Freeagle

It’s all my fault. The phone rang one day about four years ago; it was a friend who worked for electric carmaker Tesla. “Hey, a friend of mine here has an AMC Eagle. It’s not running. He just wants it gone. Know anyone who’d want it?” The owner/donor’s story is short and sad: moving cross-country to his new gig in Fremont, California, the previous year, he grenaded his own car en route, and needed something relatively cheap to get out to the coast. He found this low-buck 1984 Eagle (a California car all of its life, sold new at True American AMC in Sunnyvale) in the want-ads, and drove it around for about a year as a fun car — well, as much fun as a 3,500-pound car with 112 horsepower could be, anyway. And then…

“Little things started to go wrong with it,” my friend reminded me recently. “He’d.” To be fair, the engineer worked in Tesla’s Materials department; even so, the thought of someone working for America’s biggest all-electric car company who’s flummoxed by wiring issues is slightly jarring. “Anyway, he said that repairs would cost more than it was worth — more than he paid for it in the first place. He figured he’d never get any money out of a dead Eagle, even parting it out. So, he knew I liked cars, and he asked if I knew anyone who’d want it.”