Billed as ‘the sports car of the Seventies,’ it’s for sale on Bring a Trailer.

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.

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