AMC might have been trying to shake their small, economy car image for 1969, but they knew better than to even shy away from their reputation for making anvils wearing license plates. Regardless of what kind of car you make or sell to the public, if you can prove that it can withstand abuses all but a handful of lunatics will never even approach, you’re safe. Show quarry workers loading up a Ford truck to the tops of the bed with boulders. Drop a Ram from a crane. Show crash-test footage and prove that your car didn’t immediately fold up into origami, floating in a puddle of oil, and everything on top of that is icing on the cake. You can sell performance, comfort, frugality, but first and foremost you have to sell on longevity…automobiles are big investments, after all. And when you are a company as small as American Motors was back in this time period, you didn’t just hint that your products were tough, you proved it.
A little comedy doesn’t hurt, either.
Be honest: when you see a vehicle that has “Student Driver” tags all over it, do you immediately change lanes or do everything legal to get the hell away from said car? I won’t lie, I do. I’ll stay the hell out of the way of the learning driver. It’s not that I’m worried about them doing something stupid just because, it’s because a moment of frustration or intervention on the instructor might be the reason they don’t notice that they are merging their vehicle into my path of travel until I lay on the horn like the Queen Elizabeth 2 entering a harbor in fog. We’ve joked about student driver horror stories and how instructors must go home and pound away liquor to calm their nerves after a grating day in the passenger seat. Surely, after a Rebel takes the kind of hell this unlucky soul’s students put it through, it’d be fine as your daily driver for the family, right?
