Even though there was no shortage of weird custom cars in the late 60s and early 70s, this George Barris built Bathtub Buggy is without question one of the weirdest. If you have a love for dated show rods and bathroom fixtures, today is your lucky day because this weird former show car is currently for sale on Ebay.
I'll admit when I discovered the Bathtub hot rod a few months ago, it was the first literal combination of a hot rod and something normally found in a bathroom I had ever seen. Far too young to have ever been exposed to the "show rod" scene of the late 60s and early 70s, your insightful comments quickly brought me up to speed on the fact a few bathroom themed custom vehicles had already paved the path for future porcelain/hot rod hybrids.
This past week while reviewing the weirdest vehicles Ebay has to offer I found one of these original bathtub hot rods, specifically the Bathtub Buggy built by George Barris in 1970. In truth I am not 100% positive it is the Bathtub Buggy built by George Barris because no mention is made of this fact anywhere in the Ebay listing. Even with this in mind, I feel pretty safe making this guess because the only thing possibly weirder than building a bathroom themed hot rod would be building an extremely accurate and period correct replica of someone else's bathroom themed hot rod.
According to the Barris Kustom Industries website (where we found the picture above), the Bathtub Buggy features a Ford 289 V8 up front as well as "all essentials and accessories found in a bathroom". Almost everything on the Bathtub Buggy is gold, brass or some combination of the two. We imagine the Bathtub Buggy turned quite a few heads for a variety of different reasons when it debuted at the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan.
Judging from the pictures the Bathtub Buggy has spent quite a bit of time sitting in a garage since that debut (I can't imagine why). The bidding for the Bathtub Buggy is currently at $5000 with the reserve not met. There's still a little over two days left on the auction so you still have plenty of time to flush your money down the toilet purchasing the Bathtub Buggy.
(Photo Credit: Barris Kustom Industries)
[Ebay or go here if the auction disappears]