Yes, this bonkers creation is a Miata – I think an NB? – that’s wearing the dead skin of a Dauphine, sort of an automotive version of the Mesoamerican god Xipe Totec, who was always portrayed wearing someone else’s flayed skin. Like Xipe Totec, this combination is likely to conjure up feelings of alarm, maybe terror, but in this case the fun variety instead of the scary-god variety. It’s incredible how well the Dauphine’s wheelbase aligns with a Miata, especially when you consider the Dauphine was a four-door family car. In its new role as a Miata body, you drive this Dauphine from the rear seat, as the dash consumes most of the front passenger area of the car. A Dauphine is rear-engined, so air intake for the Miata’s significantly more potent (think a conservative 116 hp or so compared to 32 hp) engine comes through the below-the-bumper hole that once housed the Dauphine’s spare tire. I bet this thing is an absolute blast to drive, and I bet the experience of driving from that back seat is surreal, at the very least. Next time I see this thing I’ll leave a note and maybe we can do a little video about this delightful lump of raw bonkersism. I have tremendous respect for quirky cars that are daily driven and as a result not necessarily kept in showroom condition, but this is too much deterioration. Back in the 1960s, there was a guy in Southern California who had a Dauphine with a Corvette engine where the rear seat would have been. I don’t remember now what he used for a transmission/diff, but am pretty sure it wasn’t the stock Renault unit. Always wanted to see him drag race the guy who built an OG Mini with a Cadillac engine stuffed (longitudinally) under the hood at roughly the same time. The car’s pretty cool too. This Dauphine was owned by the late James A. Oster (J.A.OSTER), it was rotted and pulled out of a pond in eastern NC and was purchased to be made into furniture. I moved from Texas to NC and I was losing my passion for cars and was on the verge of selling everything… The desire to create was fading, but like all car people I found myself on Facebook marketplace looking at odd cars. This Renault Dauphine popped up and I immediately saved it. I waited for my wife to come home and I showed it to her, I told her that I think it was the same wheelbase as a Miata. Then professed how cool it would be to put this body on a Miata. Well, 94.5 inches was the golden number, but by the time I contacted the seller… The car was sold. Determined to have it, I asked if he had the buyers contact information. He informed me that the buyer also had another one that he was possibly looking to sell. I reached out to the buyer and told him I was looking to buy the car. He was very nice to inform me that he did not believe the car could be saved. I drove up to his house to pick up the “unsalvageable” car, and what is sitting there? A Henny Kilowatt. I took some photos of the Henny and scooped the body up. Later I would go back to take more pictures of the Henny to facilitate the sale of it to a guy in California. Over a year without telling anyone I put the car together in my backyard. The goal was to create something with no rules. Owning a Skyline GTR becomes taxing, people want you to make what they want. It always created the wrong crowd. After going out a few times with this car, I realized the crowd it made was the right people. The dreamers, the creators, the people who just want something different. In a world of copycats… Be different… P.S. My first video of this car on IG, I profess that I should probably go put this car back in the pond it was found in. I am glad I didn’t. Dude, Tesla swap that shit! There used to be a 90’s Camry wagon around here on a lifted Hilux chassis. Seeing it in traffic would bust my brain for a second as it would assume it was a Camry on a car trailer until you saw it move independent of the other vehicles around it!
