AMC Undercut the Corvette by $1,000 With America’s Only Other Two-Seat Muscle Car — Then It Vanished in Three Years

AMC’s 1968 AMX was America’s only two-seat rival to the Corvette — built by chopping a foot out of a Javelin and priced $1,000 cheaper. Three V8 options, a 19,134-car total run, and 52 factory Hurst drag cars later, here’s why this forgotten muscle car still has some of the most devoted owners in the hobby.

In 1968, if you wanted a brand-new American car with two seats, a steel body, and a V8 up front, you had exactly two choices — and one of them wasn’t the Corvette. American Motors, the perpetual fourth-place finisher in Detroit’s muscle car war, took a running Javelin, cut roughly a foot out of its wheelbase, deleted the back seat entirely, and called the result the AMX. It undercut the Corvette’s price by more than $1,000, out-attituded nearly everything else on a used-car lot, and disappeared from showrooms after just three model years. MotorWeek’s Joe Ligo tracked down a clean 1969 example for the network’s Muscle Car Memories series to explain why a car most people have never heard of is quietly one of the smartest classic buys left in the muscle car world. The story gets even better once you dig into what AMC crammed under the hood — and how 52 of these cars ended up terrorizing NHRA drag strips just a year later.

The MotorWeek segment does what the show does best: a patient walk-around paired with the kind of historical context that gets lost when a car this obscure comes up for sale. Ligo runs through the AMX’s badges, its bucket-seat interior, and the styling cues shared with and diverging from its Javelin sibling, while explaining why AMC bothered building a two-seater at all when the company was fighting just to stay solvent against GM, Ford, and Chrysler. It’s a useful reminder that AMC wasn’t chasing the muscle car war for volume — American Motors never had the sales numbers to compete with the Big Three on that front — it was chasing a halo car that would get people talking about the brand at all, the same logic Dodge would later apply to the Viper and Ford to the GT40.

Owners who’ve actually lived with these cars back up everything the segment gets right. One commenter describes ordering a 1969 AMX straight from the factory in Hunter Green with the 390 Go Package and a four-speed, taking delivery on Christmas Eve 1968, and racing it against a ’55 Chevy the same night. Another spent a decade driving a 290-cubic-inch, four-speed example that a West Virginia state police fleet had swapped a 390 into after retiring it from mountain pursuit duty. A third recalls being stationed with the Army in Kaiserslautern, Germany, where AMC was the only automaker with a dealership on post — meaning Rebels and AMXs were the hot shipping-home order for anyone eligible for free overseas-to-stateside car transport. Those are the kinds of stories a car needs decades of real ownership to accumulate — not marketing copy.

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The Car AMC Built by Cutting a Foot Off the Javelin

The AMX debuted mid-year on February 24, 1968, designed by AMC’s Richard “Dick” Teague. Rather than engineer a two-seater from scratch, AMC shortened the Javelin’s wheelbase by about 12 inches and removed the rear seat, turning a compact pony car into the first steel-bodied, two-seat American production car since the 1957 Ford Thunderbird. For that single model year, the AMX and the Chevrolet Corvette were the only two-seat, American-built performance cars on sale — full stop. AMC priced the AMX at $3,245, nearly 25% below, and more than $1,000 cheaper than, a comparably equipped Corvette. American Motors built 6,725 of them in 1968, a modest number by Big Three standards but a real statement from a company that couldn’t match Detroit’s R&D budgets.

Three V8s, One Two-Seat Body: What You Actually Got

By 1969, the model year featured in this video, AMC offered the AMX with three V8 options: a 225-horsepower 290, a 280-horsepower 343, and a 315-horsepower 390. A four-speed manual came standard, with a three-speed automatic available. AMC built 8,293 AMXs for 1969 — a jump from 1968 — and of those, 3,620 paired the 390 with the four-speed manual while 2,183 combined the 390 with the automatic, making the 390/four-speed combination the one collectors chase hardest today. One commenter on the video, an AMC owner, points out that the mid-tier 343 “Typhoon” V8 was genuinely competitive with other manufacturers’ small- and medium-displacement performance engines of the era, even though it gets overshadowed by the 390 in most retrospectives.

The two-seat AMX didn’t last. AMC built 6,725 in 1968, 8,293 in 1969, and just 4,116 in 1970 — its final year as a standalone two-seater — for a total run of 19,134 cars. Starting in 1971, AMX became a trim package bolted onto the four-seat Javelin rather than its own model, and that badge disappeared for good when the Javelin itself was dropped after 1974. The original two-seat AMX had a three-year window, and that’s part of why so few people remember it today.

The 52 Hurst Cars That Turned the AMX Into a Drag-Strip Legend

What makes the AMX’s short run more interesting is what AMC did with it on the drag strip. In 1969, American Motors partnered with Hurst Performance to build a run of Super Stock drag cars: 52 production AMXs, all finished in Frost White with consecutive serial numbers, were shipped from AMC’s Kenosha, Wisconsin plant to Hurst for conversion, plus one additional prototype built for drag racer Shirley Shahan. Nearly every one of those 52-plus-one cars held at least one class track record at some point during the 1969-70 season, and Shahan herself drove one to a class win at the 1970 NHRA Winternationals. By most estimates, at least 40 of the original 53 Hurst SS/AMX cars still survive, which is a remarkable survival rate for a purpose-built drag car from that era.

That combination — a genuinely rare two-seat body style, three distinct V8 options, and a factory-backed drag racing program most people have never heard of — is why AMX ownership tends to run deep. The commenters on this video aren’t casual fans; they’re people who ordered these cars new off a factory order sheet, kept them through marriages and deployments, and are still driving or restoring them fifty-plus years later. One owner mentions rebuilding a 401 for his AMX-badged 1972 Javelin after pulling it out of storage after 35 years. Another calls the two-seat AMX more fun to own than the Corvette he also had in the garage at the time.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.