What would a Gremlin have been without Bob Nixon's on-a-budget barf-bag-sketch chop back truncation? What would it have been with any other silhouette behind the B-pillars? Correct, it wouldn't be a Gremlin at all, which is fairly obvious given the Gremlin's successor, the Spirit, swapped the chop back for a liftback and nobody ever confused the latter for the former. But what if AMC's designers tried to give the Gremlin more utility by turning it into, say, a station wagon?

Granted, there's no information attached to this image of a wagon-bodied Gremlin-nosed AMC small car that the Gateway AMC club recently posted to Facebook that would suggest that was the intention behind the mockup. In fact, there's no information attached to it at all, and AMC enthusiasts have been trying to discern whatever they can from the image since, including the location of the photo. We know, for example, that the schnozz comes from a 1977-1978 Gremlin, though those wheel covers came on 1973-1975 Hornets.

We know from Pat Foster's "American Motors Corporation: The Rise And Fall of America's Last Independent Automaker" that AMC execs were looking to keep Gremlin sales from collapsing during the late Seventies - hence the redesigned front end, along with several other changes like a larger rear window, more standard equipment, and the newly available Audi-built 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine. Could the mockup above have been another proposal for juicing Gremlin sales?

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