True Stories of The Muscle Car Fan: AMC Exec Passes Javelin AMX With Go Package

Brad Mathis learned to drive on his grandfather’s grasshopper-green AMC Javelin AMX — a fully loaded “Go Package” car built by a man who spent his career working inside AMC’s High-Speed Stop Division. What started as supervised laps around a garage at age twelve grew into a personal collection of seven AMC vehicles and a Javelin now in its fourth generation of family ownership. Read on for how one family turned a single car into a lifelong AMC obsession.

Not many muscle car stories start with a grandfather who spent his career inside the industry that built the car in question. Ted Walters worked as an executive for AMC Motors in the company’s High-Speed Stop Division, after stints at Hudson, Nash, and later Chrysler — and decades later, his grandson would learn to drive on the very car that connection helped bring into the family. What began as a twelve-year-old sneaking supervised laps in and out of a garage eventually grew into a four-generation obsession with one specific brand that most people on the road today wouldn’t even recognize.

A Grandfather Who Worked Inside the Industry

Ted Walters spent his career on the inside of the American auto industry, working in AMC’s High-Speed Stop Division after earlier stints with Hudson and Nash, and later moving on to Chrysler. That kind of insider access shaped what ended up in his family’s driveway, and the car at the center of this particular story — a grasshopper green Javelin AMX — has stayed in the family long enough to become what his grandson, Brad Mathis, now calls a fourth-generation car, passed down and still very much in active use rather than tucked away in a collection.

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A “Go Package” Car, Fully Loaded

The Javelin itself wasn’t a stripped-down base model. Finished in grasshopper green with a white vinyl top, a gold T-stripe, and a matching green interior, it came equipped with air conditioning, a rear defroster, a tilt wheel, a 727 automatic transmission, and a 401-cubic-inch V8 fitted with true cowl induction — the kind of factory option combination that earned cars like this the nickname “Go Package” cars among AMC enthusiasts. It also carried a factory fiberglass hood, front disc brakes, and a Positraction rear end. Remarkably, the interior has survived essentially original and in excellent condition, a rarity for a car that’s now been driven hard across multiple generations of the same family. Details like that made the difference between an ordinary Javelin and a genuinely desirable one on the collector market decades later.

Learning to Drive, Then Learning to Sneak Out

Brad’s introduction to the car came early, learning alongside his grandfather and father how to fix whatever the Javelin needed. He estimates he was around twelve when he first started falling for the car, and thirteen when he was allowed to drive it — strictly supervised, and strictly limited to moving it in and out of the garage. That restriction didn’t hold for long. Brad admits to sneaking the car out for joyrides not long after, a habit that ended abruptly when a neighbor called his parents to report what was going on. The keys got hidden after that, and his parents started tracking the odometer to keep tabs on him.

The Gremlin, and the First AMX of His Own

Brad’s own car-buying career started around age fifteen with a 1973 Gremlin, a modest first step before he moved up to a 1969 AMX with the 390 V8 and a four-speed manual — the car he ended up daily-driving to high school from roughly 1998 to 2001, running it hard enough over those years that he eventually wore the engine out completely. It’s the kind of ownership story most muscle car fans recognize immediately — a car bought for love, then driven into the ground simply because it was fun to drive.

A Second AMX and a Neighbor Who Ratted Him Out

After the 390 in his first AMX gave out, Brad heard through local connections about a friend’s 1970 AMX, also running a 390 and a four-speed, and willing to sell. He borrowed money from his father to buy it, and still owns both AMXs today, though he describes them as needing some TLC after years of heavy use. His real long-term project, by his own account, has always been restoring the original family Javelin — a job that’s kept both AMXs sitting on the back burner while he focuses his limited time and money on the car with the deepest family history attached to it.

A Collection That Kept Growing

The Javelin project hasn’t stopped Brad from adding to his AMC collection along the way. His current lineup includes a 1969 AMX, a 1970 AMX, a 1972 Javelin AMX, a 1972 Gremlin X with a V8, a 1973 Hornet with a V8, a 1976 Hornet AMX four-speed V8 clone, and a 1979 Spirit GT with a 401 that once served as an old race car. That’s seven distinct AMC vehicles spanning roughly a decade of the brand’s production, a collection built one opportunistic purchase at a time by someone who clearly wasn’t interested in owning just one example of the marque he grew up around. Few AMC collectors assemble a run this deep without years of patient hunting through classifieds, swap meets, and word-of-mouth tips from people who know the brand’s small but devoted following.

Passing an Obsession Down to a Fourth Generation

Brad now has three young sons of his own — Braeden, Bryson, and Owen — and says his hope is simply to have the Javelin, and eventually the rest of the fleet, finished in time to hand down as their own high school cars, continuing a pattern that’s already run through four generations of his family. AMC enthusiasts are a small enough community that Brad says it’s genuinely rewarding just to meet other people who recognize what he’s driving, given how few AMC cars most people on the road today would even identify. For his family, though, recognition was never really the point — keeping the cars running, and keeping them in the family, always was.

Why the Javelin AMX Still Turns Heads

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AMC’s Javelin, and the higher-performance AMX variant built alongside it, never sold in anywhere near the volumes of the Big Three’s pony cars, which is exactly why cars like Brad’s family Javelin draw double takes at shows today — most spectators genuinely don’t know what they’re looking at. The 401-cubic-inch V8 fitted to Go Package cars was AMC’s largest and most powerful passenger car engine of the era, giving the smaller, lighter Javelin a genuinely favorable power-to-weight ratio compared to contemporaries from Detroit’s bigger manufacturers. That combination of rarity and real performance is precisely what’s kept AMC ownership groups small but fiercely loyal for decades, trading knowledge and parts leads within a community that Brad’s own family has now been part of across four generations.

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