If there’s anything better than a regular Chevrolet Corvette, it’s a Corvette fashioned into a wagon. This wild Corvette wagon for sale on Craigslist has with a practical hatch in back and a proto-lightbar up front.
Builders have been grafting a longer roof onto the rears of Corvettes for decades. Back in the 1970s, a number of designers and builders all made their own takes on what a long-roof C3 Corvette should look like.
One such builder, Michigan-based custom car builder Chuck Miller had a client with a tall order. As Corvette Magazine reports, Uriel Jones, a drummer in Motown’s the Funk Brothers, loved his Corvette but was disappointed that it couldn’t haul his gear. Miller decided that the best way to fill Jones’ needs was to build a wagon. Miller contacted Harry Bradley, an industrial designer that worked at GM and designed Hot Wheels for Mattel, to design a wagon rear end that matched the Corvette’s design.
The result was a wagon with expanded cargo capacity that looked like it rolled out of the factory that way. Miller went on to build a handful of Corvette wagons before passing the torch onto Ralph Eckler, who sold the wagon conversions as a kit.
Bradley didn’t just design a Corvette for Miller’s client, he drew up another wagon for Mike Betterton of Visalia, California.
Bradley’s design for Betterton would take the Corvette wagon idea to the extreme.
The wagon portion was built on a steel roll cage flanked by Lexan side windows that wrap around onto the roof. A more detailed ad for the car says that the wagon roof portion is attached to the chassis using rubber mounts and is allowed to flex with the rest of the car.
Bradley also ditched the Corvette’s taillights, instead opting for the full-width tail light setup from a 1971 Ford Thunderbird.
That full-width lighting theme continues up front, where six sealed-beam headlights stretch accross the nose of the car. It’s a bizarre setup, but I bet it looked epic at nighttime. Betterton paid $25,000 to have this car created over the course of three years.
The ad notes that the car has been featured in a number of magazines and books with some scans to prove it:
This car is fully documented in numerous magazines & books like Keepin’ Track of Corvettes Vol. 4 (Front Cover), Super Chevy Oct. 1978 (Front Cover), Corvette News Summer Issue 1982 (Harry Bradley’s Concept Cars) & Petersen Deluxe Corvette an American Classic 1978.
Sadly, the car’s fallen into a rough state over the years. It was in a crash in 1997 and hasn’t been repaired or driven since.
The seller says that it’ll need a full restoration from front to back and I believe them. It doesn’t run or drive, but is said to be numbers-matching.
This is also not it’s first time showing up for sale. As noted by Road & Track, one of the last times was in 2019 when it was listed on eBay for $17,000.
The price for this unique piece of Corvette history is now $20,000.
Hat tip to Jeremy!