Auburn Replica 1936 images

Real 1936 Auburn Speedster Boattails stopped rolling off the line decades before this replica was built in 1978, making it a resurrection rather than a survivor. Underneath that Art Deco bodywork sits a Ford 351 Windsor V8, part of a replica boom that started with the 1963 Excalibur and let 1970s buyers relive pre-war glamour without pre-war reliability headaches. These cars even found Hollywood fame, starring in 1990’s Dick Tracy.

Auburn 1936 351 CID Windsor V8 3 Speed Automatic –built 1978

MCF thanks Gateway Classic Cars for the images provided here.

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Nobody was building real 1936 Auburn Speedster Boattails by the late 1970s — the company folded decades earlier — so when a car like this one shows up wearing that unmistakable pointed tail and full-length fenders, it’s not a survivor, it’s a resurrection. Underneath that Art Deco bodywork sits a Ford 351 Windsor V8 and a 3-speed automatic, a combination no Auburn engineer from the 1930s ever would have recognized but plenty of hot rodders in the late ’70s absolutely would have approved of. Built in 1978, this replica is part of a whole cottage industry that sprang up to bring pre-war glamour back to American roads without the pre-war reliability problems. So how did an entire genre of these cars come to exist in the first place?

The Replica Boom Nobody Saw Coming

The replica movement that produced cars like this one traces back to 1963, when the Excalibur — styled after the Mercedes-Benz SSK — kicked off a wave of small manufacturers building fiberglass-bodied tributes to pre-war classics on modern American chassis and drivetrains. Auburn and Cord replicas followed close behind, giving buyers who couldn’t afford, or couldn’t find, an original 852 Speedster Boattail a way to get that same swoopy, fendered silhouette without hunting down a 40-plus-year-old straight-eight.

Why a Windsor V8 Makes More Sense Than It Sounds

Dropping a Ford 351 Windsor into an Auburn-styled body might sound like sacrilege to a purist, but it’s exactly what made these replicas usable, drivable cars instead of museum pieces. Original Auburn 852s ran a supercharged Lycoming straight-eight that’s nearly impossible to service today; a 351 Windsor paired with a 3-speed automatic gave builders parts-store reliability and real power, all wrapped in bodywork that still turns heads at every stoplight the way the original did back in 1935.

A Genuine Piece of Hollywood History

These replicas earned a level of fame the originals never quite matched — an Auburn Speedster replica played the hero car in 1990’s Dick Tracy alongside Warren Beatty and Madonna, and similar replicas turned up on Remington Steele throughout the 1980s. That kind of screen time cemented the boattail Speedster silhouette in pop culture even as most Americans had no idea the real 852 had gone out of production decades before Dick Tracy ever hit theaters.

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