Rare 1955 Le Gene Californian Roadster Heads to Auction

Among the many small-batch sports cars that emerged from Southern California garages in the 1950s, the Le Gene Californian Roadster stands out for its scarcity: only six complete examples are thought to have been finished. One of those survivors is now being offered for sale out of Fenton, Missouri, with no reserve and a title identifying it as a 1955 CAFC.

The car traces back to San Bernardino, where father-and-son builders Lee and Gene Dodson set up their own operation and named it by combining their first names. Their Californian Roadster was conceived as a garage-built rival to the two-seat American sports cars of the day, and it used a fiberglass body at a time when the material was still a novelty in the industry. Chevrolet’s Corvette is often wrongly credited as the first fiberglass-bodied car; low-volume makers such as Glasspar and Kaiser Darrin had already been working with the material before it. A modified 1940s Ford frame underpins this example, with a 99-inch wheelbase, dropped front axle, transverse leaf springs and lever-arm dampers.

Motivation comes from a 239 cubic-inch Mercury flathead V8 pulled from a 1948 Mercury, upgraded with Offenhauser aluminum heads, an Offenhauser intake manifold and twin Holley 94 carburetors. A three-speed manual gearbox routes power to the rear wheels, while hydraulic drum brakes handle deceleration. The maroon fiberglass body wears a custom stainless-steel grille, a hood scoop, tailfins, chrome bumpers and a windshield borrowed from a 1955 Ford Victoria, rolling on black 16-inch wire wheels. Inside are black and maroon vinyl bucket seats, matching door panels, black carpet, a floor shifter and Veglia Borletti instrumentation.

This particular car spent decades unidentified. It resurfaced in 2008 as a rolling project with no known history, bought by Geoff Hacker and Rick D’Louhy, and was restored in Florida between 2009 and 2010. It then appeared at the 2010 Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance under the placeholder name “Mysterion” before research confirmed its Le Gene origins. Some earlier accounts had mislabeled the car as an Atlas Ford.

The odometer reads roughly 9,000 miles, though the true mileage is unknown and the speedometer, tachometer and odometer are not currently functional. Le Gene is believed to have produced just six turnkey cars plus six additional bodies, and only four complete cars and a single body are known to survive today, making any public sale of one a rare event for collectors of mid-century American sports specials.