Today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe SP2 is a rare Brazilian sports car that at present still happens to be in Brazil. Let’s see if you’d pay its not-insubstantial asking to bring it out.
I am shocked and saddened that not everyone was as fully smitten by yesterday’s 1983 Renault R5 as was I. I thought it came with a decent price for so clean a quirky little car, but 55-percent of you heartless souls disagreed, dunning the little champignon to a Crack Pipe loss. By the way, how to you pronounce “Renault”? Do you prefer Ray-know or is it Ree-nahlt for you? I prefer the former but my wife has read a lot of Mary Renault and gives me the skinny eyes whenever I say it that way.
Hey, who wants to go to Brazil? They’ve got food on swords there, amazing beaches, and those beaches are populated with beautiful people wearing the smallest possible swimwear imaginable. If you like butt cheeks and lots of them then Brazil’s beaches are for you. They also have the amazing burping girl down there which makes you wonder just what other delights the South American nation might just have to offer.
One such delight is this 1973 Volkswagen SP2 which, even if you live in Brazil, you’ve likely never seen in the metal. These long-nosed fastbacks were built by VW do Brazil from 1971 through ’76 to feed the demand for sports cars at a time when government policies made imported cars prohibitively expensive. The SP2 was wholly developed by VW’s Brazilian subsidiary, and adapted from the platform and drivetrain of the locally-produced Variant.
Powering the SP2 was a 1,700-cc air-cooled engine good for 75-horsepower and driving through a four-speed transaxle. A handsome fastback body and well appointed interior masked the car’s humble underpinnings.
The SP2 was not as successful as Volkswagen do Brazil had hoped, as the similarly spec’d but lighter Puma outperformed the steel-bodied Vee-Dub both on the road and in sales. After just over 10,000 units, the SP2 was discontinued in 1976.
That makes them pretty rare in Brazil, and pretty much nonexistent everywhere else. Enter a Southern California company that claims as their business the import of interesting Brazilian cars. That leads us to this particular SP2, in medium metallic blue with racy red stripes and a pretty swank interior. The ad shows pics of the car in Brazil and the seller says that he’s taking orders for his next container shipment so pay up and he’ll bring it up. He has another one on the way already.
The seller’s ad is a little hard to follow, but the gist of it is that he has this import/sales company—Les Brands Distribution—and he’s bringing these cars up once he has a buyer on the hook.
This particular SP2 is described as having “nice paint, nice interior, and no rust” and the pics show a car that looks to be in pretty decent shape as confirmation. Oddly, if you search for the license plate number—BZU 8851—the results show another SP2, in silver with a different interior. I’m not sure if that’s a red flag or not. For all I know all of the license plates in Brazil could be BZU 8851.
Mileage is sad to be 99,000 and the seller claims he’ll deal with all the importation registration paperwork. He also says in his ad that his time is limited so he’s not interested in dicking around. His price is $38,000 in his Craigslist ad, and $44,000 on his web site. He says “Other similar will range between 29k- 30k” which doesn’t really help his cause as far as I’m concerned. That’s just my opinion.
What we want to know is your opinion, and it’s now time to vote on whether or not this Brazilian exchange student is worth exchanging $38,000 in cold, hard cash.What do you think, is that what it costs to obtain so rare a bit of interesting VW history? Or, at that price is this girl from Ipanema destined to stay there?
You decide!
Los Angeles, CA Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
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