Featured in two magazines and in the Hemmings 2007 Classic Car Calendar, this might well be the best compact Dodge A100 pickup on the planet.

It's no secret that I call Cars and Coffee my private hunting ground for feature vehicles for the many magazines I contribute to. Every Saturday morning more than 300 interesting cars and trucks vie for a coveted parking spot in the lot between the Ford and Mazda buildings. Several years ago I shot this eye-catching Dodge A100 and it was ultimately featured in the January 2008 issue of Cars & Parts. (It's now featured in the September issue of Hemmings Motor News as well.) Look closely at this truck and you'll see why. It's a near-perfect example of the breed of compact pickups that were the domestic response to the sales success of the wide selection of the versatile yet under-powered Volkswagen trucks that were popular in the late fifties and early sixties. Besides the Dodge A100, Ford responded with its Falcon-based Econoline while Chevrolet's initial response was the short-lived (1961 to 1964) Corvair-based Loadside pickup which featured an innovative side ramp making it exceptionally easy to load cargo.

This A100 is owned by Gary Streuder who calls Orange County, California home. It's been restored with its original green and white color scheme and makes a striking presentation, having won most of the shows in which it has been entered, including a Best of Show at the 2004 Orange County Labor Day Cruise, an event with more than 1,000 entrants. If you look close you'll see the only external modification, the wider than stock, original style wheel with dog dish hub caps. Unlike its Ford counterpart for 1965, this A100 is a V8, equipped at the factory with Dodge's 273-cubic-inch small block V8, numbers-matching Gary is happy to say. This one has been totally rebuilt and features a 625 CFM Road Demon carburetor and is mated to a column-mounted shifter rowing the three-speed synchronized manual transmission. In 1965 Dodge produced 36,535 six-cylinder A100 pickups and vans in total and just 5,810 V8s making this an exceptionally rare truck.

Gary's A100 is an exceptionally desirable California "black plate" truck. On the inside you'll find a pair of vinyl-trimmed bucket seats. If you're a Mopar muscle car fan they might look familiar; they're the same light weight seats that you'll find in the factory B-Body drag cars from the same era. While the interior is Spartan even by the standards of the day, remember that this is a no-nonsense work truck, most of which have long returned to the earth in the form of iron oxide, making this a very unusual specimen. It drives like a dream and needless to say with the four-barrel 273 with a performance cam and headers, drives better than the day it was built. Gary is asking $19,900, about the same price as a new base model Ram that will depreciate $5,000 the minute you drive it off the lot. And it's certainly far less than it would cost to buy a sixties A100 rust bucket, if you could find one worth restoring then rebuild it to this level.

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