Equipment
Modified 360ci AMC V8, and equipment includes Holley fuel injection, Thorley headers, 16? steel wheels, Rough Country springs and dampers, a razor-style grille, a roll bar, a pintle hitch, air conditioning, and a custom Bluetooth-equipped stereo system.
Condition
Presented with a recent repaint and tasteful, period-appropriate cosmetic modifications, namely the roll bar. Modifications to the 360 cubic-inch AMC V-8, including Holley Sniper electronic fuel injection and an upgraded camshaft, help rather than hinder. Truck collectors, far from penalizing modifications, have repeatedly demonstrated that they’ll pay a premium for updates that make these rigs more usable.
Market commentary
The J-10’s biggest liability in the 1980s is now, for many collectors, a selling point: It was really old. You don’t need to squint very hard at the photos here to see the Jeep Gladiator that went on sale way back in 1962. By the mid-1980s, pickups and other large trucks had begun their long journey from workhorses to luxury automobiles, but cash-strapped AMC, which had invested heavily in the smaller Jeep Cherokee, couldn’t afford to keep pace. And so the later J-10s still used a live front axle, and they were significantly smaller than their full-size contemporaries from Ford, GM, and Dodge (in fact, the Jeep is closer to what we think of as a compact truck these days). When Chrysler bought AMC in 1987, it saw no need to continue a slow-selling competitor to its Dodge Ram and new Dodge Dakota. What that means today is that a 1980s Jeep J-10 has all the vintage charm of a 1960s American truck—industrial looks, maintain-it-yourself mechanicals—but is two decades newer. The J-10 also bears more than a passing resemblance to the Jeep Wagoneer, which has long been a darling among vintage SUV collectors. Finally, although the link between new cars and classic car values is near impossible to quantify, it certainly doesn’t hurt that Jeep has recently reintroduced a pickup truck and spent millions convincing people to buy them. So, it makes plenty of sense to us that J-10s have appreciated more than 90 percent in the last three years, and that nice ones are fetching ever higher prices.