The Ultimate $25K Manual Diesel Wagon Is Actually an RV and There’s One for Sale

The Vixen has all the trappings of a classic ’80s sports car—turbo engine, wedge-shaped body, sealed-beam headlights, manual transmission, and an animal name. It also carries a kitchen, toilet, bedroom, and diner booth because it’s actually an RV. It’s one of those obscure vehicles that many car nerds have heard of but few will ever see because only about 600 were made. One just popped up on FB Marketplace, giving us all a rare opportunity to peek inside and somebody the chance to take on a very interesting project here.

A few variations of this bizarre low-riding RV were made. But most, including this 1986 Vixen 21td we just found on Facebook in Texas, run a 2.4-liter BMW turbodiesel engine mated to a DeLorean manual transmission. The seller wants $25,000, though these are tough to value because of their niche appeal and rarity. It’s not how I’d spend that much money personally, but good luck finding another one. The ad lists typical old-weird-car issues, but the body looks pretty clean and it’s apparently had its engine recently rebuilt.

Over the years, the Vixen has been periodically celebrated on pretty much every car blog because it bundles everything car-loving hipsters love to crow about. It’s like the final form of “diesel-manual-wagon” which was so many millennial auto journalists’ ultimate automotive archetype. For the record, even working at Jalopnik circa 2015, I never really understood those particular obsessions but I can appreciate the Roger Moore-era James Bondy appeal of the Vixen.

For those who haven’t heard of this strange vehicle, there are dozens of contextual writeups (Benjamin Hunting’s 2020 story on Hagerty is my fave) but I’ll provide the high-level download to save you a click:

Vixen was the brainchild of engineer and designer Bill Collins (no relation to me), who worked on the Pontiac GTO and DeLorean, among other things. He had a heck of a career in the car business and passed away last year at age 90. His obituary in Hemmings lists out his professional accomplishments more completely and includes this nugget from him about the Vixen project: “I look at Vixen as the culmination of all my experiences from starting with a clean sheet of paper and building a car from the ground up,” he said. “I possessed an overview of how to build a whole car that I would never have gotten had I been a spark plug engineer for Chevrolet.”

Apparently, Collins took a trip in one of those cool ’70s GMC Motorhomes and was inspired to create a unique mobile domicile of his own, with more of a driver’s-car vibe than your usual flimsy-box-body-on-frame RV. Forty years later, whether or not he succeeded is still kind of up for interpretation. That Hemmings obit says the Vixen won The Industrial Design Society of America’s Industrial Design Excellence Award in 1986, but IDSA’s online awards records only go back to 2001. I can’t find Car and Driver‘s in-period road test online but it’s referenced in a more recent post as featuring “epic body lean, a patience-testing zero-to-60-mph time of 21.8 seconds, and a top speed of 100 mph.” Fuel economy of 30 mpg was claimed but the reality was closer to half that, according to the EPA.

If you’re serious about wanting to buy one of these or learn about the actual ownership experience, the Vixen Owner’s Association is a thing that exists and is still active today!

Got a lead on an even more obscure RV that we might not have heard about? Hit up the author at andrew.collins@thedrive.com

The post The Ultimate $25K Manual Diesel Wagon Is Actually an RV and There’s One for Sale appeared first on The Drive.