We perused Craigslist today and found this ad for a bizarre Comanche. It’s a 1987 Jeep Comanche, heavily modified to resemble…something like a Jurassic Park/Death Race-mobile, we guess? In any case, it deserves to be made fun of.
Straight out of Mapleton, Illinois, this yellow-green metal monstrosity hopes to be sold for $6,999. We can’t imagine who would want it, short of Dr. Frankenstein or perhaps Ozzy Ozborne–the latter would at least have the good sense to mesh the color choice and hellish theme together with black paint. But we digress.
This Comanche was, at one point, a simple pickup conversion of the Cherokee, manufactured from 1985 to 1992. The poor Jeep fell into the wrong hands aesthetically, but mechanically, it’s done very well for itself, with a Chevy 383 installed to deliver 450 hp and 500 lb/ft of torque. The 700R4 trannie, a mainstay of GM cars equipped with V8s for much of the ’80s, could feasibly handle any abuse the 383 dishes out.
But for the love of God, it can’t help any of the ghastly “artistic choices” made on the vehicle: the yellow-green paint scheme clashes so strongly with the “death” theme of the car–skulls and skeletons and bones adorn everything from the rear fenders to the head rest–that it becomes hard to picture how this car was planned out in the first place.
The owner claims this outrageous Jeep is “lightweight”; while that may be the case versus a factory Comanche, we can’t help but wonder how much more could have been saved had the owner not welded on shaped metal all over the damn thing.
No aspect of this car was spared of his wrath, not even the interior, with the hacked up steering wheel resembling the controls of a Ninja Turtles passenger plane. A none-too-comfortable, Sunday School-style plastic chair was fashioned into a passenger seat. It doesn’t appear to accommodate people with legs, seeing as the footwell was raised to waist-level, presumably to make way for the .50 calibur machine guns that emerge from where the air conditioner used to be.
The owner concludes by saying the Comanche is “definitely a head turner and one of a kind.” True as that may be, it’s for all the wrong reasons. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to get prepared for the next adventure…