The first car I owned was a 1972 BMW 2002. It was a real lemon. The engine nearly threw a rod a week after I bought it junior year of college, stranding me in California's Central Valley and costing me my entire summer internship's salary to rebuild. The ongoing maintentance and restoration of this thing cost me a lot of my first Microsoft employee stock grants which, given the run up in the stock price between 1990 and 2000, meant I spent probably $100K on that damn thing.

Still, I loved it, and I love the 2002. This legend was the lineal ancestor of the BMW 3-series and really created the category of the sports sedan. So, I was incredibly pleased to see that the BMW Mobile Tradition division is building a new 2002tii (the fuel injected version) from mostly new parts they still make for 2002 devotees. They plan to auction it off for charity next spring. How I'd love to win that! Of course, they're building the much cooler version with the round taillights. (BMW switched to square taillights and heavy bumpers in 1974 to meet US safety regulations, destroying the look of the car in the process.)

Kudos to BMW for investing in this project.

For more, check out this article from Autoweek and this one from About.com.

Thanks to Metacool for pointing me to this..