amceagle.com
A fan site for the first crossover, built around my own 1988 Eagle Wagon.
The AMC Eagle put full-time four-wheel drive under an ordinary family car in 1980, years before anyone said crossover. This site tells its story, with specs for every year, a VIN decoder, and the car I actually own.
The home page opens on the wagon itself: built 23 October 1987 in Brampton, Ontario.
1 of 2,306
Eagles built for 1988, the final year
49
real VINs the decoder was checked against
1980–88
every model year covered, with specs for each
0
frameworks: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript
The idea
History, specs and a VIN decoder in one place
Information about the AMC Eagle is scattered across old brochures, forum threads and half-remembered facts. I wanted one clean, accurate place for it: how the four-wheel drive worked, what changed each year, what every model looked like, and what an Eagle’s VIN actually says.
The site is built around my own 1988 Eagle Wagon, one of 2,306 built in the final model year and the last car to wear an AMC badge. Every figure is sourced, and where sources disagree the page says so rather than picking one.
VIN decoder
Every character of a VIN, explained
Type a VIN from the dash or the title and the decoder breaks it down: country, engine, gearbox, body, model year and plant, with the check digit verified.
- Handles both formats: the 13-character 1980 VIN and the 17-character VIN from 1981 on
- Runs entirely in the browser. The result lives in the link after the #, which is never sent to the server
- Share, copy link and copy-as-text buttons, so owners can send a decoded car to a club or a buyer
- Checked against 49 real Eagle VINs, and honest where the published charts run out, like the undocumented 1988 trim code
Specs and models
Every year, every body style
Engines, gearboxes, four-wheel-drive systems, axle ratios and production for every year from 1980 to 1988, taken from AMC’s own brochures wherever possible, plus a page for each body style.
Specs by year
Figures come from the factory brochures. Third-party numbers are labelled, and conflicts are marked “sources differ”.
Model pages
Wagon, sedan, two-door, SX/4, Kammback and Sundancer, each with its own history and photos.
How it’s built
A static site with a small, sharp toolchain
01
Research
Specs from AMC brochures, VIN codes from AMC’s VIN charts, each checked against real cars.
02
Generate
Python scripts build the specs, VIN and model pages from that data, with one shared header and footer.
03
Serve
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript served by Caddy from my own server, behind a Cloudflare tunnel.
04
Measure
Google Analytics, with QR codes from the print kit tagged so each poster shows up separately.
Off the screen
A print kit for car shows
Two 24×36 posters, a dash card and a 4×6 handout, in a navy-and-cream style drawn from 1980s AMC advertising, with logos traced from the 1984 brochure. Each QR code points at a short link I can re-point without reprinting, and each one is tracked separately in analytics.
Own an Eagle? Decode it.
Paste your VIN into the decoder to see how your car left the factory, or read the full story of the first crossover.