The review of this Hornet Hatchback makes an interesting counterpart to the Grand Am review in the same issue as it makes a rather compelling case for it being a better pick than the GA in just about every way. It was faster, much more fuel efficient, handled fairly well, had quick power steering, an excellent drive train, and a more compact body with a practical hatch and decent space utilization.
It also makes for perhaps an even better comparison to the four import sport sedans tested by R&T recently, as this well-optioned Hornet’s price fell right in the middle of the prices for those four (Audi 100, Saab 99, Volvo 144E, Peugeot 504). Without overtly saying so, in Road and Track’s eyes, this properly equipped domestic compact was about as good as it got in terms of being a viable alternative to that class of import sedans. And the Hornet wasn’t overtly trying to be European. The key was in the options.
R&T tested a Hornet back in 1970 and was not pleased, but back then it was a six with the B/W automatic, soft suspension, drum brakes and slow manual steering. But this ’73 was altogether different, despite being the same basic car. It goes to show how selecting the right options makes a huge difference.
This one was equipped with the 175 hp 360 AMC V8 teamed with Chysler’s Torqueflite, a combination both quick (0-60 in 9.1 seconds; a full second faster than the Grand Am) as well as surprisingly economical. It averaged a solid 16 mpg at a time when that was not at all common for a brisk V8 powered car, never mind any car with half-way decent performance. And to top it off, it exhibited none of the driveability issue that plagued so many 1973 MY cars; it actually started and ran perfectly!
Of course there were some limitations, such as drive line noise intrusion into the interior. But then this was a unibody and designed to be a relatively low-cost car.
The brakes (disc front; drums rear) were good, with no sign of fade after six panic stops. The heavy duty suspension was “a mixed blessing”. The Hornet cornered flat, but with a worse ride as a trade off, especially over small, sharp bumps. This was typical of Detroit suspension tuning: either too soft and lack of control in spirited driving, or stiff springs and the resultant downsides. Europeans did it differently, with long suspension travel, moderate-soft springing, but damped effectively. The Hornet’s lack of suspension travel was simply lacking, so stiff springs were the expedient Band Aid.
Despite 61% of the weight being over the front wheels, with the handling package the Hornet’s intrinsic understeer was not excessive. And the quick power steering with 3.3 turns lock-to-lock enhanced the experience. The Goodyear radials also contributed to the generally positive handling. It was even possible to hang the tail out in spirited cornering.
There were a few gripes about some interior details, but the quality of materials was praised. AMC’s rigid fiberglass headliner was deemed to look out of place. The Mercedes-like gated floor shifter was deemed not quite up to snuff.
Overall, R&T was “pleasantly surprised” with the Hornet, due to its packaging, looks, performance and economy. That is of course if it’s optioned right. Note that its as-tested price was $4, 304, a whopping 75% higher than the base price. Unfortunately this was the reality back then: if you didn’t want a stripper with a six, manual gearbox, slow manual steering drum brakes and a drab interior, you had to pony up, a lot. All this would change eventually, as folks became spoiled by well-equipped imports and increasingly wouldn’t touch strippers.
This disparity also makes price comparisons with imports at the time rather misleading, as folk tend to focus on the huge disparity between the base price of domestics vs. imports. Optioning a domestic properly and that disparity suddenly was a lot less.
I just want a stripper with a nice pair…
+1
I love that the Hornet hatchback was a success for AMC – at least for a while, and one optioned like this one checks so many boxes for me. To add to all of its positive, objective attributes mentioned here, it was a genuinely great-looking coupe with none of the polarizing stylistic qualities of other AMC products of the day. I’m solidly a fan.
Was really a minor success, the Sportabout wagon got more sales. By 1975, Pacer was getting attention. Then, in late ’76 to ’77. AMC sales cratered. Wasn’t until the Concorde reskin for ’78 that AMC compact line did well, but was too late, and we know about Renault taking control.
The Pacer and Matador coupe brought them down
$639 covered the various performance-related options on this car. Another $1,200 in options that were trim and convenience related brought it up to $4,304. A BMW 2002 started at $4,498 in 1973. Sometimes they were delivered with $10 worth of anti-freeze as the only option. The AMC was faster and probably had more luggage space. I say probably because the spare tire placement was awful, while BMW tucked theirs under the trunk floors when they still had excellent engineers. I’m not going to claim that the BMW offered more value for everyone, but I will say that there was a time when buying a German car was a matter or personal choice based on preference rather than status seeking.
I would bet the single most expensive option was air conditioning.
When these were new, I did not care for the hatchback’s styling – I thought the Duster did a better job of trying to swoopify a rectangular car. But time has passed and I now find these attractive.
AMC in 1973 seemed like it was on an upward trajectory. The Hornet Sportabout and Hatchback, the Gremlin X and the various Jeeps all seemed to be heading in the right direction, and even the Matador and Ambassador seemed credibly done. But then it all started to unravel – new products were duds and old ones either lost their edge (Gremlin, Hornet) or got messed up (Matador sedans). It was all downhill from 1973.
I have never really been an AMC guy, but the car tested by the magazine is one that I could indeed learn to live with.
Like the closely-related Javelin, their rear axle seems somewhat far back for American taste at the time. The Duster didn’t have that. It made the AMCs somewhat of an acquired taste. But it did give them good back seat room, which the Javelin crowed about–to no effect–in its ads. Americans were not interested in that at the time.
Imagine an alternate reality, where instead of the money wasted on the Pacer, AMC devoted resources to a more sophisticated independent rear suspension in place of the oxcart leaf sprung live axle, perhaps Bosch fuel injection for the straight 6, and a decent 5 speed manual. AMC’s success was typically when they found unexploited holes in the market.
I agree, AMC could have killed it in the 70s and 80s with a reshuffling of resources that were squandered on cars like the Pacer. The Hornet chassis wasn’t perfect but it took to improvements well and the body aged very well, for me personally without the scope of seeing them in the 70s the Eagle Wagons looked like solidly contemporary early to mid-80s designs not something reskinned from 1970, even the second Gen Firebirds and Camaros start to look like dinosaurs by 80-81
Independent rear suspension wouldn’t even be necessary, that was far from a given on RWD cars, even imported ones unless you were spending some serious coin, a 4 link coil arrangement like Ford’s fox platform would have been enough, a primary focus in on modernizing powertrains for efficiency and maybe an all new small overhead cam engine would have been the most beneficial and put them ahead of the Detroit 3 for a while like their compact bodies did in the 50s.
Yes, yes, yes. Spot on comment! They would have had money to carry out more serious restyling as well if they had done exactly what you said. Hell, Chrysler’s LH cars of the nineties were an direct result of what AMC engineers began in the eighties. It shows what they could do when they had a budget to do so.
That there car could go like a bat out of the nether regions. My late brother let me drive his back in ’76 and when I stomped on the throttle her rear tires screamed as if they were on fire. Cop tried to nail me, but he lost control and hit a side rail. Karma,I reckon, for all the bad cops out there.
In long run the Euro brands went along with SUV/CUV market and now push those instead of ‘good handling’ cars. The bloated BMW CUV’s are their version of ‘good ol’ American cars’. Who knew?
Wow, check out that dashboard with the center hump that sticks up for the HVAC and Audio…just like a modern car! AMC, once again way ahead of their (or, “a”) time.
Not being in the market when these were around, I don’t know if it’d appeal. In hindsight I kind of like the Nova hatchback better, but of course there’s no way to really compare them now as they were then.
Was the Nova hatchback a response to this hatchback or the other way around? I don’t know which came first.
Interesting question. Both hatchbacks were introduced fir ’73, but of course, things take development time. I like the Nova, but I’m #teamhornet where the hatchbacks are concerned.
FWIW, the Hornet came only as a hatchback, whereas on the Nova and other G compact coupes the hatch was optional, and the take rate was rather low, some 30% IIRC.
This was the heyday of hatchbacks in the US, on somewhat larger cars. They then gravitated to strictly smaller cars.
Is that correct or am I misunderstanding you? I am fairly certain there was a Hornet 2-door coupe/sedan (whatever you want to call it), with a normal trunk lid. The hatchback Hornet is something I somehow only recently discovered existed, all the while I thought it was only 2doors, 4doors, and wagons. The 2-door was the cheapest with the hatch being about 10% more costly.
I meant the fastback Hornet coupe. Yes, the notchback 2-door sedan came out in 1970.
My point was that in this semi-fastback body style, the Hornet only came with a hatch; the Nova didn’t. It was optional.
Is that clearer now? 🙂
Oh I think I get it now. You mean with this particular rear side contour visual it’s hatch only, not that the only way to get a 2-door Hornet anything was as a hatchback/liftback whereas the Nova looked pretty much exactly the same from the side with either trunk or hatch.
Yup.
The Hornet was originally conceived only as notchback sedans (2 & 4 door). In 1971, the Sportwagon was added. Given how hot hatchbacks were at the time, they then created the slope-back Hatchback for 1973.
The Vega hatchback and a number of Japanese hatchbacks/liftbacks were the hot thing starting in about 1971.
The Nova always only had one roof line.
They both came out the same year, 1973. The Hornet 2 door originally only came as a 2-door sedan between 70-72 with a standard trunk. It was still available after the hatchback bodystyle was introduced
There it is! Thanks. That angle makes it look a lot like a Mustang II, if perhaps a tad larger and a tiny bit swollen around the hips.
I’m thinking Vega sedan, actually as I say that perhaps the Hornet hatch design may have been a response to or at least inspired by the Vega hatchback bodystyle?
from this angle, it really looks like a car from 70s Australia. Here’s a shot from Mad Max
I first became car aware around 1980, so I always associated AMC with two extremes: weirdo economy models like the Pacer and Gremlin and practical outdoorsy vehicles like the Eagle and Jeep. This model seems to prefigure the latter line-up and is probably one of the better looking small compacts of the mid 70s IMO (Though I could do without the swoopy stripe). I wonder if this hatchback leaked as badly as the Nova did?
An AMC collector friend had one of these in the late 90s, a 72 or 73 360 V8 hatchback 2 door, in excellent shape. The similarly to my Fox body Mustangs that came along years later was remarkable. Very similar size, packaging , performance and overall driving experience.
Of course people went ga ga over the 80s Mustang, when lowly AMC had virtually the same thing, years earlier.
I’ve maintained that AMCs products of the 50s through 70s were consistently ahead of their time. If AMC had the resources of GM to fully develop them, they’d have done much better.
The high, far-away dash must have been inconvenient and intimidating for short people.
Interesting you say that, my maternal grandmother was 4’11” and she briefly had a Hornet before handing it down to my Mom by 1973-74 when she would have been a senior in high school, I wonder if that was a motivating factor
My dad, with me as the “third baseman”, bought a YELLOW ’74 Hornet hatchback with the big AMC 6 and A/T. No A/C tho, that was years later before he decided that option was worth the co$t to him. He liked the car and it had reasonable fuel economy for the time. Unfortunately as my mother had not been included in the purcha$e decision; well she simply hated the car!
Certainly something I should have cautioned him about given my car $elling days in L.A. where I always made sure the wife was involved. However, as it was the first and only time he purcha$ed a new car without taking a bath I had let that blind me to what would probably happen with her opinion of the Hornet! OOP$!!
The Hornet was very satisfactory to my dad as his one and only car despite having come out of a ’67 Impala 283 4 door sedan. I don’t recall if he ever drove his Hornet on long distance vacation trips as he had the Impala and ’65 Malibu 6 before that. His view of the Hornet might have changed had he done so….?
I’ve always seen the Hornet HB as one of AMC’s best design efforts, altho in retrospect the ergos were dated given the age of the platform, and the seats were far from supportive AFAIK. Non supportive seats were certainly not exclusive to AMC products. DFO
I always liked this car and always like the way the hatch looked. Too often the copies I saw on the road around Chicago were cheap versions. The Oil Crisis I and II changed Americans from wanting cheap small cars, to wanting nice small cars with lots of brougham options.
This car was loaded up to be a nice car before Ford put out the Granada, which rode the Oil Crisis marketing shift to success, while still being a nasty cheap car filled with brougham options. AMC was too busy with that crappy Pacer and Matador Coupe to update the Hornet, or they could have issued an upscale formally designed compact to win sales during the mid-1970s.
In hindsight, AMC let their bread and butter sedans get old because they wasted resources on launching bad cars. Had AMC kept focused on their compact car offerings, and put that money into them, they would have had far more success.
One really had to “work the option list” to get an enjoyable “compact car” in this time period.
Unfortunately, the chances of finding a similarly optioned car to this article’s car, on the lot at any AMC dealership, was slim. EXTREMELY slim. I know because I looked. Several times. The one dealer who would order it for me quoted a 6 to 9 week wait and wouldn’t “dicker on the sticker” one penny.
The local Dodge dealer had a 340 Duster clone on the lot and was quite willing to discount for me.
Guess which car I purchased?
I’ve been the proud owner of a ;’74 Hatchback X since 1977, with the ‘big’ six, 3-speed, and factory air. In it’s day it was such a better driver than the Chevy Monza, or the Chevy Nova that my buddies had; and was much more reliable than the ‘newer’ Aspen/Volare cars.
Dick Teague did a great job of styling this compact. Do I wish the plastic dash fit better and didn’t look so cheap? Of course. But the bodies were decent, the suspension was solid, the engines were bulletproof (my 258 has 180,000 miles on it, and it still runs great.) Thanks for this article!!
-Does anyone remember the sci fi movie about the alternate earth on the other side of the sun, where the main difference is that everybody drives AMC Hornets? The name escapes me…
Never heard of it.
The funny thing about AMC suspension is that the Argentinians, using the same basic platform had a coil sprung rear that seriously improved cornering and AMC could have adopted it. They also should have added the Pacer’s rack and pinion steering across the board in 1975 . Low cost ways to keep ahead of the competition.
wish i had keeped my 1975 hornet hatchback . rare now silver x levis 304 3 speed stick
Nothing to do with the car, but is is sad to see on Google Maps the abandoned AMC factory at 14250 Plymouth Rd in Detroit.
I drove a brand new 1973 Hornet X hatchback in green paint color with the white racing stripes. Put new Goodyear white letter 60’s on the back and 70’s on the front. A beautiful car to own and drive. Never forget the cocky guy pull up next to me in a Camaro and give me the look. Oh, yeah , I blew his doors off. Fun ended when got T-boned and totaled. My dream is to have one sitting in my driveway today. We’re allowed to dream, aren’t we!