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Origins
The Hornet of 1969 replaced the Rambler American as AMC's bread and butter, a tidy Dick Teague design that would quietly underpin most of what the company built for the next decade. The Gremlin was a shortened Hornet, the Concord a plusher one, and the Eagle a four-wheel-drive one; few platforms in Detroit ever worked harder. On its own terms the Hornet was a sound, unpretentious compact offered with sixes and V8s, including a brisk SC/360 version in 1971. Its strangest claim to fame came in 1974, when a Hornet X performed the corkscrew bridge jump in The Man with the Golden Gun — a stunt calculated on a mainframe before anyone dared drive it. Production under the Hornet name ran to 1977, but the engineering soldiered on into the late 1980s.
1971 AMC Hornet 2-door sedan blue f · CZmarlin — Christopher Ziemnowicz, releases all rights but a photo credit would be nice if this image is used anywhere other than Wikipedia. · Public domain
