In the spring of 1966, American Motors presented Project IV, four concept cars that might represent the company’s future—including a sporty coupe called the Vixen.

A veteran of General Motors, Packard, and Chrysler before he was 40, Richard A. Teague was appointed chief stylist at American Motors in 1961 and vice president of design in 1964. He had bold and ambitious plans for styling at AMC—that is, as ambitious as the automaker’s meager resources would allow. Fortunately, he enjoyed the support of senior AMC executives, including George Romney, Roy Abernethy, and Robert Evans.

One of Teague’s forward-looking initiatives was Project IV, a group of four imaginative 1966 concept cars that might point to future directions for the smallest of the Detroit Four carmakers. These four were the Vignale AMX, the Cavalier, the AMX II (actually an outside project by independent designer Vince Gardner) and the one we’re featuring here, the Vixen.

The Vixen was presented as a two-door sport coupe version of the four-door Cavalier sedan, though the number of interchangeable components was limited. While the Vixen shared the Cavalier’s front and rear styling elements, the doors and front fenders were longer to achieve the desired long hood/short deck proportions of a sport coupe. (At the time, AMC did not yet have a rival to the Mustang in production.) With the Cavalier designed for efficiency in manufacturing, it was proposed that the Vixen’s longer panels could share Cavalier tooling via a pull-though stamping method.

Teague himself was credited as the Vixen’s designer, though it’s not known how much he relied on his talented styling staff, including Fred Hudson, Chuck Mashigan, Vince Geraci, and Bob Nixon, for the final result. As we can see, the Cavalier/Vixen front and rear end treatments are rather close to those that would appear a few years later on the 1970 Hornet compact—and the front end of the subcompact Gremlin as well.

One novel feature of the Vixen was its blacked-out rear deck and backlite, delineated by long sail panels that swept all the way to the rear (below). To break up the large sail area, improve rearward vision for the driver, and presumably, reduce claustrophobia for the rear seat passengers, a ser of four vertical louvers wws included on each side. According to AMC, the louvers and quarter glass were engineered to render the glass invisible from the inside.

Like the Cavalier, the Vixen was not a roadworthy prototype but a fiberglass studio glider and show car, without an engine, drivetrain, functional chassis, or full interior. And like the Cavalier, for its publicity photos it was transported five miles north from AMC headquarters on Plymouth Road to the Reynolds Metals building in Southfield. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the striking Reynolds building was the scene for many a car shoot by the Detroit automakers in the ’60s. Non-functional show cars are usually destroyed when they no longer serve their original purpose, and that was the fate of the Vixen as well.