And so in response to a question about these cars I went and actually found the Canary Island pictures!! Miracles will never cease??!!
These are from 1977 on the Island of Tenerife. Note the Porsche Crest on this car as opposed to the VW one. I suspect that it was a private owner who removed the VW logo and added a Porsche crest. Badge engineering/wishful thinking at it’s finest! But who knows?? Apparently 65 of these were exported from Brazil to the Canary Islands. And/or perhaps this car was a harbinger of things to come….
On this car the original hard panel between the lights has been blacked out as well as the section in the front of the hood. Looks quite good.
However:…. remind anyone of anything???
The car (SP2) may well have been (and to my eye certainly was) inspiration for the Porsche (VW/Audi) 924. You can see the family resemblance below (with even some 944/928 ish elements).
Digging a bit on the internet:
The person in Brazil responsible for the SP2 ( Dr. Rudolf Leiding ) who had autonomy to develop the car in Brazil. By 1971 he had returned to Europe and was the head of VW in Germany. The EA425 was intended to be a Volkwagen car being developed at VW’s request by Porsche for VW production using an Audi motor and marketed by Audi and/or VW (VW was the parent company of Audi at the time). When VW decided not to go ahead with production, Porsche bought the rights to the design and produced it themselves (at a VW plant), still using the Audi motor.
This link gives a bit more food for thought
http://924er.blogspot.ca/2011/07/from-volkswagen-sp2-to-porsche-924.html
And a bit about Leiding.
http://www.vwsp2.ch/joomla31/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56&Itemid=238&lang=en
And more than you ever wanted to know about the SP2. Wander around on this site under history to see pretty much the whole SP2 story.
http://vwsp2.ch/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=234&lang=en
You can find out lots about the EA425 design, but I could not find any articles that directly linked it to the SP2. However, given it’s executive lineage and the visual resemblance, the connection between the SP2 and the 924 seems very hard to deny!