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Some cars earn their keep with horsepower, and some earn it with sheer presence. The black 1983 Avanti II currently up for grabs on Hagerty Marketplace is firmly in the second camp — a hand-built, fiberglass-bodied coupe wearing Raymond Loewy’s timeless 1962 shape, backed by a paper trail that runs unbroken to the original owner, and sitting at a bid that still looks like a bargain. (Photos courtesy of Hagerty Marketplace.)
A Studebaker Idea That Refused To Die
The Avanti story is one of the great survival tales in American car culture. Studebaker introduced the car for 1963, built fewer than 6,000 of them, and then walked away from the automobile business entirely. Former South Bend dealers Nate Altman and Leo Newman bought the molds, the tooling, and part of the old plant, and simply kept going. The result was the Avanti II — the same jet-age silhouette, now with Chevrolet small-block power and a bespoke, order-it-how-you-want-it build process that never resembled a real production line.
That’s why the model still feels special today. Avantis were assembled a handful at a time, and 1983 was a particularly thin year even by Avanti standards; the seller’s posted production figures put the run at just 187 cars. Compare that to the original 1963 Studebaker Avanti R1 that Loewy’s team penned in a rented Palm Springs house in a matter of weeks, and you get a sense of just how long this design stayed relevant.
What Makes This One Worth A Look
Finished in black over a two-tone gray and black interior, this Avanti II is powered by the 305-cubic-inch V8 backed by a four-speed automatic. The seller confirms it’s the 190-horsepower version rather than the 155-hp tune, which matters — the higher-output cars are noticeably livelier, and this one reportedly shows 170 to 190 psi across all eight cylinders on a compression test. Advance Carburetor Specialty rebuilt the four-barrel electronically in January 2021.
The equipment list reads like a luxury coupe of the era: power steering, power-assisted front discs, power windows, a tilt column, front buckets with a center console, auxiliary gauges, rear defroster, and a period-correct Blaupunkt AM/FM cassette deck. Chrome bumpers and chrome window trim mark it as a pre-1984 car, before Steve Blake’s ownership deleted them.
Sensible upgrades have been made along the way, too. There’s a Turner Brake front disc conversion, an aftermarket set of 15-inch five-spoke alloys, and a larger-capacity aluminum transmission pan with a drain plug — the kind of thing an owner adds when they actually intend to service the car. The winning bidder also gets a spare set of four chrome-plated Avanti wire wheels with correct center caps, wearing four brand-new Kumho Solus 205/70R15 tires.
The Paperwork Is The Real Story
Documentation is where this car separates itself. The seller is the fourth owner and states he holds dated title and bill-of-sale documents for every owner going back to the first: Clyde S. Altemus of Houston, Texas, who bought the car new and sold it in February 1994. Owner two, Francis Dean Hopkins of Friendswood, Texas, drove it until 2004 and then put it into dry storage for seventeen years. After his passing, his family commissioned a complete new vinyl interior along with a new fuel tank and extensive ignition and fuel system work before selling it on.
A clean CARFAX backs up recent maintenance — transmission pan gasket and fluid in November 2024, brake wheel cylinders and a fluid flush in December 2023, and a fuel pump and filter in October 2023 — and the car comes with a clean Maine title in the seller’s name. That kind of continuous, verifiable history is rare on any 40-plus-year-old car, and it’s downright unusual on a low-production specialty coupe.
The seller is upfront about the imperfections, which is exactly what you want: there are scratches and paint flaws in places, age-consistent cosmetic wear, corrosion on undercarriage components, and air conditioning that no longer blows cold. Hagerty’s own Avanti model overview flags the frame “hog troughs” as the critical inspection point on these cars, and a bidder in the comments has already asked about them — a smart question worth confirming before the hammer falls.
What The Market Says
This is where things get interesting. Hagerty Valuation Tools currently pegs a 1983 Avanti in #3 “Good” condition at $15,300, and Hagerty notes that a typical good-condition example trades around $14,250. Over the past three years, 1983 Avantis have sold anywhere from $6,600 to a high of $34,230 across a dozen public auction results.
Recent comps skew toward the upper half of that band. A 1983 Avanti with 51,000 miles brought $20,223 on Bring a Trailer in June 2026. A 1984 sold for $13,046 on AutoHunter in May 2026, and a 1988 coupe hit $20,738 on BaT in February 2026, with another 1988 example bringing $13,200 at Mecum in January. Later Youngstown-era cars — the kind featured in our look at a pristine 1989 Avanti convertible — command more, but the chrome-bumper Avanti IIs have been quietly firming up.
Against that backdrop, a high bid sitting in the $9,000 range with hours left on the clock looks like genuine opportunity. Even accounting for the paint, the undercarriage, and an A/C system that needs attention, the documented ownership chain, the fresh service history, the 190-hp engine, and a second full set of wheels and new tires all argue for a car trading below where the guide says it should be. For reference, our feature on a low-mileage 1985 Avanti II shows just how much presentation swings these numbers.
Why The Avanti Still Deserves Respect
It’s easy to write off a 1980s Avanti as a curiosity. That would be a mistake. This is a design that looked like nothing else on the road in 1962 and still stops conversation in a parking lot in 2026 — a coke-bottle fiberglass body with no grille, a built-in roll bar, and one of the first applications of front disc brakes on an American production car. The Studebaker-era cars could genuinely run, too; our Avanti versus GTO showdown found the supercharged R2 taking all three rounds against a 400-cube Pontiac.
Buy this one and you get the shape, the story, the folder of paperwork, and a spare set of wire wheels, all for a fraction of what a comparable-presence classic costs. The auction is scheduled to close Tuesday, August 18 at 2:45 p.m. EDT on Hagerty Marketplace. As always, do your own due diligence — but this looks like a lot of hand-built American design for the money.
