The original Studebaker Avanti had no real chance to succeed. A little more than a year after it hit the market, the company ceased U.S. auto production. A few models continued to be briefly built in Canada, but the Avanti wasn’t one of them. The Halo car was revived by a couple of Studebaker’s dealers and was soon reborn as the Avanti II. This one is from 1978 and looks to have been out cooking in the Sun for years. We’re told it runs on an external fuel source, but the body and interior are in a state of neglect. Bought from an estate, this Avanti II is in Casa Grande, Arizona, and is available here on eBay. The next bid past $1,950 might get to take it home.
From mid-1962 until the end of calendar 1963, Studebaker only cranked out about 4,600 copies of the Avanti. The goal had been 20,000 per year, but troubles with the fiberglass bodies helped cause a slow start. Those numbers likely didn’t justify building more of them in Hamilton, Ontario after December ’63, so everyone thought the Avanti was dead. But a couple of Studebaker dealers thought otherwise and bought the name, tooling, and manufacturing capacity and launched the Avanti II in 1965. Those cars would rely on a Chevrolet chassis, engine, and transmission as Studebaker components were now gone.
From 1965 to 1982, the founders and their families held guard over the Avanti. After they passed on or no longer had interest, the company changed hands several more times until the end came in 2006. Production was never higher than a few hundred copies per year, so it was largely a hand-built automobile. In 1978, just 142 Avanti IIs were assembled, including the seller’s car. He/she bought it from an estate after the owner had passed away.
This Chevy-powered Avanti II has been sitting for ages. The fuel system is gummed up, but the 350 cubic inch V8 fires up and runs off an external can of gas. And the Turbo-Hydramatic transmission (the seller thinks it’s a TH-400). The odometer reads 87,000 miles and the car may have been parked due to the age of the seller rather than mechanical issues, but that’s just a guess.
One of the hood’s hinges broke off, so it rests over to the side. The paint (said to be black) is well-burned but the body and chrome may be okay. The interior is toast in many respects, with the upholstery at a minimum needing to be replaced. The car has factory GM air conditioning, but who knows if it works. If you’re a fan of these cars and don’t mind the Chevy power of a déjà vu car, is this a project you’d undertake restoring?
I see this as the beginnings of a cool resto-rod. I love the original Avanti’s, so I wouldn’t feel bad about lightly modifying it at all.
I have never seen one of these in this condition, and I never expected to. Pretty much begging to be hot-rodded at this point. (I wonder if DashMat has a pattern for these)😁Always thought these were so cool. It’s actually sort of in my neighborhood. Uh-oh…
“Needs work.”
I love Avantis, but this one, not so much.
I think this will be a great $25,000 car after you put at least $50,000 into it! And if that seems inordinately negative, there are any number of new cars in that price range that will only be worth $25,000 after just a few years anyway, and they won’t have the style and fun of this one! I hope someone goes for it – so much nicer for the rest of us to see than just another Hyundai Genesis or similar on the road here in Arizona!
I bought a car that baked in the sun for years before my purchase, awful. That interior will crumble if you touch it to say nothing of the mechanicals. It’s as if it was in an oven forever :-(
One correction to the original writeup: Studebaker was FAR from a “just in time” operation, so when the South Bend facilities were shut down there were a substantial number of complete Studebaker chassis available, with the parts on hand to make quite a few more. All of that inventory, in addition to the pertinent intellectual property is what Newman & Altman bought from Studebaker-Packard in the Avanti deal. So long story short, while the Avanti IIs and the other subsequent Avantis have “foreign” powertrains, it was many years before they had to source other platforms on which to build. Most likely this ’78, and most, if not all, of the other Avanti IIs roll on an original Studebaker-designed chassis. The later Avantis that aren’t as dimentionally or as aesthetically “true” to the originals are built on other platforms, mostly GM G-body chassis.