Here’s your chance to get, if not the, one of the rarest and most beautiful BMWs ever made and which ironically, as Jalopnik’s Raphael Orlove put it, wasn’t even really a BMW.
It’s the BMW-Glas 3000 V8 Fastback by Frua and it’s heading to RM Sotherby’s Villa Erba sale that will take place on the shores of Lake Como, Italy, on May 23, 2015.
Glas was a small and independent German carmaker with humble beginnings that was mostly known for its tiny and cute Goggomobil before it started building the 1300GT coupe in 1964 and later the 1700GT penned by famed Italian designer and coach-builder Pietro Frua who was responsible for the Maserati A6G and is even said to had a hand in the styling of the Volvo P1800.
After running into some financial troubles, Glas was acquired by BMW in September of 1966, with the Bavarian carmaker re-branding the firm’s newly developed 3000 V8 coupe, which was often referred to as the “Glaserati” due to the styling similarities to Frua’s Maserati Quattroporte, as a BMW-Glas model. Only 418 BMW-Glas 3000 V8 coupes are believed to have been produced between September of 1967 and May of 1968.
Along with the regular production models, Frua also designed a number of experimental prototypes including the one-off BMW-Glas 3000 V8 Fastback you see pictured here and which was the only 3000 V8 model to sport BMW’s double kidney grille. It made its debut at the 1967 Frankfurt Motor Show and at the time, it was thought that it could enter series-production as a BMW model, but the Bavarians abandoned the idea and concentrated on the E6 3.0 CS.
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