AMC Levi's Gremlin
Weird Car of the Day #501: 1973 AMC Levi's Gremlin – Hot pockets
Nobody knows what the '501' in Levi's 501 jeans is for. A fact that sounds totally made-up, but is actually true.
Levi Strauss & Co., makers of Levi's jeans, started producing its world-renowned denim pants in San Francisco, California in the late 1800s.
In 1906, the deadliest earthquake in U.S. history hit San Francisco, levelling more than three quarters of the city and pegging the death toll at an estimated 3,000 people—there's no way to tell how many actually perished.
Levi's Battery Street headquarters largely survived some of the most intense seismic activity to hit North America, and then its records burned in a following three-day fire.
And that's why the full story behind '501' will never be known.
AMC's Levi's Gremlin, arriving 67 years later, has the opposite problem. We know all about it; countless car blogs and publications have written about it, and the motives aren't hidden under layers of rubble.
Simply, AMC wanted to sell more cars without having much money to spend on making more competitive cars.
With that history in mind, for WCOTD #501 could it be anything other than the AMC Levi's Gremlin?
michael banovsky
