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Quick: name the last car to wear a Studebaker-derived body. If you said the Lark, the Hawk or some 1960s oddity, you are a few decades off. The answer is the Avanti, and it kept going long after the company that created it died. A 22k-mile 1989 Avanti Sport Convertible is live at no reserve on Bring a Trailer, where bidding stood at $9,000 as of this writing. The auction ends Monday, October 26.
The car that outlived its maker
Studebaker unveiled the fiberglass-bodied Avanti as a last-ditch bid for relevance, with Raymond Loewy's team shaping a sleek coupe with no traditional grille and a sculpted, domed-glass profile. It wasn't enough. Studebaker ended car production in December 1963, and the Avanti looked like another footnote in the long list of lost independents.
It wasn't. Local Studebaker dealers Nate and Arnold Altman and Leo Newman bought the Avanti name, tooling and parts, and returned the car to production in 1965 as the Avanti II with Chevrolet V8 power. Over the following decades the little company changed hands several times. Stephen Blake took over in 1982 and added a convertible, rectangular headlights and body-color plastic bumpers on a Monte Carlo-based chassis. By 1987 the operation had moved to Youngstown, Ohio, under owner John Cafaro, who built just 405 cars there before the plant closed in 1991. Michael Kelly later revived the brand, with production running until 2006.
Why this one is a rare find
Production for 1989 was tiny, and the listing cites a reported 101 Avanti convertibles for the model year. This one was delivered new to Sansone Auto Galleria in Lake Park, Florida, and the window sticker lists a total of $52,172. It later passed through owners in Texas, Tennessee and Ohio, and the current seller bought it in 2021 and has added roughly 1,500 miles. The odometer now shows about 22,000.
Under the long fiberglass hood sits a fuel-injected 5.0-liter Chevrolet V8, factory rated at 170 horsepower and 250 lb-ft of torque, paired with a four-speed automatic and a limited-slip differential. The car is finished in Silver Beige with a tan top and beige leather that wraps across the dash, console and door panels. Fifteen-inch alloy wheels, fog lights, ground-effect skirts, power windows and air conditioning round out the equipment. The seller is upfront about a few flaws: the outer passenger door handle doesn't work, so that door only opens from the inside, and there are creases in the front seats and cracks in the finish on the gauge dials. The listing includes the window sticker, owner's manual, service records, a clean Carfax report and a clean Ohio title.
The nostalgia hook
An Avanti draws a crowd precisely because most people think it vanished in the sixties. Cars like this keep surfacing as proof that the story kept going into the Reagan and Bush years, with a body shape that looked futuristic in 1963 still on sale in an era of boxy sedans and pop-up headlights. If you've seen the shape before, our look at an earlier Studebaker Avanti shows where it all started.
It also lands in good company. Other cars that outlasted their era include the last Jensen Interceptor ever built, the Mitsubishi Starion and the one-year-only Ford Starliner.
With no reserve, four days left and 458 watchers at the time of writing, someone is going to take home a very odd piece of American automotive history. You can see the full photo gallery, video walkaround and comments on the original Bring a Trailer listing.
