When American Motors discontinued the Ambassador in 1974, the automaker was out of the big car business for good.

When the final Ambassador rolled down the production line in Kenosha, Wisconsin in June of 1974, it really was the end of an epoch. American Motors had now abandoned the big-car market forever. Back in the mid-1960s, the smallest member of the Detroit Four had embarked on an ambitious campaign to expand from niche-market car maker into a full-line manufacturer. Now the company was retreating back to the niche segments, and in a few years the AMC product line would include the quirky Pacer, Spirit, and four-wheel-drive Eagle passenger cars. (Read about the unusual Pacer here.)

In truth, by 1974 the Ambassador had become almost a redundancy in AMC’s product line. Essentially, it was a Matador intermediate sedan with the wheelbase stretched (from the firewall forward) from 118 to 122 inches. But while the Matador was offered with a standard inline six and basic trim, the Ambassador came loaded with a choice of V8s (304, 360, and 401 CID) and air conditioning, power steering, and power brakes all included as standard. And there was a single trim level, Brougham, that included premium interior fabrics and convenience features. In short, the Ambassador could be described as a Matador with all the boxes on the option list pre-checked for your convenience.

There were just two body styles offered for ’74: a four-door sedan and a four-door wagon. (The Matador two-door and four-door styles were split into two distinct body shells that year, so the two-door Ambassador was discontinued.) Due mainly to increasingly stringent federal impact standards, the car was treated to new front-end styling with increased overhang and a robust DOT bumper, so the Ambassador happens to be a one-year look in its final production year. Priced in the $4500 bracket, dead center in Pontiac/Oldsmobile territory, the Ambassador had relatively few takers except for AMC loyalists, as we can imagine. Production amounted to not quite 25,000 cars, a minor fraction of AMC’s total volume of 500,000+ cars that year.