A 1959 Studebaker Lark VI Deluxe wagon, finished in a shade called Tahiti Coral, is currently crossing the auction block on Bring a Trailer. The bid closes May 27. It is, without exaggeration, the most cheerful thing on four wheels you’ll see this year.
That color alone would be enough to stop traffic. It’s the pink of a 1950s bathroom tile, the kind of hue Detroit used to throw around with abandon before the entire auto industry collectively decided that white, black, and seventeen shades of gray were the only acceptable palette. Try configuring a new car today in anything remotely this bold.
Even Mazda gates its best Miata colors behind limited-edition trims. An Audi configurator is basically a funeral home brochure.
But this Lark isn’t just a pretty face sitting in a Napa Valley driveway waiting for Instagram likes. Somebody spent real money under the hood. The stock Champion 169-cubic-inch inline-six is still there, but it’s been seriously massaged — high-compression head, Offenhauser dual intake manifold, twin carburetors, ported and polished internals, overbore pistons, and ceramic-coated headers.
No dyno numbers are listed, but the factory rating was 90 to 100 horsepower, and this engine is clearly making considerably more than that.
Here’s where the math gets interesting. A ’59 Lark wagon weighs roughly what a current Honda Civic does. Pair that with a three-speed manual column shifter and an overbuilt six that Studebaker originally engineered with truck-duty margins, and you’ve got a car that will cruise at highway speeds without breaking a sweat.
It won’t embarrass you merging onto I-29, and it will absolutely embarrass every crossover in the Target parking lot on style points alone.
The Lark itself was a fascinating chapter in Studebaker’s long, losing fight for survival. Introduced for 1959 as a compact alternative to Detroit’s bloated land yachts, it was an immediate sales hit — briefly. It bought the South Bend automaker a few more years of life before the end came in 1966.
The wagon variant was the practical one, the family hauler, the workhorse. Finding one this clean, this modified, and this unapologetically pink is genuinely rare.
The listing’s Napa Valley location practically writes its own road-trip screenplay. Fly in, win the auction, load the cargo area with cases of Pinot Noir, and drive it home across the country. You’d collect more smiles and thumbs-up per mile than any six-figure sports car could manage.
There’s a quiet rebellion happening in the collector car world. The seven-figure muscle car auctions get the headlines, but cars like this Lark — weird, wonderful, deeply personal choices — are where the real enthusiasm lives. Nobody buys a pink Studebaker wagon to flip it.
You buy it because you’re tired of the sameness, tired of the algorithms that told every automaker that consumers want anonymity on wheels.
Studebaker couldn’t survive by being different. But sixty-seven years later, that difference is exactly the point. The gray SUVs will depreciate into oblivion, and this Lark will only get more interesting with age.
The auction ends Tuesday. Bring your sense of humor and your checkbook.
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