Welcome to This Week on Hagerty Marketplace, a recurring recap of the previous week’s most noteworthy cars and significant sales from the Hagerty Marketplace online auctions.
If there’s one thing that most enthusiasts admire, it’s the ability to choose your own gear and row through a manual transmission to make it happen. Adding in the ability to remove the roof for open-air motoring, and you might have one of the best classic cars on the planet! This week, we share three different ways to get your fix of manual transmissions and convertible tops, with a unique number of gears for each vehicle.
Can we tempt you with a ragtop Buick with that classic muscle car feel, directly connected to a four-speed manual? How about a Pontiac roadster with a five-speed overdrive? Or a Porsche 911 cabrio with that effortless six-speed? There is no wrong answer, so have a look at all three and chime in with your favorite in the comments.
Sold For $35,578
Very few experiences in this world can match the purity of a large displacement V-8 engine managed by a 4-speed manual transmission with a cue-ball shift knob. Add the uniqueness of a drop-top configuration, finished in Ivory Gold Mist, sporting the luxury touches of a Buick, and you have something truly special. This is one of 2,454 GS 400 Convertibles produced in 1968, and it’s been restored to a standard worthy of use on the 2025 Hot Rod Power Tour.
Recent servicing and restoration work includes new tires, wheel bearings, rocker arms, a reconditioned cooling system, and a rebuilt carburetor. A new exhaust with Flowmaster mufflers sounds incredible, while a front disc brake conversion ensures the GS400 is more usable at modern speeds on modern highways. And this is indeed a driver-quality restoration, as the auction includes an addendum with its modest cosmetic flaws. It adds up to a sale price between #2 and #3 condition, suggesting this rare Buick muscle car was a good deal for a fantastic car.
Sold For $17,325
While possessing half the cylinder count of the roofless Buick, this Pontiac Solstice has an extra forward gear and a roadster chassis with a tuned suspension that’ll eagerly consume any twisty road in front of it. This example sports a mere 5,652 miles on its odometer, but loses a little originality with a Magnaflow cat-back exhaust system and a pair of OEM leather seats. The factory cloth seats are included with the sale, and that’s likely to be valuable in the future, as this Solstice appears to be worthy of placement in a museum.
There is plenty of upside for this deal, as the under-$18K sale price is significantly lower than a #1 condition Pontiac Solstice ($33,500) trades for according to Hagerty Valuation data. While there aren’t many cars from the 2000s that deserve the charmed life of a well-preserved collector car, this five-speed turbocharged Pontiac might be one of them. Find a factory cat-back exhaust system to go with the stock cloth seats, and this forgotten performance ride might just soar in value the next time it comes up for sale.
Sold For $27,553
There’s something to be said about a Porsche cabriolet with a manual transmission, but the real value in this 996-gen Porsche 911 comes from its reams of service history included in the sale. Buying a 26-year-old sports car with over 60,000 miles can turn into a maintenance quandary, but the records of repairs on this black over tan ragtop inspire more confidence. And bidding was strong, suggesting that the care this Porsche received over the years was enough to move the needle in the seller’s favor.
A Porsche 911 in (#3) overall good condition should be about $6,000 less than this car’s sale price, but it’s a safe bet that the allure of a 6-speed manual and all that service history was a premium worth paying for the winning bidder. There is no record of the infamous IMS bearing being addressed, and there are cosmetic imperfections sprinkled around the vehicle, but it’s hard to get this much performance and prestige for the price of a new Toyota Camry anywhere else.
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