Junkyard Find: 1982 AMC Eagle SX/4 Sport
The AMC Eagle may have disappeared from public consciousness decades ago outside of Colorado, but Eagles are still all over the place in the Mile High City. I can think of a couple of daily-driven Eagle survivors within several blocks of my house (not to mention several VW Vanagon Syncros, but that’s another story), and fallen Eagles show up in Denver-area self-service wrecking yards with great regularity. In this series, we’ve seen this ’79 wagon, this ’80 coupe, this ’82 hatchback, this ’84 wagon, this ’84 wagon, and this ’85 wagon. As for the very rare AMC Spirit-based Eagle SX/4, we’ve seen just this Iron Duke-powered ’81 prior to today’s find.
A two-door, quasi-sporty car with four-wheel-drive… put out by a company that, by 1982, was obviously doomed. Still, some SX/4s were sold.
With the good old bulletproof AMC 258 straight six, this car had all the torque it needed to unstick itself from mud and snow. Fuel economy wasn’t so great, but gas prices dropped quickly as the mid-1980s approached.
Chrysler stuck with the AMC six well into our current century, but axed the Eagle just a year after its 1987 takeover of American Motors. Confusingly, Chrysler made the Eagle name into a separate marque.
Did this car really get 32 highway MPG? Maybe at 47 MPH, downhill!
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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I get such a warm feeling when I see the AWD Eagles. I really would like to have one of the wagon ones - they're impossible to find without massive rust in the Midwest.
My first car being a '74 Gremlin showed me that an AMC was a solid car, at least until rust hit it. Shortly after my wife and I married we bought an '81 SX/4, and sadly had to part with it a few years later due to a move. Last year I picked up an '81 Eagle Kammback as a winter daily driver. It looks like a basket case but runs like a top. They are great cars in a very crude way.