The golden era of the American automobile seems to never lose it’s luster in the collector car market. Although the Big 3 (2.5) are currently healthy and arguably building the best products to date, postwar Detroit folklore and the cars it spawned just gets better (and more valuable) with time. We won’t see a mighty, unregulated industry like 1960’s Detroit ever again, for better or worse.

Prototypes and show cars from the Big 3 and AMC have become especially coveted as they are the last true artifacts of Detroit’s legendary automotive Michelangelo’s.

Joe Bortz started the whole show car craze by resurrecting old GM Motorama cars from the fifties. He became famous for finding old cut up prototypes in wrecking yards around Detroit and single handedly elevated the visiblity of these forgotten survivors of a long gone auto industry.

Over in Kenosha, Wisconsin there was an equally cool design house being run by Dick Teague over at American Motors. Even with a shoestring budget and a smaller industrial footprint than the Big 3, that didn’t stop AMC from a very productive run in the sixties and early seventies. The Marlin, Javelin/AMX the AMX show cars were all exceptionally strong styling efforts and put AMC design on the global map.

Fast forward to this AMX prototype (American Motors eXperimental) presented at the 1966 Chicago Auto Show as a non-powered, fiberglass bodied concept car. Three cars in total were built, and only one exists today. Snatched from the claws of the crusher at the last minute, this old AMC is for sale for a mere $400K.

Now if that seems crazy, probably cheap by concept car standards. Like we said, this is now an historical artifact of an era (and country) that no longer exists. Having said that, we think this AMX prototype with rumble seat, is one of the few show cars that looks worse than the production model. Some may disagree, but to AMC fans this car might be the rarest and most desirable American Motors prototype second only to the mid-engine AMX show cars.