Could This Quirky ’70s Hatch With a V8 Be America’s First Hot Hatch?

I’ll be honest, the first time I laid eyes on a Gremlin, I thought someone had backed a Hornet into a wall and called it a day. Look at it. It’s like a regular car that got halfway through the manufacturing process and the factory just… stopped. But here’s the thing—fast forward to 2026, and I can’t stop thinking about this scrappy little hatchback. Because what if I told you the AMC Gremlin, yes that Gremlin, wasn’t just a quirky economy car, but the true godfather of the American hot hatch? A car that crammed a massive V8 under its snub nose years before anyone had even coined the phrase “hot hatch.” Crazier still, it did it with a wink and a total disregard for what people thought was possible.

Now, before we get carried away, let’s set the stage. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, America was all about muscle-bound land yachts and full-size wagons that could double as apartments. Small cars? That was for the Volkswagen Beetle crowd. But up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the ragtag crew at American Motors Corporation was cooking up something different. They weren’t General Motors. They weren’t Ford. They were the weird uncle of Detroit, and they had a tiny budget but a huge penchant for oddball ideas. Their creation, the Gremlin, debuted on April Fool’s Day 1970. No joke. It was essentially a Hornet platform they’d chopped at the back, stuck a sharp, almost vertical hatch on, and sold as America’s smallest production car. The proportions were all wrong, and yet… strangely right.

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