So Many Eagles In Colorado, But Not All Can Fend Off The Subaru Hordes
Yes, there’s a place where you’ll see AMC Eagles on a regular basis; there are several parked on the street in my Denver neighborhood, and you see even more when you go into the mountains. Even the ahead-of-its-time Eagle can’t last forever, however, and this one has begun its journey back to the steel mill.
It took Subaru quite a while— say, well into the 1990s— to build a four-wheel-drive (no, I’m not going to get into the AWD-versus-4WD terminology debate, which is about as much fun as the “tomato: fruit or vegetable?” debate) car that didn’t clatter off the road in shuddering paroxysms of mechanical suckitude within a year or two after manufacture, but once they got it right, they got it right (disclosure: I own— or, more accurately, married into— a late-model Outback). That means that the devoted Colorado Eagle owner, confronted with a cascade of 30-year-old-car headaches and truck-ish ride, is often tempted to give up on the ol’ AMC and give in to the Subaru peer pressure.
I may have to go the other direction, though; the Outback is a helluva competent machine, but it just hasn’t won my heart. I’ve been eyeballing Eagles, so it’s good to see that used parts won’t be terribly difficult to find.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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Some of my Jeep SJ ( Grand Wagoneer) buddies down around Mesa Verde have an up graded Eagle with a fuelie 4.0, a 727 Tourqueflite tranny with a NP 229 transfer case. I am sooo jealous. In stock form Eagles made decent beach buggies. Prolly because the weight was distribut4d well front and rear like the wags are
One of my brothers-in-law had one , bought new, with the same copper two-tone but a whiter colored body. He got it when they briefly moved up to th snow belt. It also had a stick shift but I don't remember ever seeing another one with a stick. It was also fairly stripped and didn't have A.C., possibly why he sold it after they moved back to Texas but as I recall he really liked it.I always preferred the kooky looking coupe version which had a rather peculiar looking vinyl top.Eagles were always rare here in Texas but when I lived in Denver in the eighties saw quite a few.