Anadol

~ the obit ~

Turkey wanted a car of its own and could not afford the usual way of getting one. Stamping steel bodies means press tooling, and press tooling needs a production volume to justify it, which the Turkish market of the mid-1960s was nowhere near able to supply. So Otosan, the Koç Holding company that had been assembling Ford trucks under license since 1959, went to Reliant in England, a firm whose entire expertise was molding car bodies out of fiberglass because it built three-wheelers for people with motorcycle licenses. Reliant developed the prototype under the code FW5 and Ogle Design styled it, with Tom Karen doing the drawings.

The first Anadol A1 came off the line at Otosan's plant on the Asian side of Istanbul on 19 December 1966. It was a two-door fastback on a steel chassis with a fiberglass shell bonded over it, running a 1200cc Ford engine that was swapped for the 1300 Kent in 1968. Around twenty thousand were built before the model ended in 1975. The A2 that followed in 1970 was a four-door sedan, widely credited as the first mass-produced fiberglass four-door anywhere, and at 35,668 units it became the best-selling thing the brand made.

The range got ambitious in the middle years. The STC-16, designed by Eralp Noyan and built between 1973 and 1975, was the first Turkish sports car, and 176 of them exist. There was an estate, the SV-1600, and a beach buggy called the Böcek that Otosan sold 203 of. None of these were going to pay for themselves, and they read now as a company finding out how far a fiberglass mold could be pushed when the alternative was one body shape forever.

Passenger car production wound down in 1986. Import rules were loosening, the Turkish buyer who could afford a new car started to have real alternatives, and the fiberglass advantage had become a disadvantage against modern steel bodies with modern crash behavior. Otosan put the plant to work on Ford models for export instead. Only the P2 pickup carried on, which it did until 1991, finishing with 36,892 units and outselling every Anadol sedan on its own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ böcek ~

The Böcek, which means bug, was a doorless open-topped buggy built from 1975 to 1977 and sold mostly to hotels on the Aegean coast. Two hundred and three were made. It is the least sensible product in the company's history and the one that turns up most often in photographs now, since a fiberglass buggy in a coastal town tends to get repainted instead of scrapped. Working examples still come up at auction in Turkey every couple of years.

~ still on the road ~

Here is the thing about a car with no steel skin: it does not corrode, so it leaves the road much later than it should. The last Anadol sedans were built while I was a toddler and the pickups were still coming off the line around the time I started school, and they stayed ordinary traffic well into the 1990s. Usually a faded A2 or a pickup with a wooden bed built onto the back, parked on a side street and going nowhere fast. A lot of Turkish drivers of that generation learned on one because it was the vehicle a family had spare.

The jokes came with it. The car was called plastic, and there was a persistent story that it would burn to nothing in a crash, which the owners' clubs have spent decades arguing about. The rust immunity was real though, and mechanics liked it for being simple in a way that a village could maintain. A Ford engine meant parts were available everywhere, and a fiberglass panel could be patched with resin by anyone who had ever repaired a boat.

What survives is a restoration scene. There are owners' clubs running since the 1990s, and small workshops remake the parts that nobody stocked to begin with, which is how a decent A2 ends up worth more today than the car cost new in real terms. Otosan is still there, the main plant at Gölcük, still the largest vehicle manufacturer in the country and still building Fords. The brand is dead and the company that made it never stopped working for a single year.

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