Yahoo Autos Consider the Matador
Think of a 1970s American coupe, a big-body two-door with acres of style. Chevelle? Sure. Torino? Absolutely. Satellite, Monte Carlo, Eldorado? Check, check, check.
Consider, instead, the AMC Matador.
Welcome to You Must Buy, our daily look at the cars you really should be buying instead of that boring commuter sedan.
It's weird that most of us have all but forgotten the Matador. One of AMC's most successful offerings, the midsize sedan spawned a radically-styled "personal luxury coupe" in 1974. For AMC, the perennial fourth-place automaker among America's Big Three, it was a shocking accomplishment: An evocative, swoopy coupe that perfectly captured the design ethos of the era.
That's especially true of this, the extremely limited-edition Matador Barcelona. Wearing two-tone paint with a complementing vinyl padded roof and requisite opera windows, the ritzied-up Matador variant had all the plush, velour-lined, comfort-sized luxury that was all the rage in the post-ponycar era. The hellions who bought Mustangs and Cudas throughout the '60s had grown older; plush luxury, rather than fire-breathing muscle, was now their bag.
This 1978 Matador Barcelona that's currently for sale on eBay is the ideal example. Lightly modified but resoundingly solid, this burgundy coupe has a few key mods that draw out and accentuate the Matador's intense style. The front bumper is gone, the better to highlight the dramatic tunneled headlights and broad, short grille. The big-inch wheels, modern reproductions of a classic Mopar muscle car design, nod to AMC's habit of raiding the parts bins of the Big Three to build their cars on a budget.
Look at this thing. It's got everything you want from a vintage car: Big, funky styling. Opulent proportions. A pillowy velvet interior in a shade of crimson that's far too decadent for today's conservative car stylists. A 360-cubic-inch V8, a column shifter, and a speedometer in the rounded-bubble-square shape of a vintage alarm clock. Perfection.
It makes you wonder how we could so thoroughly forget such a car. And outside of the die-hard AMC-heads among us, we largely have. Stroll your local car show, cruise-in, or swap meet: You'll see enough Ford and Chevys to make you believe they were government-issued to every man, woman and child in America, but the AMCs are as rare as an April snowstorm. Doubly so for the Matadors.
That gives a car like this a puzzling aura: It looks familiar, but it feels vaguely misplaced. You look at the thing and it makes sense-yep, that's a 1970s personal luxury coupe, with its long doors and tonal color scheme-but you can't exactly put your finger on it. It almost seems anachronistic, like it was designed today to evoke the style of the '70s without referencing an actual car from that era. Like it came from a cartoon or comic book or video game where the creators wanted to evoke the style without referencing an actual car.
That's bizarre in part because the Matador coupe made such a huge splash when new. It sold briskly and won awards when it debuted. It featured prominently in the James Bond movie The Man With the Golden Gun, as baddie Francisco Scaramanga's flying getaway car.
But the Matador-designed by Richard Teague, the stylist who also penned the XJ Jeep Cherokee-somehow faded from our minds. We all got distracted by the chart-topping hits, the Skylarks and GTOs and Mark IVs, and forgot the deep cut from late in AMC's crate.
You can change that. You should change that. This Matador has three days left on its auction and a current bid lower than the cheapest new car on the US market. Small price to pay to stand out.
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