Regular readers will know that besides our love of everyday classics, here at ViaRETRO we’re also fond of unusual or quirky classics – it doesn’t need to be a Ferrari, Lamborghini or Porsche, fabulous as most of them are, to attract our attention, and this week’s Prime Find is a perfect example of what we mean.
NSU is one of the oldest names in motor manufacturing, having been founded in 1873 when the company began producing knitting machines. In 1886 they branched out into making bicycles, including penny farthings, and by 1892, bicycles had completely replaced knitting machines, with the NSU brand name appearing around this time.
From bicycles the company moved – almost inevitably – to motorcycles in 1901 and five years later, the first car to bear the company initials rolled out of their Neckarsulm factory. However, by 1932 it was clear that the motorcar side of the business was struggling badly, and the company sold their new manufacturing plant to FIAT.
Post WW2, the company resumed bicycle and motorbike production and by 1955 NSU was the world’s biggest producer of motorbikes. Encouraged by this success, they re-entered the car production arena in 1957 with the NSU Prinz, a small rear-engined 2-door saloon, a European kei car, like Goggomobil or Isetta. These were tiny cars built for the immediate post-war austerity years.
During the 1950’s and ‘60’s the company continued to market the Prinz through to the Prinz 4 as a small saloon, gradually increasing the engine capacity and overall performance while maintaining the rear-engined layout, and by 1961 the Prinz had evolved to become a very different, larger and superior car to the original Prinz, with 1-litre, 1100cc and 1200cc versions on offer by the time production ended in 1972.
However, the model made a dramatic evolutionary jump in 1959 with the appearance of a 2-door coupé designed by Scaglione at Bertone, called the Sport Prinz.
NSU evolution…
This little coupé packed a punch that belied it’s small, rear-mounted 583cc – and later, 598cc – engine, with a claimed top speed of 160kmh, and it was mid-way through it’s decade-long production run that an even more radical version of the Prinz was unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show, the NSU Spider.
Also designed by Bertone, this open 2-seater roadster was the first production car to be powered by a Wankel rotary engine, a design which – besides becoming the cause of much schoolboy sniggering by cheerfully ignoring that the W in German is pronounced as a V – basically enabled significantly more power to be developed from a physically smaller and simpler power unit. Without going into the how – not least because I don’t understand it – a rotary engine could produce the same power as a considerably larger capacity regular engine. In the case of the NSU Spider, its 498cc unit pushed out 50bhp (later increased to 54bhp); by comparison, the 948cc engine in the first MG Midget produced just 46bhp.
Unfortunately, this exceptional performance was accompanied by equally exceptional thirst for fuel and worse, despite its lack of moving parts – just three in a two-rotor engine – reliability issues, something reflected in our Prime Find, as we’ll see shortly.
The Spider was expensive to build and was never intended to be a big seller, with just 2,375 built before manufacture ceased in 1967, with the next deployment of the Wankel engine being in the fabulous NSU Ro80, which unfortunately was so unreliable that it effectively killed NSU off as an independent company in 1969, when it was taken over by VW and merged into the Auto Union division, with the brand itself disappearing for ever with the end of Ro80 production in 1977.
Autocar magazine road tested a NSU Spider back in 1965 and gave it a fairly mixed review. They were disappointed by the noise – especially with the hood up – the sparse instrumentation, and general lack of practicality. Nevertheless they liked the gearbox, brakes and especially the car’s handling, finding it “really most enjoyable on minor roads with lots of twists and turns”. They were also impressed by its speed, and while perhaps not exactly over-praising the Spider, looked forward to further development of the car’s revolutionary engine.
Photos from Autocar
The NSU Spider had a number of contemporary rivals – the aforementioned MG Midget and its badge-engineered Austin Healey Sprite cousin, which were pretty much half the price of the NSU, and the roadster versions of Honda’s S600 and S800, probably the cars that most closely matched the free-revving ability of the Prinz Spider. FIAT’s very pretty 850 Spider – also by Bertone but this time from the pen of Giugiaro – was another strong contender.
Slightly larger alternatives would include the mini-Thunderbird Auto Union 1000Sp roadster, the elegant Renault Caravelle and VW’s stylish Karmann Ghia – the last two also being rear-engined.
The competition
So to our Prime Find, which is one of those 2,375 NSU Spiders, our car having been built in 1966 and has been with its current owner for an astonishing 54 years! The vendor is the car’s third owner after NSU themselves – for three months – and a Herr Mansbacher, and bought the car in August 1967 while living in Düsseldorf before importing it into the UK two years later. When he bought it, the car had just 15,000km under its wheels and had already had a replacement engine under warranty (the kind of cost that contributed largely to NSU’s demise).
Under the vendor’s ownership the engine was overhauled twice more, the second time at 82,000km (the odometer now reads 1,447km, so I presume is on it’s second time around.
There are a number of attractive aspects to this little roadster, depending on how you like your classics. If originality and patina are your thing, then this car has a lot of both – to be honest, a little too much for my tastes, but it can be used as is. The paintwork is pretty faded in may parts, the rubber seals worn the soft-top needs a good clean and the chrome is quite pitted. The interior however looks reasonable, and there is a substantial history file that dates back to the car’s early days.
I’ve seen just one of these pretty convertibles at a show in the last five years, so the successful bidder will certainly be buying a rarity – there are just 26 Prinz’s of all types left in the UK, so while howmanyleft.com doesn’t identify Spiders separately, it’s reasonable to assume they number in the single digits only.
This NSU comes up for sale with HandH Auctions at their Buxton Pavilion sale on July 7th, carrying an estimate range of £8,000 to £10,000. It’s difficult to know whether this represents good value or not, but there is another, fully restored, example for sale in The Netherlands for €39,500 or just under £34,000, so there is a fair bit of headroom for restoration if the next owner is so minded. Either way, this is an exceptionally uncommon car in the UK – it is of course LHD – and this auction represents a rare opportunity to acquire one. As usual, we have borrowed a number of the (very plentiful) photographs from the auctioneer’s website, and the full lot entry can be seen here.
With our Saturday instalment of Prime Find of the Week, we’re offering our services to the classic car community, by passing on our favourite classic car for sale from the week that passed. This top-tip might help a first-time-buyer to own his first classic, or it could even be the perfect motivation for a multiple-classic-car-owner to expand his garage with something different. We’ll let us inspire by anything from a cheap project to a stunning concours exotic, and hope that you will do the same.
Just remember – Any Classic is Better than No Classic! We obviously invite our readers to help prospective buyers with your views and maybe even experiences of any given model we feature. Further to that, if you stumble across a classic which you feel we ought to feature as Prime Find of the Week, then please send us a link to primefindoftheweek@viaretro.co.uk