The convertible I had prior to my 124 Spider

In case anybody might be interested in another fun car that I had prior to my 124 Spider (from 2004 to 2014), I’ve duplicated a somewhat hidden page that I’ve had on my blog for some time (4 years; based on an article I wrote 16 years ago, back when I owned the domain hunterdunebuggy.com), but apparently because it is now a stand-alone wordpress.com web page, rather than a blog post, I’ve never been able to add the tags that Google needs for it’s search engines, so although the vehicle is pretty obscure, this article may outperform that page (get a few more hits).

Presenting my 1965 Hunter Dune Buggy, a limited-production clone of Steve McQueen’s customized version of a Meyers Manx vehicle he’d purchased from Bruce Meyers, for some of  his driving scenes in the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair.

written by Dan Adkins

Bruce Meyers started the dune buggy industry in 1964 when he designed a fiberglass dune buggy and started producing the Meyers Manx in his tiny shed on the Balboa Peninsula outside Newport Beach.  It was a monocoque body with a Beetle engine, transmission and suspension bolted to it and Meyers hoped to sell 20 or 30 (then priced at $985) just to cover the cost of the project.  Instead, he would receive more orders than he could fill.  Soon thereafter, in order to make the buggies easier to manufacture and more affordable, he redesigned the Manx bodies to bolt onto shortened VW floor pans (with front seats, suspension, beam, wheels, transmission and engine already attached beforehand, if so desired) and when magazines like Hot Rod and Car & Driver featured the fiberglass buggies on their covers, they took the country by storm.

In 1967, after Steve McQueen won his favorite lead role as Thomas Crown in the original production of the United Artists film The Thomas Crown Affair, for which he earned $750,000, and apparently aware of how well the Manx dune buggy performed on the beach, decided he wanted to use a souped-up Manx buggy in the beach racing scenes with co-star Faye Dunaway (who bravely remained seated at his side), rather than a Jeep as the script called for.  The film was released on June 18, 1968 and it helped further boost the dune buggy industry, as all of the driving scenes and stunts were done by McQueen himself in the buggy he had customized, known as the Queen Manx (which indeed started out as a Meyers Manx kit purchased from B.F. Meyers & Co.).