Advertisement

The $5 million AMX/3 on Craigslist is your weirdest cyber Monday pitch

There's no greater woulda-coulda-shoulda story in Motown car history than the 1970 American Motors AMX/3. Born from the era when American Motors was a racing stalwart, the AMX/3 was the company's answer to cars like the DeTomaso Pantera — a combination of brute Detroit power and Italian style that was envisioned as the company's flagship, but was killed before production even began.

So when someone shows up purporting to offer one of the few AMX/3s ever built, at a price tag of $5 million — on Craigslist, naturally — people take notice.

1970 AMC AMX/3
1970 AMC AMX/3

Officially, only six AMX/3s were ever built, all of them assembled in Italy by coachbuilder Bizzarrini; five to AMC's orders, and one from spare parts after American Motors ordered the project killed. Yet the seller of the car above claims it's one of four assembled, and that it's being put up for bid after the original owner decided to bail out of a full restoration estimated to cost $50,000. The ad, as spotted by BangShift, includes only two photographs — one of which was also posted on an AMX/3 enthusiast site — and a fuzzy copy of an AMC bill of sale.

Earlier this year, an AMX/3 in good condition sold for several hundred thousand dollars in a private sale, so it's not clear what might make a disassembled AMX/3 worth an order of magnitude more. There's not enough information in the ad to warrant a $500 car purchase, let alone a transaction that would rank among the most expensive muscle cars ever sold. And yet the ad doesn't seem of a piece with other CL posts like the fakers who tried to hustle a McLaren F1 using photos swiped from forums that didn't even show the same car.

We've emailed the seller for more details, but as cyber Monday pitches go, this one needs some work.