineering practice” in the area of chassis and suspension design was pushing it even as a joke, heavy-duty option or no. (If you don’t know what a trunnion is, take a few minutes to have a look at Tom Jennings’ Rambler Lore page; we’ll wait.)

The text’s praise of the new four-link rear suspension’s lack of “the wheel hop, axle tramp or undue spring compression sometimes apparent in other, lesser rear suspension layouts” was no doubt sincere, but what Car Life decorously fails to mention was that one of the worst offenders in these respects was the previous AMC torque tube chassis. The limitations of the old setup were amply discussed in a July 1965 Motor Trend test of a 327/Twin-Stick Ambassador 990, which found that jackrabbit starts or dragstrip-type acceleration immediately provoked a bitter war between axle assembly and clutch that, like nuclear war, could have no real winner.

 

AMC bought its power steering systems from GM’s Saginaw Division. However, Car Life found the Marlin’s unsatisfactory:

[the power steering] damped out whatever road feel normally would be transmitted to the driver by action of front suspension components; and the car required continual “herding.” The system’s 4.4 steering wheel turns lock-to-lock must be regarded as “slow” by current industry standards. As identical steering gears provide 3.5 turns lock-to-lock for GM cars, it must be assumed the Marlin’s ponderous steering wheel action was the product of linkage design. The test car’s power-assist system, when the wheel was turned to full stop in either direction, bucked in a disconcerting kickback in the driver’s hands.

They allowed that this seemed to be a problem that could be fixed with proper adjustment, but I’m not sure that quality control problems with the steering box would be any less concerning than problems with the linkage design.

Commendably, the Marlin had offered Bendix front disc brakes from the start. (They had actually been standard at the outset.) However, stopping a Marlin still much to be desired: As with a lot of disc/drum setups, the rear wheels would lock too easily, and since the Bendix discs had solid rather than ventilated rotors, the front brakes heated up quickly in hard use. Car Life found the Marlin “about average for disc systems but superior to the majority of factory installed drum systems.” As with the sales comparisons to the Charger and Barracuda, this was not high praise.

 

Dodge didn’t offer the fastback Charger with a six, but you could have your Marlin with the 232 cu. in. (3,801 cc) Torque Command six, with either single-barrel or two-barrel carburetion, giving 145 or 155 gross horsepower — one imagines Roy Abernethy and his lieutenants fretting about the potential loss of Marlin sales if it didn’t offer an economy engine. There were also 290 cu. in. (4,751 cc) and 343 cu. in. (5,624 cc) V-8s, offering between 200 and 280 gross horsepower; the test Marlin had the latter.

Both the AMC six and the new V-8 were modern designs, relatively light with excellent development potential, but there were no real powerhouses in the bunch, and the ’67 Marlin was a fairly heavy car. (The text says, “4000-lb.-plus,” but that refers to the test weight; the spec table lists the curb weight as 3,790 lb, about 200 lb lighter than a Charger with a 383.)

 

The CL acceleration times — 0 to 60 mph in 9.3 seconds and the quarter in 17.3 seconds at 80.6 mph — were certainly adequate, but as the top of the Marlin line, the 280 hp engine came up short. The text remarks:

The 343 is fine, but to a growing segment of the automotive market, 400-plus cu. in. holds magical attraction, perhaps because of the thrill of brute power, or perhaps just because of horsepower snobbery. However, no 400-cu. in. engine exists in the American Motors lineup. Scratch another list of potential buyers, the big-inch enthusiasts.

As for economy, Car Life managed a grim 11.4 mpg on premium fuel. “For many years American Motors has attracted, deliberately, economy-minded buyers,” the text notes grimly. “Scratch them, too, where the 343/280 engine is concerned.”

The Borg-Warner Shift-Command transmission in the Car Life test car was basically the same one CL editor John Lawlor had (over)praised in the CL Studebaker Avanti introduction five years earlier, but the bloom was off the rose: The automatic gave you a choice of starting with a nasty jolt or a lethargic second-gear step-off, and unless you intervened manually, it would shift well shy of 4,000 rpm. The editors note:

The Borg-Warner automatic, again, is a supplied item, not manufactured by AMC. Thus the unit has not necessarily had the engineering attention that has been showered on 3-speed automatics such as the Turbo Hydra-Matic, Cruise-O-Matic and TorqueFlite. Scratch potential buyers who are seeking the smooth automatic transmission.

If the Marlin had been really attractive, or really fast, or really something, indignities like the tiny decklid and small, not very useful trunk (pictured below) might be easier to excuse, but even then, the too-short seat belts and uncomfortable front seats might have been a bridge too far. (The seat belts, at least, do sound like a problem that an AMC dealer ought to have been able to fix.)

For the editors, the painful driver’s seat seems to have been the last straw, eliminating comfort-seekers from the Marlin’s potential customer base:

And, that rules out nearly everyone. Those eliminated as potential Marlin buyers in the context of this report represent a goodly part of the youthfully-inclined market; all small car fans; those seekers of refinement, taste and harmony; buyers of simplicity and luxury; the large displacement engine enthusiasts and the economy minded; the drag racer and the automatic transmission fancier; and those who will pay for comfort that comes with convenience.

Oof. But what did you think about the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Who, then, did buy those 3998 Marlins [in 1966]? An unsubstantiated guess is that the cars went to buyers inordinately loyal to AMC products. Brand loyalty is a well-known consumer phenomenon and loyalty to AMC appears engendered by a heritage that includes the renown of Nash and Hudson, and a reputation for engineering, durability, reliability and economy.

I’ll buy brand loyalty — there are still people who fiercely defend AMC and its products, so I’m sure there must have been some in 1967 — but heritage? The Hudson and Nash brands had been gone for a decade by the time this article appeared, and their best days were some years before that. Did any new car buyers, even AMC loyalists, still care enough for it to matter? I’m skeptical.

 

The review concludes on an optimistic note, noting that AMC “appears to be regrouping its forces” (which was true — the AMC Javelin, a much more considered response to the Mustang, was only a few months away) and that this might mean “that market penetration percentage will once again creep upward.” This was wishful thinking in the long run, but AMC sales did rally a bit, to 272,726 for 1968 to 275,350 for 1969.

1967 Marlin production totaled only 2,545 units. More of them seem to have survived and been preserved than you might expect from the dismal sales figures, so they must have their fans, but as a commercial effort, they weren’t even the “rear guard action” CL suggests.

A few points of note about the data panel: Car Life did not reliably distinguish actual versus estimated top speeds, but the 116 mph listed under “Performance” is clearly a calculated figure, and I can’t see a stock 1967 Marlin even approaching it. The “Fuel Consumption” section repeats the 11.4 mpg test average in the main text, but estimates 11 to 14 mpg in normal driving, where the text on p. 77 says gloomily that the engine “could be rated no better than 13-mpg potential.”

 

I’ve always wanted to think kindly of the Marlin: It does nothing the 1966–67 Dodge Charger doesn’t do better, but it’s both eccentric and hapless in a way that engenders sympathy. However, this Car Life assessment drives home what a no-hit game the Marlin was for AMC — it seems there was almost no opportunity they didn’t miss, and the only parts of this review I can argue with are the areas where I think the editors were a bit more generous than the big fish really deserved.

Related Reading

Curbside Classic: 1965 Rambler Marlin – The Rambler Classic Shows Up With An Expensive Bad Wig And Gets Laughed Off The Stage (by Paul N)
Curbside Classic: 1967 Rambler Marlin – The Humpback Whale – AMC’s Deadly Sin #1 (by Paul N)
Vintage Snapshots: ’65-’66 Marlins In The Real World (by Rich Baron)
Vintage Ad: 1965 Rambler Marlin – “The Swinging New Man-Size Sports-Fastback” (by Paul N)