The Meyers Manx was a custom built machine made back in the mid 1960’s by a guy named Bruce Meyers, who lived and worked in California as an engineer and boat builder. He wasn’t a professional race car driver, but he sure managed to lay waste to a bunch of pros while showing off his prototype dune buggy in what would come to be known as the Baja 1,000.
Based on a chopped down VW Beetle fitted with a fiberglass body, the Manx was light, easy to handle, and capable of trouncing sand dunes even without 4x4. In spite of the fact that Bruce patented his creation, his design was emulated, and sometimes just plain ripped-off by other companies. Engines and power depended on what VW was used as the source car (all flat 4’s though). The vast majority of these buggies were street legal, though the very nearly open wheel wells meant they could be fitted with super nubby tires to claw and crawl up dunes. Buggies like these straddled the line between off road jeeps and dirt bikes (quads weren’t really so big yet back then), and the design became iconic in off road racing and pop culture. Even Barbie had a dune buggy that looked like a Manx (in pink, of course).
Bruce Meyers had left his company by the time it met with financial problems involving the IRS in the early 1970’s, but he founded (more like refounded, though) the Meyers Manx, Inc. company in 2000 to do a small run of buggies and sell kits. The buggy pictured here was one of two Dune Buggies I saw at this particular car show, and even that number was surprising to me. It’s not like Minnesota is known for having vast deserts to race across. I’m sure people manage to find fun stuff to do with these things anyway, though.
I tried to find some numbers for what one of these would cost nowadays, and it’s all over the place. Mostly, it seems that it really depends on what car has been used for the buggy donor. I found a listing for a genuine Meyers Manx for just under $5,000. Of course, you could just go to the Meyers Manx website and buy a brand new “Kick-Out” Manx Traditional kit for $4,700 and build your own. They’ve also got some cute looking newer models available in kit form including one called the Manxter 2+2 for $5,895, and a Manxter DualSport kit for $8,545. But what about stuff that’s already built and ready to go. Well, I found an online listing for a dune buggy built on a Subaru platform with twin turbos for $19,500, and a Manx knock-off based on a ‘68 VW for $18,000. The prices drop to nearly half that for other versions that seem like they’re more street oriented and less Baja ready, and half of that number even for another street-tire equipped Manx knock-off ($4,000 if you’re willing to go to Arizona to get it). If you want to build your own and don‘t care if it‘s the official Manx or not, there’s a guy in Connecticut who wants to sell you a kit for $1,499 (OBO). If you wanna get all back-woods about it, you could head to Arkansas and get yourself a real post-zombie-apocalypse style rig that looks like it was cooked up in a meth lab…no paint, no fiberglass body, a roll cage that looks like it was welded together out of old bicycle frames, a bus transmission, and rims that look like they were pulled off a car that was sitting in the junk yard for a decade or two. It’s totally lick’em-stick’em, but you can tweak out with it for only $750. Seems like there’s something for just about every budget in the dune buggy world!
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