Auto Sun & Air Cabriolet

I would say different owner, the number plates have been changed.

The ad reads "runs well, needs new battery.good tires and 3 months rego" (you can see the whole ad here). It was for sale around this time last year, I would guess that the current owner bought it then with nearly a full years registration, so theres close to $1000 in it's value, and now it's nearly out of rego again, won't start and either he doesn't know why or doesn't want to pay to fix it. It's still great value though, if it wasn't four hours away I'd be tempted to go and have a look..

 

Another one found, this one for sale in South Australia.

Note that this one is missing the vents on the C-pillars, some have them some don't. I thought maybe it was a facelift/pre-facelift thing, but seems to be random. Original purchasers choice, perhaps. This is also the first one I've seen with the factory rear spoiler, note the "Cabriolet" decal on the left side of it.

 

Another one. Good shots of how they cut the roof up. I would guess that they started with cars that already had a factory sunroof panel?

 

Couple more. I found this one on Celispeed.com:



..and here's the one that GazModz spotted earlier this year in SA. I'm quite jealous actually, I've never seen one in the wild

 

Found a couple more Autosun cars up for sale;

This one in Hobart for $2000:



and this one in SA for $1200

 

Found another one. Check out the rear quarter window, you can just make out the sticker that says "Cabriolet by Autosun"

 

Boy, it's been a long time since I updated this thread. I keep my eyes peeled for these Autosun cars, I'd very much like to own one some day. Here's a few recent finds:

Heres another one with the factory side skirts. Looks like it's got the rear skirt as well, but not the bootlid spoiler.



This one popped up on Gumtree in a wrecking yard advertised as being parted out :sad The ad disappeared after a few days though, I sure hope someone saved the whole car



Heres one with some horrible graphics (well... it WAS the 1980's I suppose....). Note the rear roof section has been cheaply repaired with press-studs at some point.



Nothing too exciting, just a nice clean white one



This one needs a little TLC, but the advert was extremely interesting for two reasons. For one it included the build number of the car - this one is #22:



The second interesting thing about the ad for that car was that it included the only picture I've found so far of the interior headlining:



And finally, I've found a couple of pictures of the cover of the Auto Sun & Air brochure for the car. This one in particular is interesting because it has the recommended retail price of the car hand-written on it: $36,692. To give you some perspective on that, in 1987 you could have bought TWO base model family sedans for $36k...

 

Hi Steve,

We never got the factory convertible. These cars are unique to Australia, they were converted when brand new by a company called Auto Sun & Air, which was a subsiduary of one of the biggest Toyota dealers in Australia. They were sold as a dealer option all over the country. I haven't found much literature on them either, just the cover of the brochure and a tiny snippet out of a newspaper. I'm going to start buying up local car magazines from 1985 to 89 and see if there was ever a review or any advertising for them.

 

Another Autosun car has popped up for sale. The ad claims it's a one-owner car. They're asking $1650. No build number given, but I make it the 18th different car I've found.

http://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/burleigh-heads/cars-vans-utes/1988-toyota-celica-coupe/1130061164

 

Vic - they were all FE motors. The Australian spec 162's were called SX (GE motor, rear discs) and ST (FE motor, rear drums, and some other cost savings like manual windows, no reach adjustment on the steering column, vinyl door car inserts instead of cloth, vinyl headlining instead of velour, poly steering wheel and gearknob instead of leather, no rear spoiler). For some reason we only got the coupes in ST trim, while you could get a hatch with either

 

There's a pic of this car earlier in the thread (well, there WAS, until Photobucket decided to be dicks and blocked all the links), but it's popped up for sale now so here are some better pics. The guy is asking $2k, and says he spent $2k fixing the roof a couple years ago. Unfortunately (for me) its in South Australia, otherwise it would probably be in my driveway by now...

 

I very much doubt you would have, they were converted by Auto Sun & Air here in my home town of Sydney and I've only ever seen one of them on the road. I have no idea how many were actually produced, but in the 5 years that I've been looking out for them I've only found pictures of 19 different cars. I doubt more than 30 or 40 would have been built, they were quite expensive for the time - $35k in late 1980s dollars.

There was a mob called Griffith in the US who did a similar job on the RA40 coupe in the 70's and called them the Sunchaser but I've never seen anything else quite like it in the ST162.