AMC AMX 1970 – 360 V8 Four Speed

AMC only built 4,116 examples of the two-seat AMX for 1970, making it the rarest year of a three-year run most muscle car fans barely remember. Under the hood, a 290-horsepower 360 four-barrel paired with a four-speed made this featherweight fastback genuinely quick for its size. It’s one of the most overlooked sleepers of the entire muscle car era.

Sleek looking car!!

Everybody remembers the Big Three’s muscle car wars, but there’s a scrappy independent that quietly built one of the rarest two-seaters of the entire era — and most people walked right past it. Only 4,116 examples of the AMC AMX left the factory for the 1970 model year, making it the last and lowest-production year of a three-year run that most casual fans have never even heard of. Under that long hood sat a 360-cubic-inch V8 that could be paired with a Borg-Warner four-speed, a combination that turned this featherweight fastback into something genuinely quick for its size. So why does a car this rare, this fast, and this final still fly so far under the radar?

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The Last of a Vanishing Two-Seater

AMC only built the two-seat AMX for three model years — 1968, 1969, and 1970 — before folding the name into a Javelin trim for good. The 1970 car got a two-inch stretch up front for a longer, more aggressive nose that finally let it visually compete with the Mustangs, Camaros, and Cougars crowding the segment, but the redesign didn’t save sales. With just 4,116 units built that final year, the 1970 AMX ended up the rarest of the three — a genuine oddity that most muscle car crowds still overlook in favor of the bigger names.

290 Horses From a Small Independent’s V8

The 360 four-barrel under the hood wasn’t chasing big-block bragging rights, but it didn’t need to. Rated at 290 horsepower and 395 lb-ft of torque through a Motorcraft four-barrel carburetor, it was enough to make a four-speed AMX genuinely quick in a package that weighed less than most of its rivals. Paired with the right rear gearing, these things could run into the low-14s in the quarter mile — respectable numbers for a car most people assume was built by a company that couldn’t hang with Detroit’s big dogs.

A Sleeper That Never Got Its Due

Here’s the thing about AMC muscle: it’s rarer than most Hemi cars people fawn over, it’s genuinely quick, and it’s still criminally undervalued compared to a Mustang or Camaro with the same numbers. A numbers-matching 1970 AMX four-speed is a legitimately hard car to find today, and every one that survives is a reminder that Kenosha built something worth remembering. This is the kind of car that turns heads at a show precisely because nobody expects it — and that’s exactly what makes it special.

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