Today’s Nice Price or No Dice Audi S4 was built by Allroad Outfitters for the 2018 SEMA show. Now — if its price feels like a deal — it could be showing up in your driveway.
Did you ever notice how, in the namesake movies, Indiana Jones incessantly runs around stealing antiquities, using as his sole justification that they belong in a museum? Based on the comments, many of you had a similar feeling towards yesterday’s remarkably well restored 1973 Mazda RX-2.
Of course, none of you would stoop to the level of common thievery to fulfill that assertion. But it seems that few of you would have gone the lengths of paying the seller’s $28,000 asking price to make the car the centerpiece in your ’70s Rotary Rocket diorama. This resulted in a 72 percent No Dice loss.
As you know, the COVID-19 global pandemic has put a serious kink in many a plan for public gatherings. In the automotive world that means car shows, marque meets and commercial gatherings have all been curtailed or outright canceled. One of the biggest annual events to get sidelined by the virus is this year’s SEMA, or Specialty Equipment Marketing Association, show. Once the tacky showcase of wretched automotive excess and unnecessary-accessory debauchery, the 2020 SEMA show will be replaced by an online-only affair called SEMA360. What will that look like? Probably something akin to the JEGS website, only a bit more over the top.
The move to a remote, online venue sadly eliminates one of the key delights of the SEMA show, that being the arrival of all kinds of wild, out-of-the-box tuner and fabricator cars that typically overflow the Vegas show and give it a unique vibe.
That doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy a SEMA ride; we’ll just have to turn back the clock a couple of years to do so.
This 2013 Audi S4 was modified for the 2018 SEMA show by Southern California’s Allroad Outfitters. The car was one of three the company brought to Vegas and was by far the most audacious. The crazy DTM-style bodywork, rally lights, roof rack and interior mods may have not been enough of an advertisement for the shop’s capabilities, however, as its web presence now seems to be limited to Instagram.
To say this Audi is outlandish is an understatement. To begin with, the base car is Audi’s lauded S4 sedan. That means it has the phenomenal supercharged 3-liter V6 under the hood. That engine swings for the fences with 333 horsepower and 325 lb-ft of torque. Behind that sits Audi’s seven-speed double-clutch auto-manual and venerated quattro AWD drivetrain. On top of all that, it has been laden with carbon fiber flares, wings and a panorama of rally-inspired paint.
The interior features a pair of Recaro carbon-Kevlar buckets up front, and a bolt-in four-point roll bar in the back. Five-point harnesses tie together those race-inspired features. There’s lots more here, too. The ad calls out additions like new Toyo tires on spacer-extended Rays 18-inch wheels. A Borla exhaust gets its orders through Eurocode headers, giving the engine a break on backpressure. To take advantage of that, the car has also been gifted with an APR Stage 3 ECU and TCU tune.
The ad includes the retail price on all of the add-ons, as well as the time — at $80 an hour — it took to bring the car to SEMA status. That’s a lot of work, not just in the car but in tallying that all up for the ad. I think we all can agree that it also was mostly for naught. Nobody gives a rat’s buttcheeks how much time you spent working on your car. Or for that matter, what the parts may have cost you. What’s being bought is a complete vehicle. If it works as it should and has an expected future lifespan, that’s going to be a greater influence on the asking than how much the carbon fiber mirror caps cost.
Fortunately, this Audi looks to be working and in great shape. The seller describes it as a one-owner car that comes with a clean title. The ad marks its condition as 9.9 out of 10 and notes that the car won the Toyo Tires Treadpass Vehicle award at the SEMA show. That’s apparently just one of several accolades it has earned.
It’s pretty impressive stuff, and one would want to know all that if they were considering this car’s purchase. That audience is most likely a very narrow niche of Audi enthusiasts, or perhaps someone whose fetish is collecting all the SEMA-related cars they can find.
You may not count yourself as being among either of those groups, but that shouldn’t stop you from voting on this wild Audi and its $59,995 asking price. As noted, the seller goes to great lengths to tally up all the investments made, in both parts and labor, to build this car. In the end, however, that probably means less than the sum of those parts and that labor.
To that end, do you think this crazy S4 is worth $59,995 as it sits? Or, is this a SEMA show car that has you saying “see-ya”?
You decide!
Ventura County, CA Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
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