This really is a forgotten four-wheel drive, but an important car in the history of its marketing. American Motors owned Jeep which, one would have thought, would have put them in a perfect position to engineer and market a four-wheel drive road car. In reality, the transmission of the contemporary Jeep was crude, costly to produce and rather rough in operation, so AMC looked to FF Developments for a more refined system using Tony Rolt's revolutionary viscous coupling. The Eagle was developed in the USA by Roy Lunn, famous for his work on the Ford GT40, and was powered by a 4.2 litre straight-six that is a close relation of the unit still used in the modern Cherokee. The best-selling car fitted with the FF drive system, the Eagle was built to get around the American Government's gas-guzzler tax: four-wheel drive vehicles with a high ground clearance were exempt.
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