Red, White And Blue: Muscle Car Restomods Don't Come More American Than Our AMC Rebel Machine

Our render looks back at the limited-run muscle car from AMC and gives it a modern stance, with a hood-mounted tachometer and retro color scheme.

If you call your new muscle car both a ‘rebel’ and ‘the machine’ you should probably back it up with some substance. That’s what AMC did with the 1970 AMC Rebel The Machine, and then they painted in white, red and blue, because America.

It was a show of force, and a real muscle car with real substance. Contemporary performance machines could consider The Machine a worthy opponent with its 6.4-liter, 340-hp / 430 lb-ft V8 and stripped-out body, those figures also out-gunning both AMC’s own AMX and SC/Rambler.

Now the classic car's nameplate is back once more, to rebel against both the present and the future with its loud V8 and louder style, thanks to HotCars artist Rostislav Prokop.

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Back in 1970, the muscle car which followed the SC/Rambler was a boxy affair, with a scoop on top of the flat-top hood. It leaned back on heavy-duty suspension and looked like it meant business, if business was drag racing.

The chrome-finished Machine had a white base coat, a blue hood, blue rocker panel stripe, and the full red, white, and blue combination in the grille and round the trunk. Rostislav’s render goes big, wide, and square once more, too, but features a white and blue/gray paint scheme.

It’s a widebody with huge flares on each corner and AMC-inspired wheels, and a flat rear trunk devoid of any wing. Below it sits a dual-exhaust setup like the 70s model. It wouldn’t be a classic car-reimagining without LED light replacements which also appear front and back.

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HotCars Photo © 2023 Valnet

We like the inclusion of the hood scoop with its driver-facing exterior tachometer. This is something that electric vehicles don’t need, but the new Machine doesn’t care for the future.

It presumably comes with a big, bad V8, as evidenced by the exhausts up back. The AMC brand as we know it ceased trading by the end of the 80s, but as this is a fictional muscle car, the sky is the limit for the powerplant under that extroverted hood. As the seeds of the American Motor Corporation ended up in Chrysler, a 6.2-liter supercharged Dodge Hellcat V8 with 717 hp / 656 lb-ft would do the trick.

Built only for the 1970 model year, this curio today represents a relatively rare and exciting slice of prime muscle car era Americana. At auction, average values 53 years later are around $52,000 according to Hagerty and as much as $83,000 according to Classic.com. With only around 2,000 made for the 1970 model year it is a rare classic car today.

Hailing from Britain, the home of both MG and Aston Martin, Dave is no stranger to sports cars. Or a little rain. When he's not busy working his day-job or writing songs and pretending to be a musician; Dave indulges his obsession with cars by writing and researching diligently, so that he can inform and convert other people to the dark side.