This Wild Dune Buggy Was the Follow-Up to the Meyers Manx

• Did you know Bruce Meyers designed a street rod follow-up to the dune buggy?
• The styling on this second-generation SR is bananas, but it’s an easy-to-work-on VW underneath.
• This one also has its official Manx certification.

The original Meyers Manx dune buggy, endlessly copied and re-created, is an indisputable automotive icon. You only need to look at one to instantly hear the Beach Boys singing about California sun and surf, cruising along the beach on a warm summer evening. But Bruce Meyers didn’t just stop at the sand.

A wild-looking piece of Manx history just turned up at Bring a Trailer (which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos): a Karma Coachworks SR2. What year does it hail from? Well, that’s a bit of an open question, as the chassis that underpins it is a 1970 Volkswagen, but the car was built a little later.

A Manx SR was featured on the cover of Car and Driver’s May 1970 issue, where we noted that it pegged the fun-to-drive meter for not much money, same as the original Manx Dune Buggy did. SR stands for Street Roadster, and Bruce Meyers’s idea here was to take his original success and build a more tarmac-oriented funster out of it.

First-generation SRs are pretty rare, with only 200 of them built. In one interesting footnote of 1970s car history, one of the factory-made examples found its way to serial entrepreneur Malcom Bricklin and thus might have been a partial inspiration behind the fiberglass-bodied SV-1.

Here’s where Karma Coachworks comes in. Meyers folded his business in 1971, but Cosa Mesta, California–based Karma thought it could make a go of things. With input from Meyers, the SR2 was developed, again with the simple recipe of a fiberglass body on a shortened Volkswagen chassis.

In gloss black, the vibe this thing is giving off is very much Batmobile Junior. It packs plenty of styling elements into an 80-inch wheelbase, with a spoiler, scissor doors, and extra-chunky back tires. It comes with a removable roof panel and removable side windows.

Out back is a 1.6-liter Volkswagen flat-four of indeterminate power output. Figure around 70 horsepower or so with that Holley “Bugspray” 2110 carburetor on top, which is plenty for a vehicle that weighs about as much as a child’s swimming pool. Power gets to the ground through a four-speed manual with a Hurst shifter.

Besides being a barrel of laughs (and possibly also screams) to drive, the appeal here is that this SR2 carries genuine Manx certification. It’s an overlooked part of the Bruce Meyers story, but has its place. It might be a little more Black Sabbath than Beach Boys, but it’s still maximum fun in the sun.

The auction ends on October 21.

Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels.