Rusty But Trusty

Although we’re generally infatuated with oddball European cars, occasionally we like to venture beyond our standard fare and dig up truly rare things like coachbuilt Japanese convertibles from the early 1980s. For those of you who weren’t around then, the death of the convertible was a common theme for automakers and car enthusiasts. There was a major push for passive safety (witness the addition of park-bench sized bumpers, impact bars in the doors, foam rubber dashboards, and open cars such as the Fiat X1/9), and the lack of a roof just didn’t seem compatible with our dangerous new world. As a result, several small coachbuilders took on the task of chopping the roofs off of regular production cars. Cars such as the Toyota Celica and Corolla, Subaru DL, Honda Prelude and CRX, and Mazda RX-7 all went topless thanks to these folks. Also among that crowd was the Datsun 200SX, seen last week in the Bonham’s at Quail auction parking lot with an unspecified price (but really, how much could it possibly be?).

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