Love ’em or hate ’em, there’s no sitting on the fence with BMW’s new giant grilles. Some people are so smitten with the look of cars like the 4-series, M3 and X7 they’ve even modified older BMW’s to match the style. By the same token, other potential BMW customers are so turned off they’re buying from rivals like Mercedes instead.
If you hate the new grilles so much you wish you could just get rid of them altogether, we’ve got just the car for you. This restored BMW 700 Luxus currently being auctioned by RM Sotheby’s doesn’t have a grille at all.
That’s right, not even the diddiest of double kidneys. This particular 700 was built in 1964, but it’s not this car’s age that explains its missing mouth. In fact BMW introduced the now iconic kidney grille back in 1933 on the 303 sedan, and it’s been a fixture on almost every car since. Except on BMWs with their engines at the back, like this 700, that is.
The 700 – BMW’s first unibody vehicle, and the car that saved it from financial ruin – was part of a wave of rear-engined European economy cars that found fame in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Others included the Renault 8, Fiat 500 and 600, and Volkswagen Beetle. Chevy even had a go at tackling these imports with the rear-engined Corvair.
Related: The Grille Of A BMW E30 3-Series Could Fit In The X7’s Glove Box
Evolved from the freakish 600, a kind of stretched BMW Isetta bubble car, but clothed in a conventional sedan or coupe body by Michelotti, the 700 was powered by a tiny 694cc air-cooled flat twin derived from BMW’s motorcycle engines. RM Sotheby’s listing gives the output of this sedan as 38 hp, although most other 700 sources seem to quote 32 hp.
Whatever it has, it’s not much, and the top speed is probably somewhere around 75mph. For fans that wanted more a decade before BMW M had been invented to deliver it, there was the 700 Sport. Twin carbs lifted output to a heady 40 hp, dropped the 0-62mph time to less than 20 seconds, and increased the top whack to 84mph. But while even that sounds quite sedentary, the little 700 was a giant killing race winner in its day, notching up multiple class wins and nabbing the 1960 German Hillclimb Championship.
If you want to get your hands on arguably the rarest BMW in America, or you’ve simply taken grille-hate to the extreme but still love the brand, get your bids in quick. The auction ends today and bidding is only at $11,500 at the time of writing.
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