Chevrolet Impala, Suzuki Jimny, Volkswagen Karmann Ghia: The Dopest Cars I Found For Sale Online

Friends, I'm back from my little jaunt out to Oregon. I'm already over 2,300 words into the first story about that event — the first of at least three — but time waits for no beautiful woman. It's a Friday once again, and that means it's time to pause work on my gonzo opus and track down some automotive listings for you to waste your few remaining hours in the work week daydreaming about. 

Last week, we looked at the cars in and around the city of Medford, the town in Oregon for which I was bound. Today, now that I'm back in New York City with no further travel on my calendar, I bring you something else: Listings from wherever I feel like. West coast listings, east coast listings, I left no stone unturned in finding you some truly oddball cars to peruse. Welcome to this week's installment of the internet's Dopest Cars. 

The seller of this Impala says it runs on the chassis of a 1986 Chevy 3/4 ton truck, but I like to think this particular two-door just ate its veggies as a kid and grew up to be big and strong. If a baby 1966 Impala could dream about what it would look like in 20 years, wouldn't it dream up something just like this? No rear doors, no concessions to practicality; just big wheels, a lift, and a winch. 

Alas, cars do not (I'm told) grow up and age. They do, however, end up in the hands of mad-scientist shadetree wrenchers with more spare parts than sense, and for that I'm glad. That baby Impala may never grow up to look like this, but the right mechanic with the right ratio of beers to ideas can turn this concept from a hazy vision into reality. I'm thankful they did. 

This past weekend, I got to ride my first ever kick-start dirt bike. It was also my first ever two-stroke, and my first ever dedicated off-road bike. It was one of these: A Kawasaki KX112, the motorcycle you buy when you've decided your child is going to be Travis Pastrana when they grow up. 

The KX112 I rode likely wasn't a 2025 model, but it's tough to tell. The bike is carbureted, it runs premix, and it doesn't even have a dashboard — it could be from any time between the invention of the automobile and today. Well, any time after the invention of Monster Energy, at least. I'd never understood why people tolerated the smoke of two-strokes, dealing with all the premix, but I get it now. They're just fun little engines, and I kind of want one. Not enough to buy a dirt bike in Brooklyn, but more than nothing. 

I have no Earthly idea what's going on here. The seller says it's a trike, and that much is certainly true. They also say it's a "Honda BR1000," and that is simply not a production Honda model. Maybe they meant to say it used the engine from a CBR 1000, which would mean this cobbled-together trike is running Fireblade hardware under the hood. Or maybe trunk. I don't know where the engine is in this thing.

What I do know is that there's no Earthly way this is safe to drive. How much does that matter to you, though? Would you take a final, memorable ride over a lifetime's worth of dull, boring commutes? Would you rather live in peace as Mr. Nobody, die ripe, old and smelling slightly of urine? Or go down for all times in a blaze of glory, smelling near like posies, without seeing your thirtieth?

Remember when BMW sort of built a supermoto? Yeah, neither does anyone else, seemingly including BMW. The company did a lot of experimenting in and around the dirt back in the 2000s, seemingly trying to expand its dominance from the full-size boxer GS down to any other even slightly adjacent segment. BMW is still trying this to this day, only without weird experiments like the G650 line. 

The G650 line included two more offroad-focused bikes, and then the G650 Xmoto — this thing that looks a little too refined to be a supermoto, but a little too awkward to be anything else. These didn't exactly sell like gangbusters, and it's not hard to see why. With a couple decades of depreciation, though, this could be a wildly fun bike for the price. $1,500 gets you plenty of torque, most of the original body panels, and no key. The seller is adamant that the bike is NOT STOLEN, though. 

The newer Suzuki Jimny is a more aggressive, more traditionally off-roady style, but there's something I really love about these older cars. Not just that they can be legally imported to the U.S., now, but I like their lack of pretension. They're not the world's most capable off-roaders, so why do they have to look like they are? Why can't they just be cute little SUVs that happen to be four-wheel-drive?

I like these smooth edges, these rounded corners, these big, enthusiastic eyes. The roof rack is the entire length of the roof! This little guy is adorable, and I love him. You should love him too, to the tune of 4,800 United States American dollars. Look at how cool the seats are! I need to know that he's going to a good, Jalop home, so let me know when you buy this little guy. Send photos. Take good care of him. 

I have a bit of a bone to pick with Daihatsu in regard to this Naked. Primarily, that this car is not by any stretch of the imagination actually naked. Sure, there's some texture on the doors to approximate an inner structure. Yes, there are exposed bolts keeping some of the body panels on. But is that really naked?

We live in a world of Jeeps with skeletal half-doors, of Broncos with exposed support structures under their roofs. We live in a world of Ariel Atoms and Nomads, for god's sake! We know the structure underneath this Naked's skin isn't this perfect square, yet the body panels alter its shape in order to meet those kei car dimensions. What is that, if not clothing, if not shapewear? If someone buys this and strips off the body panels, removes the hood and bumpers, and swaps the doors for something made from bent tubing, then it'll be truly naked. 

Have Crown Vic Police Interceptor prices bottomed out? Have they gone up? I seem to remember these going for around $1,500, but now I'm not finding much below the $2,000 mark around here. This one isn't even a particularly spectacular example, with its off-color body panel and scuffs, yet it's going for $2,200.

I wouldn't want it to be better, though. A Crown Vic should be a little beat-up, it should be rough enough that it can't possibly be an actual active cop car. Do you want to be forever stuck in traffic that's going the speed limit out of fear of getting pulled over by you? No, you don't. You need a Crown Vic so visibly poorly-maintained that no overfunded local police department could possibly be responsible for its care. You want this specific Crown Vic, because it's the ideal former cop car. 

I don't need to sell you on this, right? It's a manual NB Miata for $3,000. Moving on. 

Porsche cars are kept too nice. They're too valued, too expensive, too preserved. But there's an exception, a car that's very cool but not nearly as valued as the rest: The Porsche 944. Look at this yellow one, beat to hell for five grand. If you could even manage to find a 964 in this shape, if there are any left that haven't been converted into 30 billion dollar Singer machines, it would still cost a hundred grand because of the potential. 

The 944, by contrast, is cheap enough that you can actually use one. You don't need to store a 944 in a climate-controlled garage and trade it endlessly between rich guys like an overvalued painting. This is no Bring A Trailer money-laundering operation, this is an actual car. You should get this 944 and actually drive it, and experience something none of those 964 owners do: A Porsche. 

Speaking of beat up cars made cooler for it, how about this Karmann Ghia? Have you ever seen one of these with fenders this wide? With this many lights up front? With a bull bar like this? There's clearly a very interesting build going on here, and the ad gives absolutely zero details about it.

The ad, in its entirety, reads: "Unique less than 300 miles on the new engine." That's it, that's all you get. No information on the lift, nothing about the exhaust, nothing about the new engine. You don't even get a second photo of the car. Are you intrigued? Do you want to know more? Sounds like you need to drop six grand and learn the car's intricacies for yourself. Buying someone else's project with no information is always a good idea. It'll certainly make a good story, at least, when you're forced to reverse-engineer some of these mods.