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Studebaker bet its future on the Avanti and lost. The company shut down car production at its South Bend, Indiana, plant in December 1963, and by every normal measure that should have been the end of the story. It wasn't. The Avanti kept getting built, in one form or another, until 2006. This 22k-mile 1989 Avanti Sport Convertible is live on Bring a Trailer right now with no reserve. It was bid to $9,000 as of Friday, and the auction ends Monday, October 26, at 4:47 p.m. ET.
The Car That Was Supposed to Save Studebaker
The Avanti arrived in April 1962 and looked like nothing else in showrooms. Raymond Loewy's design team reportedly shaped it in a matter of weeks, and it wore a fiberglass body with no traditional grille and a sweeping Coke-bottle waist. Studebaker hoped to sell 20,000 a year. It built roughly 1,200 in the first year, as fiberglass suppliers and fit-and-finish problems slowed everything down. Read more about the original in Motorious's look at the 1964 Studebaker Avanti Sports Coupe.
The Coupe That Wouldn't Die
When South Bend closed, two local Studebaker dealers, Nate Altman and Leo Newman, bought the name and tooling and started hand-building the car as the Avanti II, powered by General Motors V8s. That began a 40-plus-year relay of owners and small-scale builders. You can see what those hand-built cars looked like in our stories on a 1983 Avanti II and a low-mileage 1985 Avanti II.
In 1987, John Cafaro took over the Avanti with help from the State of Ohio and moved production to Youngstown. That era produced the car you see here: a convertible with a bumper-to-bumper plastic makeover and a Chevrolet V8. It didn't last long. The Youngstown plant closed in 1991 after about four years and roughly 405 cars, according to our earlier coverage of another 1989 Avanti convertible.
This 1989 Avanti Sport Convertible
According to the listing, this is one of a reported 101 convertibles built for the 1989 model year. It was delivered new to Motors Management/Sansone Auto Galleria in Lake Park, Florida, and the window sticker lists a price of $52,172. That was serious money in 1989.
The fiberglass body is finished in Silver-Beige over beige leather, with a tan soft top, fog lights, ground-effect bumpers and side skirts, and 15-inch alloy wheels. Inside you get six-way power front bucket seats, power windows, air conditioning, cruise control, a wood-rimmed steering wheel, and a wood-veneer dash insert. Power comes from a fuel-injected 5.0-liter Chevrolet V8 rated at 170 horsepower and 250 lb-ft of torque, sent to the rear wheels through a four-speed automatic with a limited-slip differential.
The odometer shows 22k miles, about 1,500 of which were added under the current owner, who bought it in 2021. The sale includes the window sticker, owner's manual, service records, and a clean Carfax report, and the Ohio title is in the owner's name. The seller notes that the passenger-side outer door handle doesn't work, so that door only opens from the inside, and the instrument dials show cracks in the finish.
Why You Forgot It
The Avanti's later years are easy to overlook. By the late 1980s it was a 25-year-old design wearing a body kit, built in tiny numbers by a company most buyers had never heard of, with a 170-horsepower engine at a time when a Mustang GT made more. But that is the appeal. Nothing else on the road was a Loewy-designed Studebaker descendant with a Chevy V8 and the top down, and it ranks among the strangest survival stories in American car history. It also fits right in with other oddities we've covered, like the Chrysler TC by Maserati.
At $9,000 and no reserve, someone is going to get a very rare convertible with a great story. Check out the full listing on Bring a Trailer before the auction ends Monday afternoon.
