THE “Flight of the Phoenix” movies  both the 1965 original and the tepid 2004 remake  chronicled a group of quirky characters who, after crash-landing a plane in a desert, built another plane out of the undamaged bits and flew to safety. Such an industrious approach was not unlike the business model of the American Motors Corporation in the 1970s and ’80s.

For instance, in 1970 A.M.C. conjured up a subcompact by chopping off the back third of its Hornet compact sedan. The oddly truncated car that resulted, the Gremlin, helped A.M.C. to weather the oil shocks to come.

There seemed no end to what A.M.C.’s resourceful engineers and product planners could do on a shoestring budget simply by repackaging and restyling the same bits and pieces.

Perhaps the company’s most clever repackaging idea came near its end as an independent automaker when it combined passenger car bodies with Jeep-based technology to create four-wheel-drive automobiles. This novel line of cars, called Eagle, did a lot to usher in a new category of all-wheel-drive sport utility wagons with an extra three inches of ground clearance and a sporty attitude. The formula can be seen on American roads today in cars like the Subaru Outback and Volvo XC70. This spring, BMW will reprise the concept in the X6, a high-riding utility vehicle with the profile of a sedan rather than a wagon.