Send In The Clowns: 1977 AMC Gremlin Custom
Wow! Rocco B. found us a “Grim-lin” with a Porsche Engine and a four-speed! There’s no need to get excited, though, because the little 80 horsepower four-cylinder is really an Audi engine intended to be economical and not for performance. The Gremlin is what you get when you take a mediocre car, the Hornet, and cut the back end off. And in 1977 they made it four inches shorter! The seller says he is selling his Hornet because he is downsizing! (I’m not making this up) If you have $7,000 that you don’t know what to do with you’ll find this Gremlin listed on Craigslist or archived on adsaver. It’s located south of Raleigh, North Carolina in McGee’s Corner. It has the original paint and apparently, it runs and drives. It’s a nice little car and you can get half a car for the price of three.
Here is the optional sports steering wheel and the “four on the floor” shifter. The dash looks really nice. Carpet became standard equipment in 1977.
The seats appear to have held up well. The upholstery material looks like the stuff bus and restaurant seats are made of. The brown seatbelts are odd.
Here’s the 80 horsepower Audi engine mounted sideways from how you usually see it in VWs and Audis. It is about 250 pounds lighter than the straight-six it replaces and gets a little better gas mileage. There are no oil leaks apparent. Some might fuss about the red replacement hose, but this is just a Gremlin and surely it can’t make much of a difference.
In 1977 AMC tweaked the styling a bit including making the glass hatch about 25% larger, enlarging the taillights and hiding the gas filler under the license plate. AMC only built about 7,500 of these Audi powered Gremlins. This one looks like a nice example but unless it is a misprint or there are two similar cars included the price is about three times what these are selling for. NADA lists high retail at $2,650. The only two that have sold recently on eBay sold for $3,200 for a low mileage garage find and a really nice survivor for $1,600. In 50 years of owning cars, from the Studebaker to the last Ford Contour, the Rambler was one of my father’s favorite cars and the full-length version of the Gremlin, the Hornet, was one of his least favorites. I’ve enjoyed several AMC cars over the years, but my experiences with the Hornet and its stubby cousin, the Gremlin, have not made a good impression. It was always a very sad day when the only car available at the rental car agency was a Gremlin. Gremlins are cheap to buy and maintain, reliable, drive alright on dry pavement, are easy to park and are unusual enough to get people’s attention. The Gremlin was a much-maligned car but there were a lot of worse cars in the 1970s. If you want a quirky little car to take to shows the Gremlin could be a good choice. For about the third of the asking price, this nice little blue Gremlin might the car for someone!
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Comments
VeWey Graudi…
That little black knob on the right of the ashtray (you can see it better in one of the pictures in the original ad) is is, dare say, a choke? I know AMC products are behind the times, but I figured manual chokes were long gone in 1977. The newest vehicle I know of that has one is my uncle’s 1962 Ford Falcon. Does anyone know/can guess what it is?
I believe it is for the passenger side fresh air vent. Pulling it opens the vent in the kick panel area. The driver’s side one is on the left of the column. In ’78 they moved the passenger side one directly to the right of the column so it was a mirror image both sides and the driver could more easily control them both.
That is cool! I never knew that engine and transmission option existed in a ’77 Gremlin. Seems like a fair deal to me.
Is that, dare say, a choke knob to the right of the ashtray? I know AMC products are a little late compared to the Big 3, but I figured that automatic chokes were standard even on economy cars by 1977. Anyone know for sure, or owned one that could say?
I believe that is to open the passenger side vent but I could be wrong
Ah, that makes much more sense
My folks and I have owned a ‘78 Concord since new (it replaced the Hornet after ‘77), and it has the underdash flow through ventilation—both pull knobs are under the steering column, to the left and right. I can’t really make out what you guys are describing here, but that’s where the pulls should be.
People forget that cars used to have manually controlled vents.
Cigarette lighter.
I am always on the lookout for nice clean Mexican gremlins.
Every year was a low production year.
Here are the production numbers per year.
1974 – 2137
1975 – 4200
1976 – 6000+
1977 – 6800
1978 – 6000
1979 – 6500
1980 – 4900
1981 – 4300
1982 – 1600
1983 – 149
1984 were carryovers from 1983
I was able to find this 1980 model and he wants $2200 USD for it.
Engine
Interior
Looks cleaner than any US Gremlin I’ve seen in a couple of decades. I wonder why Norteamericanos aren’t buying up ‘80s classics in Mexico.
In Mexico the Gremlin name was used on the Spirit from 1979 to 1983 so that’s not actually a Gremlin in your picture, but a Spirit that was called a Gremlin in Mexico. If you’ll notice the front ends are completely different. So it seems the Spirit with the Gremlin name is worth no more in Mexico than it is in America. When our Hornet ended up in the Juarez Police fleet, it was one of the newest cars they had. El Jefe even drove it for awhile. He’s the only person I ever heard of that was proud to drive a Hornet or Gremlin!
Actually the Spirit name was used on the Gremlin in the US from 1979 to 1983.
The body shape was the same with minor differences and AMC wanted to try to sell more.
VAM called them Gremlins here so I have to go with that.
A fool and his money are soon parted. You hit the nail right on the head, IT’S JUST A GREMLIN!!!!
😂😂😂
A CL ad with MORE than 3 pictures AND 2 paragraphs of pertinent information. Nobody on the CL does that. I’m sensing a scam here… :)
I disagree. I sold a 22 year old 2 wheel drive GMC Sonoma with 207,000 miles two years ago on Craigslist; I provided 24 pictures and listed the good and bad things wrong with it. Sold it for $1400.
If they’ve only got 3 pictures is when I wouldn’t give it a second look. You have the camera out, snap a few more and it’s only a few minutes more to upload them.
Uhhhh…I’m pretty sure Mike was being facetious. Check your sense of humour.
If the 4-cylinder Audi engine fits in there easily, who’s to say the 944 turbo engine wouldn’t?
That would make it even MORE distinctive than it already is 😀
@Rattlinglikenuggets, the Audi engine was a ‘tuned down’ version of the engine Porsche was putting into the 924 so you’re probably closer to the truth than you might think
By 1977 AMC couldn’t afford to bleed anymore money into tooling up and educating on fuel injection so they stuck a carb on the poor little tugboat. The little Audi engine made the Gremlin 250 pounds lighter than the 6 cylinder version and that’s how they managed to get the mpg rating up for the car.
I never drove one so I don’t know how they performed compared to the 4.2liter but I have to imagine they were slugs
AMC had a bad experience with fuel injection in 1957, with the stillborn Bendix “Electrojector” electronic fuel injection for the ’57 Rebel. None of the injected cars made it to the public which is probably just as well. (Chrysler did sell a few cars with that system and just about all of them were recalled to retrofit carbs.) Bendix sold off the Electrojector system to Bosch and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.
I recently was going through some old Popular Mechanics magazines and happened to catch a review of the Gremlin equipped with this engine and 4-speed manual trans. It was pretty favorable overall, claimed that the 4-cylinder Gremmie was only a little slower than the six and handled much better with all that weight removed from the front. (Might have been a different story with automatic and AC.)
AMC spend millions that the company could ill afford on this engine and unfortunately it turned out to be a dead end. A few years later they turned to the GM “Iron Duke” 2.5 liter for 4-cylinder engines, then in 1983 finally brought out their own 2.5 which was essentially the AMC six with 2 cylinders deleted. (Actually more related to the 4.0, but both share a common ancestor.)
Hi David, I am not going to fuss about the red replacement hose. What does get me is why people do not change them both while you are at it? If one is bad, the other can’t be far off from failing.
I owned one of those from 1980-83. Worst car I ever had. Mine had the big 258 ci straight 6 though. I used to joke around that it spent more time on the lift than the road.
I think “send in the clowns” is a little harsh. I own a 76 Gremlin admittedly with the 232 not the little audi 121 and have owned a 77 Gremlin with the 258. I know the 121 has a bad reputation but it would be an affordable novelty until and unless you decided to swap in a larger AMC engine.
I’m thinking a 3.7L Mustang V6 would make this a super-sleeper! But I’d want to be all-in at 7 grand.
Two words that should never be used together, Custom and Gremlin.
Nuf said
Audis of this era had their engines mounted longitudinally. The larger modern Audis still do.
in the under-hood-pic…is this a transverse or longitud engine?
What are you talking about? The NADA price is out of line for these cars. A good clean original Gremlin is a $5000 and up car. The ’77 and ’78 are, after the first gen ’70-’73, the most sought after. I’m looking for one of these myself, but with a 258. Miguel, is that one automatic or manual?
It is an automatic, but there are some manual cars around.
Remember Mexico started making Gremlins in 1974 so we didn’t have the early models here.
This one is a stick, but it is not as nice as the blue one.
$1500 tops, pull and sell both motor tranny and engine.
Still has small bolt pattern rear so put 304 and auto, used, and sell for 5k.
Either that, as body seems nice, 360 and auto with different rear, Mopar, wheelie bars and bracket race, then sell for 6-7 K
I’m thinking those seat belts are faded black rather than brown.
OK, so my father bought a Gremlin in 1977 and paid $2,977 for it, brand new. Lime green, no radio, straight six, and a 3 speed manual on the floor. The knob close to the ashtray is a side air vent, not a choke. It was the car I learned to drive on- we also had a Malibu with an automatic, and my dad insisted I learn to drive in the car with a manual transmission (which I still thank him for to this day, RIP dad!).
Anyway, my father got another car and was going to sell the Gremlin. I told him I wanted it, so he gave it to me. I found a lightly wrecked 1977 “Gremlin X” in a junkyard (the sport model, per-se) and got all the cool parts I needed like the bucket seats, steering wheel, chrome roof spoiler, etc. I sanded the whole car, primed it, painted it with DuPont acrylic enamel 99A “Pitch Black” and it turned out pretty darn cool. My first so-called car restoration. Wish I had a photo.
I’d love to have another Gremlin. They are easy to maintain, easy to work on, dependable, and not as bad as people who have not owned and loved one seem to think!
The Gremlin certainly had design shortcomings but I’d certainly take one over its domestic competition of the time (Pinto and Vega).
Like a lot of U.S. cars back then what was checked off on the option list made all the difference. A stripper Gremlin is not a very pleasant ride, to be kind, but optioned out with better seats, disc brakes, power steering, electric wipers (optional on early models), AC, radial tires, etc. they really were not bad at all. Asking price on this one though is optimistic to say the least.
I owned one of these and a 1970 Rebel wagon. “not as bad as people who have not owned one seem to think” was the rally cry the whole time I used mine. Great carpool car during my college years. When the wagon was impounded for out of date tags (poor college student, and stupid) I left it in the impound lot and bought the Gremlin from a neighbor. And my sister owned a Concord (Hornet with a landau roof). Very plush car, not to everyone’s taste then or now. Great memories. I’m liking the ones Miguel is showing south of the border….