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Here's Where You Can Still Buy Volkswagen's Weird 1980s German-American Experiment, the VW Rabbit Pickup

By Rain Noe - March 11, 2020

in Cars

Volkswagen Rabbit Pickup trucks for sale!

I miss the days when automakers would experiment like first-year art students. In the 1970s Volkswagen's boxy little Rabbit was selling like hotcakes all over the world, and VW's HQ in Germany wondered if they could sell Rabbit-based station wagons and pickup truck variants, too. Volkswagen of America voted "yea" on the pickup version. So by 1979, VW's factory in Pennsylvania started cranking out the weird, diminutive Volkswagen Rabbit Pickup.

The mini-truck's production run lasted from model years 1980 thru 1983, with VW selling 77,513 of them stateside. Today, some 37 years after the last one came off of the line, you'd think they'd all be dead and buried. But I just stumbled across a website, VWTruckForSale.com, that's got dozens of them for sale. And some are in shockingly good condition, like this one:

The site has listings in nearly all of the 50 states. Conditions range from factory original to restomod to full-on Hillbilly Engineering.

In the listings I've seen prices as low as 2 grand, and as high as 25 grand. Helpfully, they leave the listings up even after the cars are sold, so you can get a sense of what other folks paid.

Check it out here.

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Richard Vinson

4 years ago

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I love the VW Pickups but just something to be aware of.
My daughter was test driving one and riding in the passenger seat with the owner driving when they were hit in the side by a larger modern truck (drunk driver - convicted). The impact was perpendicular mostly on the drivers side of the bed spinning the VW around into the curb ripping off the rear axle and being stopped by a fire hydrant. She had some serious injuries but not as bad as it could have been. My point is driving around in a classic should be done with an awareness that there has been a lot of safety improvements over these years and you dont have them. this coming from an owner of an 1980 Alfa Romeo Spider.

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