Junkyard Gem: 1977 AMC Hornet Sportabout

My research has determined that 1977 (or perhaps 1964) was “Peak Wagon” in the United States, the year when the largest number of different models of new station wagons were on sale here. Why, Datsun only sold three different car models here in 1977, while Dodge had four, and even Fiat offered a few. The American Motors Corporation was a strong player in the car game that year with long-roof versions of the Pacer, Matador, and Hornet. The Hornet wagon was by far the best-selling wagon AMC sold for ’77, but that proved to be the Hornet’s last hurrah. Here’s one of those Hornet wagons from last year, recently found in a junkyard in the San Francisco Bay Area.

When AMC first began selling four-door Hornet wagons for the 1971 model year, they were named Sportabout. That’s what everyone still calls these cars these days, although that seems to be ahead of the last model year officially the use of the Sportabout name was in 1976. AMC’s 1977 brochures and my extensive library of buyer’s guides from that era make no mention of the Sportabout name for 1977.

That said, I am still going to use the Sportabout name for this car, because traditions are traditions.

The base engine in the 1977 Hornet was AMC’s 232 cubic inch (3.8 liter) six-cylinder inline engine, but this car has the optional 258 cubic inch (4.2 liter) version, which costs only an additional $79. after inflation). A 304 cubic inch (5.0 liter) AMC V8 engine was also available for $164 ($846 in today’s money). This highly successful family of engines continued in production through 2006, when Chrysler assembled the last 4.0s in Wranglers.

This car was built for sale in California and the last parking spot is about a mile from the high school I went to when this Sportabout rolled off the line in Kenosha. Maybe the original owners lived in my neighborhood (or maybe they lived in Bard, California, which is as far from San Francisco Bay as Chattanooga is from Chicago).

A three-speed manual transmission was base equipment in the 1977 Hornet, but this car came with the optional $279 column-shift automatic (that’s $1,440 in 2023 dollars). This car also has the $625 air conditioning package ($3,225 now). Those features we now take for granted were ex

MSRP for this car was $3,699, or about $19,085 today. Unfortunately for AMC, Chrysler started selling wagon versions of the Dodge Aspen/Plymouth Volaré the year before, which meant the Sportabout was no longer the only game in town for American-made compact wagons. In 1977, a new Volaré station wagon could be had for as little as $3,941 ($20,334 in 2023 dollars), and That car did not look like it was built in 1971.

For 1978, the new Concord replaced the Hornet. There was of course a wagon version, and we know it better today as the basis for the AMC Eagle wagon.

This car probably wasn’t worth refurbishing (at least not in a state with draconian emissions testing rules for cars built before 1976 and later model years), so we can rest assured that many of its components will live on in other American machines. Engines.

Still, it’s disappointing that it hasn’t been made into a race car with an AMC 360 swap from a Grand Wagoneer.

Yep, all those hard-to-park LTD Country Squires and Caprice Estates suck like fuel tanks next to the Sportabout! Not mentioned is the fact that many manufacturers at that time would sell you new cars that were even smaller than the Sportabout.