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What It’s Like to Own a Unicorn Car Built with Unobtainium Parts
The snapping sound that brittle, old plastic makes is like the automotive interior equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. It’s painful, especially since you know that little chunk of plastic that survived several decades is now probably categorized as “No Longer Available” in every parts catalog you’ll ever find.
What to do next is a tricky dilemma for the owner of any older car. It’s especially nerve-wracking when the part that broke was attached to a boxy Japanese-designed SUV assembled by an Italian coachbuilder in Italy.
Uh, what?
Oh, you’re not familiar with the Bertone Freeclimber? You’re not alone, at least unless you’ve had time to read the story about how I accidentally bought a silver and gray one with a light green pinstripe—and, after the first five minutes of my ownership, a freshly broken interior door handle.
Oh, snap, indeed!
Nobody Knows What It Is
The first real trip I took in my Freeclimber after snapping the door handle was to have a diesel emissions test performed to make the vehicle legal for road use here in Denver. In Colorado counties where testing is required, gasoline cars go to state-run facilities, while diesel vehicles, I learned, go to independently-run facilities. The one I picked after a quick search had good reviews online and lots of photos of lifted heavy-duty trucks wearing bright chrome wheels.
I called the shop to make an appointment. The man on the other side of the line was cordial, but he had no idea what to make of the Freeclimber.
“So it’s a mini truck, then?”
“No.”
“A kei van?”
“No.”
“And you say it has a BMW engine?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm. Well, as long as you have the state-issued form that tells me what to test, we’ll make it happen.”
Luckily, the Freeclimber’s previous owner kept all the paperwork necessary, so I felt reasonably prepared for testing day. It was about 40 degrees but sunny, so I let the Freeclimber idle for quite some time and then drove the 10 or so miles to the facility. By the time I got there, its straight-six BMW turbodiesel was producing smooth and perfectly adequate torque. If anything, I felt the Freeclimber would be more limited by its archaic leaf-sprung suspension than its lack of power. It kept up with traffic reasonably well.
At the facility, the tester didn’t even bat an eyelash. Clearly, he’d seen other unusual imported vehicles. He did tell me that I was lucky the Freeclimber was a 1990 model, since he only had to perform an exhaust opacity test. I went to the waiting room, where a wall-mounted TV was blaring the reality series “Diesel Brothers.” Appropriate.
The Freeclimber passed the opacity test, I soon learned. As I was buckling up to leave, a man who was at the facility to have his Jetta TDI tested tapped on my window.
“Is this… a BMW?” he asked, pointing at the “Powered by BMW td6” badges on the hood that, frankly, were part of the reason I bought the Freeclimber in the first place. They’re so quirky.
“No, it’s kind of like a Daihatsu, except it was made in Italy,” I replied, realizing about halfway through my answer that I would need to hone my elevator pitch.
The Jetta driver nodded, clearly no better informed now than he was a few moments earlier.
Even I Don’t Really Know What It Is
When I bought the Freeclimber, Advance Auto Parts was liquidating inventory at a number of soon-to-be-shuttered locations across the country. I happened across a list of doomed local branches (and by that I mean I snuck a photo of the list while a clerk wasn’t looking). Like any bargain hunter, I made plans to visit the half-dozen or so nearby to grab parts for my cars. For most of my fleet, this was easy. Anyone behind the counter will know what a Jeep Cherokee is, and the savvier ones will understand that a BMW 2002 is not, in fact, a 2002 BMW.
But the Freeclimber? That took some planning ahead, otherwise I knew I’d be wasting a clerk’s time by having them type in the word “Bertone.” At best, the list might pull up the last few years of Fiat X1/9 models, which were sold here as Bertones after Fiat pulled out of the U.S. market.
I started to build what has to be the world’s first Daihatsu genealogy chart, though unfortunately there is no Ancestry.com equivalent for the automotive industry. The Freeclimber’s basic underpinnings, I initially assumed, were probably not much different than the Daihatsu Rocky that was sold here in the late 1980s. Or, maybe not. I went down several Japanese, Italian, Spanish, and German Internet rabbit holes and discovered that the Freeclimber had more in common with a circa-1984 Daihatsu Rugger, which was, confusingly, sold as the Daihatsu Rocky in most markets. But the Rocky sold in Spain was not the same as the American-market Rocky.
My chart got out of control the longer I dove into the abyss that is the Internet.
I found a meticulously restored Daihatsu Taft—more or less the same vehicle, maybe—in Jakarta, and I briefly Googled “How to import a car from Indonesia,” before realizing that I do not, under any circumstances, need two Daihatsu vehicles in my life. I really don’t need one, even though it has a cool Powered by BMW td6 badge.
I also nearly bought what I soon learned was a digital copy of a period press photo showing what very well may have been my Freeclimber. Did I really need that? I did not.
A Freeclimber group on Facebook proved to be somewhat useful, though here, too, I harnessed the power of Google Translate. Right-click, “Translate to English” became such a default move that I found myself attempting to translate pages that were already in English.
Eventually, I assembled a list of off-the-shelf consumables that I thought the Freeclimber might need, including shock absorbers, anti-roll bar bushings, and filters. For the most part, I cross-referenced both the global and American-market Rocky models, hoping that Daihatsu lacked the resources to substantially re-engineer the suspension. There were almost no useful resources for the Freeclimber, and the parts on my example that looked in need of replacement lacked legible parts numbers. I leveraged Rock Auto, PartsSouq, and even eBay, finding numerous discrepancies. The fact that Daihatsu—and Bertone, let’s not forget—built versions of this basic vehicle over the course of three decades undoubtedly meant a lot of overlap. Still, I had a list of parts that may or may not work, and Advance Auto was having a heck of a clearance sale.
I made an afternoon out of shopping, and eventually located a surprising—and probably suspect—number of seemingly compatible replacement parts. Using the Internet, I soon filled in the gaps with an extra shock absorber and bushing since Advance didn’t have complete sets on clearance.
And then there was that pesky broken door handle. A quick eBay search revealed dozens of $30-or-less new interior door handle kits located in Indonesia. I found the cheapest set and clicked Buy-It-Now before sending a non-refundable payment across the globe.
Ironically, the new, seemingly high-quality door handles arrived just as I was writing this. They’re not the right color, but a mismatched handle is better than none at all, right?
And now I realize that I need to locate a Bertone wheel center cap. Back into the abyss I go.
