Zimmer and the Neoclassic Car Brands

The makers came in two kinds. Some built complete cars and sold them through dealers, as Excalibur, Clénet, Stutz, Zimmer and Phillips did; others sold bodies and kits for buyers to finish. Hagerty, looking back in 2014, summed up the buyers as "Hollywood elite, pop singers, pro athletes and anyone else craving the spotlight".

The early 1980s were hard on them. In July 1982 Automotive News surveyed nearly 300 firms in what it called the "Custom Market" and found them squeezed by recession and interest rates; one consultant expected "a good percentage of the specialty makers" to die. Zimmer was the exception. A Dania dealer already ranked it with Excalibur and Clénet as the top three in 1981, and in June 1982 Automotive News reported that, at its own rate, it had passed both. In 2012 the Antique Automobile Club of America opened its Second Generation class for collector cars, which made Excaliburs, Clénets and Zimmers eligible for its awards.⁠source 1​source 2​source 3​source 4​source 5

Stevens's company built Excaliburs in Milwaukee and later West Allis, Wisconsin, from 1964 or 1965 into the 1990s: at first on Studebakers, then on a frame of its own with Chevrolet V8s and Corvette suspension, always in fibreglass. Its prices rose from about $6,000 or $7,250 in 1965 (Automobile and Hagerty differ) to $29,000 for a Series III phaeton in 1979, and to $59,800 for the Series V phaeton and $62,800 for the roadster when the Series V came in, in June 1985. It built 367 cars in 1979, Hagerty wrote, and it told Automotive News it expected 250 in 1982; in 1985 it put its full production level at some 240 a year. The founder's family sold it in 1986, and it went through bankruptcy and a rescue led by its dealers. Its lifetime total is given as 3,268 by the holder of its factory records, though other accounts give more, and its end as 1995 or 1997.⁠source 1​source 2​source 3​source 6​source 7

Alain Clénet, a French-trained designer who had worked for AMC, showed his first roadster at Los Angeles in 1976 and built it at Santa Barbara, then Goleta, California. What it was built on, the sources dispute: Automobile (2016) says new Lincoln Continental Mark V coupés with their frames shortened, Hagerty (2014) a Mercury Cougar chassis; both agree on an MG Midget's cabin. A Series I cost $27,000 or $27,500 in 1977 and over $65,000 by 1979, and the two-seat Series III Asha $78,500 at its launch in November 1981. In 1982 Automotive News called Clénets "$80,000-range cars", priced "well above its main competition, the Excalibur". The plant was padlocked in July 1982 after a quarrel with the company's backer, and the name passed to new owners. Rod Stewart, Wayne Newton and Ford's design chief Gene Bordinat had Clénets.⁠source 1​source 2​source 8​source 9​source 10​source 3

The revived Stutz of the 1970s was Virgil Exner's design: the Blackhawk, a coupé built from 1970 or 1971 on Pontiac Grand Prix and later General Motors running gear, with bodies built in Italy, and later a four-door, the IV-Porte. It was a car for celebrities: Elvis Presley, Automobile wrote, "outdueled Frank Sinatra for example No. 1". No price list of the time was read.⁠source 2​source 11

South Florida had more neoclassic makers than anywhere but California. Classic Motor Carriages of Miami made kits and replica bodies, and also the Classic Tiffany, a closed car that, Hagerty wrote, "applied the Zimmer formula but used the Mercury Cougar … instead of a Mustang"; it sold from $33,000. Automobile dates the Tiffany from 1982 and Hagerty from 1984, and its output is given variously; the Florida attorney general sued the company in 1994, and it shut in 1999. Of all the neoclassics it is the easiest to take for a Zimmer.

Phillips Motor Car Corp. built the Berlina in Pompano Beach itself, Zimmer's own town: a coupé in the style of the Mercedes 540K on a new Chevrolet Corvette, its frame lengthened by 559 mm (22 in), keeping the Corvette's windscreen (windshield) and T-top. Automotive News reported "Berlina Coupe No. 100" built in November 1981, with production to be limited to 250. A later encyclopedia called it a kit car; the 1981 report describes a hand-made one.⁠source 1​source 2​source 12​source 13​source 14

Britain had its own neoclassic: the Panther De Ville of 1974, a four-door saloon (sedan) on Jaguar running gear from Panther Westwinds of Surrey, of which about 60 were made. It is the car Cruella de Vil drives in Disney's 101 Dalmatians of 1996, and Notable Zimmers deals with the story that she drove a Zimmer.⁠source 15​source 16​source 17

Many more came and went. Among them were the Sceptre and the Gatsby in California, the Corsair kits of El Cajon, the MATCO Diamante on a Cadillac chassis, the Johnson Presidential roadster of Fort Lauderdale, and Elite Heritage Motors of Wisconsin, whose Duesenberg II replicas sold for "$100,000-and-up" in 1982, two years of orders ahead.⁠source 18​source 3​source 1

The two were tied from the start: Paul Zimmer told Forbes that the stir caused by an Excalibur roadster, which he bought for $22,000 in 1976, was what set him on the Golden Spirit. SFGate called them, in 2006, "the giants of the American neoclassic world".

Art Zimmer said in 2006 that the owner of the Excalibur name had tried to sell him its rights too: "My name's not Excalibur."⁠source 19​source 5​source 20​source 4​source 1​source 6​source 7​source 21​source 17

The Japanese Mitsuoka Le-Seyde, a two-door of about 1990 on a Nissan Silvia with a lengthened nose, looks so much like a small Golden Spirit that Curbside Classic in 2011 headed its piece "The Compact Zimmer", and Hagerty UK in 2023 thought it "perhaps influenced as much by Zimmer as any pre-war cars". That is the writers' opinion: no statement by Mitsuoka naming the Zimmer has been found, and the resemblance is all that links them.⁠source 22​source 23

The QuickSilver was not set against neoclassics at all. Venture, in July 1986, put it among the two-seaters from Fiat, Jaguar, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, and above all against the two that Detroit was about to launch: Cadillac's Allanté, announced at $45,000, and Chrysler's two-seater built with Maserati, at nearly $30,000. The first Allantés left the line in January 1987 at $54,700; Chrysler's TC by Maserati reached the market only in 1989, after the QuickSilver had gone, at about $33,000. Zimmer preferred to compare its car with the two-seat Thunderbird of the 1950s, and Cadillac's Charles Gibson told Venture why the big makers stayed out of so small a market: "We can't afford to go into a market smaller than 2,000 cars. It's not economical for us."⁠source 24​source 25​source 26​source 27​source 28​source 20​source 29