AMC Painted This 1968 AMX ‘Playmate Pink’ for Playboy’s Top Model — Jay Leno Learned Her Real Story Decades Later

A pink American Motors sports car sat in Jay Leno’s garage with a story bigger than its paint job. Behind the color was a 1960s marketing stunt, a beauty queen’s grand prize, and a headline that resurfaced decades later on a car show.

In 1968, American Motors mixed a custom shade of pink paint for exactly one purpose: handing the keys of a brand-new AMX to that year’s Playboy Playmate of the Year. It was the fifth car in a string of eleven pink AMC promotional cars, part of a marketing partnership dreamed up by an ad agency looking to put a struggling underdog automaker in front of a very specific audience. The winner was Angela Dorian, born Victoria Vetri, and for a few months her AMX was one of the most photographed cars in the country. Then, like almost every Playmate before her, she quietly repainted it to escape the attention it brought. Decades later the car resurfaced — fully restored, back in its original “Playmate Pink” — on Jay Leno’s Garage, where its current owner told a story stranger than the paint job itself.

A Muscle Car Built to Be a Playboy Grand Prize

The car in question is a genuine 1968 AMC AMX, American Motors’ compact two-seat sports car that had launched that same year as the company’s answer to the Corvette and a rolling proof-of-concept that AMC could build something with teeth. Unlike the four-seat Javelin it was based on, the AMX was chopped down to a shorter wheelbase and stripped to two seats specifically to compete in the same conversation as the Corvette — a bold move for a company that spent most of the 1960s fighting for survival against Ford, GM, and Chrysler. What makes this particular AMX a museum piece isn’t under the hood, though — it’s the paperwork behind the paint job.

American Motors’ advertising agency, Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc., pitched the idea of gifting a specially painted AMX to Playboy’s Playmate of the Year, and it fell to AMC’s Guy Hadsall Jr. to get the deal in front of Hugh Hefner. At the time, Playboy operated roughly 19 clubs around the world, and putting a new AMC sports car in the hands of the magazine’s most photographed woman each year was cheap, high-visibility advertising for a company that couldn’t outspend its rivals on national television. It was, in effect, an influencer partnership decades before the term existed — AMC didn’t have the budget to buy Super Bowl airtime, so it bought proximity to one of the most-covered names in pop culture instead.

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The tradition had started in 1964, and by 1968 the pink AMX handed to Angela Dorian was the fifth car in the series. Dorian, born Victoria Vetri, was named Playboy’s 1968 Playmate of the Year and received her AMX from Robert McNeally, AMC’s vice president of marketing, at a presentation staged near Hefner’s Los Angeles office. The car wasn’t just pink for the photo op, either — it was heavily optioned, riding on a 290-cubic-inch V8 backed by a three-speed automatic, with power steering, power brakes, bucket seats, an AM radio, an eight-track player, factory air conditioning, and a set of Magnum 500 wheels. Even the glovebox got a personal touch: where a production AMX normally carried a numbered plaque tied to its build sequence, Dorian’s car was stamped instead with her measurements — a small, strange detail that says as much about 1968 marketing as anything else in this story.

About the Video

The episode comes from Jay Leno’s Garage, and it follows the show’s usual format: Leno walks around the car with the current owner, asks the questions a curious gearhead would actually ask, and lets the guest do most of the talking. Here, the owner is low-key and matter-of-fact throughout, which makes the contrast with the story he’s telling land even harder — he discusses the car’s provenance and the Playmate connection with the same even tone he’d use to describe a carburetor rebuild. Leno, for his part, cracks jokes throughout but never talks over his guest, a hallmark of the show that longtime viewers point to as the reason it holds up better than most car-review content on YouTube.

The walkaround covers the basics any AMX buyer would want to know — the drivetrain, the options list, the ride — before settling into the car’s real hook: how a factory-built promotional vehicle ended up in a barn-fresh state decades later, and how its owner tracked down and restored it to exact factory-Playmate specification, including the personalized glovebox plaque. Then Leno gets his test drive in, and the pairing of a deadpan owner, a hot-pink two-seater, and an increasingly wild backstory turns what could have been a routine walkaround into one of the more memorable episodes in the show’s run.

6,725 AMXs, Three V8s, and One Very Specific Shade of Pink

American Motors built 6,725 AMX coupes for the 1968 model year, offering buyers a choice of three V8s: a 290-cubic-inch base engine rated at 225 horsepower, a 343 rated at 280 horsepower, and a range-topping 390 rated at 315 horsepower that ended up in 4,399 of those cars — making it the AMX’s most popular engine that first year. Dorian’s Playmate car came with the milder 290, which made sense for a promotional vehicle built to be driven gently on publicity tours rather than raced. It’s a detail that separates the marketing story from the performance story: this was never meant to be the quickest AMX on the lot, just the most photographed one.

The “Playmate Pink” tradition itself didn’t last much past the early 1970s. According to the car’s dedicated restoration archive, Playboy eventually let each year’s Playmate of the Year choose her own color rather than defaulting to pink, ending the run at eleven pink AMC cars total. Almost every one of those eleven Playmates did the same thing shortly after taking delivery: they had the car repainted. The reason had nothing to do with taste. A bright pink car with a well-known owner meant getting flagged down by police officers wanting an autograph, or strangers following the car home. Dorian’s solution was to have hers repainted a more discreet chocolate brown, the first of several color changes the car would go through over the following decades.

Why Jay Leno Wasn’t Ready for the Rest of the Story

By the time the pink AMX rolled onto Jay Leno’s Garage, it had changed hands and changed colors more than once. Dorian kept the car for decades before selling it in 2010 to the enthusiast who owns it today, and by then it was in rough shape — a former promotional showpiece that needed a ground-up restoration to bring it back to its original “Playmate Pink” specification, right down to the color-matched paint and the personalized glovebox plaque. The current owner and his AMX Club friends put in the work to get it there, and the payoff is a car that looks exactly as it did the day it was handed over near Hefner’s office in 1968.

What makes the episode memorable isn’t just the restoration, though. It’s what happened to the woman the car was built for. Under her legal name, Victoria Vetri was arrested in October 2010 after shooting her husband, Bruce Rathgeb, in the back. She pleaded no contest to attempted voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to nine years in prison, along with an order to pay $70,000 into California’s victim restitution fund. It’s a jarring turn for a story that starts with a factory promotional stunt, and it’s the reason the AMX’s current owner spends as much time discussing Dorian’s biography as he does the car’s mechanical specs when Leno starts asking questions. On screen, Leno keeps his trademark deadpan humor running throughout — but the moments where the conversation turns serious land with real weight, precisely because nobody watching expected a muscle car video to end up there.

What Makes This AMX Worth Remembering

Strip away the Playboy connection and the true-crime footnote, and there’s still a genuinely significant car underneath: a rare, documented example of American Motors’ most aggressive attempt to look cool at a moment when the Big Three were eating its lunch. AMC never had Chevrolet’s budget or Ford’s dealer network, so it leaned on cheap stunts with outsized visibility — and handing a photogenic sports car to the country’s most-photographed young woman each year was about as cheap and visible as advertising got in 1968. That the car survived, got ugly along the way, and came back exactly as it left the factory makes it a rare full-circle artifact rather than just another restomod with a good paint job.

It’s also a reminder of how much backstory can hide behind a single vehicle identification number. Most muscle cars carry stories about drag strips, dealership floor plans, or a first owner who kept every receipt. This one carries a story about advertising history, a beauty pageant, and a headline that had nothing to do with cars at all — which is exactly why it’s stuck around in enthusiast circles decades after AMC itself stopped building anything. For AMX collectors specifically, a documented, factory-optioned promotional car with a fully-traceable ownership history is about as rare as this hobby gets; most surviving AMXs from 1968 have murky early histories at best, while this one has a paper trail running straight back to a Los Angeles sidewalk photo op with Hugh Hefner’s office in the background.

Watch the Full Story

The full episode is worth watching all the way through — the car’s specs are only half of what makes this one memorable. Watch the video above, and drop a comment letting us know whether you’d have kept the pink paint or repainted it like Dorian did. And if you’re into rare American Motors iron, this is exactly the kind of overlooked muscle car history worth digging into further.