Avanti cars for sale

Overview

The Avanti is one of the great what-ifs of American car design — a radical fibreglass coupe that arrived just as the company building it ran out of road. It then refused to die, staying in low-volume production under a succession of owners for more than forty years after its parent collapsed.

History

Developed under Studebaker president Sherwood Egbert and styled by Raymond Loewy’s team in a compressed 40-day programme, the Avanti launched on 26 April 1962 on a modified Lark chassis. It had front disc brakes — rare then — and a bottom-breather air intake, and a supercharged 289 exceeded 170 mph at Bonneville, breaking 29 world records and briefly making it the fastest production car in the world.

Commercially it failed. Egbert wanted 20,000 sales in 1962 and got 1,200; production ended on 20 December 1963 with fewer than 4,600 built. Studebaker dealers Nate Altman and Leo Newman then bought the tooling and name and hand-built the Avanti II, and successive owners kept variants in production through 2006.