Not just Pumas come from Brazil, and today Nice Price or Crack Pipe continues to mine the South American Menagerie for contestants, with a foxy Volkswagen.
Yesterday, a tight, sexy, red dress overcame the sensible underwear of our Contender Puma, in a remarkably tight 52%/48% Nice Price cat fight win. The whole idea of animalistic appellation Brazilian cars was so appealing that we've decided to hit up another today, albeit one that's a canine homage rather than feline.
Starting in the 1970s, Volkswagen began naming their cars after winds- Passat, Scirocco, Golf, etc. With the exception of the Scirocco, these cars came to America under an assumed name- the Golf as the Rabbit, and the Passat as the Dasher- potentially presaging an entire lineup of Santa's reindeer-named cars. The animal names continued over at their upscale branch, Audi, where the Dasher sibling 80 became the Fox in the U.S.. Over the years, Volkswagen has vacillated over maintaining their European names on the cars eventually showing up on these shores, with intermittent sccess (Touareg is apparently a derivation of the name of a slave-trading African tribe), and while Audi has moved to various derivations of alfa-numeric naming conventions, VW has stuck with the names, and even revisited Fox at one point.
Introduced to the U.S. in 1987, the Gol-based VW Fox attempted to provide the German maker with an entry-level model. Available as either a two-door coupe, or four door sedan (a three-door wagon was also available between '88 and '90) that were nearly six inches longer than the contemporary Golf, but on a four and a half inch shorter wheelbase. This provided a commodious trunk, but a somewhat claustrophobic interior, especially in the back. Motivating the Fox was a longitudinal version of the Golf's 1.8-litre four with Digifant fuel injection and 81 ponies giving chase. A five-speed, similar to that used in the Audi Fox of years prior backed that up, and along with that manual gearbox came manual windows, manual mirrors, manual climate control, manual. . . well, you get the picture.
The Fox shared gauge graphics with its German cousins, but little else, including that durability that VW was known for at the time. Because of that, very few have been cared for, or are in as nice of shape as our 1993 example today. For better or worse, this white coupe appears about as clean as the day it samba'd off the ship and into the heart of its happy owner. He's very enthusiastic about the car, and it makes you kind of wonder what is his motivation for selling it. At $3,300, you can guess that he holds it in pretty high esteem, despite its need for an alignment, or the broken mirror. A mention of rust is a warning flag as these cars are magnets for the red plague, some losing floorboards to the extent that Fred Flintstone would feel at home padding around in them.
So what do you think of this other Brazilian immigrant? Does $3,300 put it in the fox hunt? Or, would you only pay that much if it came with Megan Fox?
You decide!
Windy City Craigslist or go here if the ad disappears. A shake of the ol' foxtail to the anonymous tipster for the link.
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