The Meyers Manx is now a National Treasure

With the sun finally shining on us, it’s easy to imagine life in California: the beach, hot sand under your feet, surfers playing in the waves, the ocean, riding down the coast in a Dune Buggy…

The very first of these little cars was named Old Red, and it just received the Historical Significance award by the US Department of Interior. This is the second car to receive this honor, the first one being the Shelby Daytona Coupe (known to Shelby fanatics as CSX2287) which won the World Sportscar Championship in 1965. It had a tumultuous history after that, and this justified its status, alongside other major landmarks in US history like the Apollo Space Capsule, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chrysler Building.

Old Red was built in 1964, by a surfer/boat builder named Bruce Meyers. His profession had a big influence on the fiberglass body he used for the car: that was the material he was most familiar working with! He then put that body on a VW Beetle frame, since they were plentiful, easy to work on and dirt cheap. When his car was finished, he used it to race between Tijuana and La Paz, setting a record in the now-legendary Baja 1000.

The little buggy became a legend, single-handedly representing the West Coast and its beaches. Meyers only built 7,000 of them, but many third-party builders copied the design, and over 250,000 were built!

The Meyers Manx company is still alive today, and they just unveiled an all-electric modern Dune Buggy. It’s perfect for the sunny beaches of Cali!