A beige coupé with a fibreglass body and a nose that breathes through its chin sits in Larvik, and it resembles nothing else registered in Norway. The 1979 Studebaker Avanti II carries a silhouette drawn nearly two decades before it was built: designed by Raymond Loewy's team on a 40-day crash program, the Avanti featured a radical fibreglass body mounted on a modified Studebaker Lark chassis. This was the space-race moment, when American design still believed the future would look like an aircraft, and Loewy, the man who also shaped the Greyhound bus and the livery of Air Force One, gave the shape a grille-less face that fed cooling air from beneath the bumper. It should have dated within five years. It didn't.
When a dead car refused to die
Studebaker itself lasted barely long enough to build the thing. Fewer than 4,600 Avantis were produced during 1963, and production had already ceased by the time Studebaker stopped car production in South Bend in December that year. What happened next is the interesting part. Former South Bend dealers Nate Altman and Leo Newman bought the molds, the tooling, and part of the old plant, and simply kept going, producing the Avanti II with Chevrolet small-block power and a bespoke, order-it-how-you-want build process that never resembled a real production line. The handbuilt cars took two to three months to make, and buyers were invited for a factory tour before collection.
By 1979 the world outside the factory had changed beyond recognition, second oil crisis and all, yet the Avanti carried on unbothered by fashion. The later cars used a 305 or, like this one, the 350 V8. Backed by the GM Turbo-Hydramatic three-speed, this is a relaxed, torque-rich fibreglass grand tourer rather than a corner-carver: the appeal is the long-hood cruise, the visual drama, and the sense of driving a design museum piece that happens to have a warm American V8 under the bonnet.
About that beige coupé
Roughly 175 cars left the works in 1979, and this one shows 53,000 km, which for a hand-built oddity of this age is genuinely low. At 239,000 NOK it sits in the middle of the sensible band for a well-kept Avanti II, neither a project-car giveaway nor optimistic money. Two checks matter more than anything else. The "hog troughs" bond the wider Avanti body to the narrower frame to prevent damage to the fibreglass, and after exposure to salt they can rot through, expensive to cure because the body often has to come off. The A-pillars are the other known trouble spot. Fibreglass doesn't rust, but everything holding it together does, especially on a car that has spent time in the Nordic climate.
The car that outlived its company
Values for the II have long trailed the original Studebaker-built cars, which keeps this a connoisseur's corner of the American-classic market rather than a speculator's one. In Europe the population is tiny, so provenance and a clean underside decide the price entirely. Before any money changes hands, lift it on a ramp for a proper look at those torque boxes and frame, confirm the Chevrolet drivetrain's history, and have a specialist verify what's original against what has been renewed. Get that right and you own the car that outlived the company it was meant to save.
