Brazil Made Baby Porsche 928s That Look Like They Came From Temu

Brazil is a land of automotive oddities, from the Ford Focus Super Duty to gorgeous-but-slow Volkswagen sports cars. VW’s roots go deep throughout Latin America, and they branch in some awfully strange directions. One of those directions is in this tiny Brazilian city car that totally isn’t a Porsche 928, no siree Bob. Please call off your lawyers.

This chibi Porsche is called the Dacon 828, whose name is a clear nod to its muse. According to Evocars-Magazin.de, Dacon started as a Brazilian importer of European cars ranging from BMW to Maserati, Ferrari, and Porsche. When Brazil banned car imports in 1976, Dacon survived by branching out into vehicle customization and upfits. Driven to Write says this meant building limousines, pickup truck conversions, and swapping Porsche engines into VWs. It was building the technical foundation of a car manufacturer, and that’s what it soon would become.

The 828 would enter development in 1982 as Dacon’s eighth vehicle project, which is supposedly where its name came from. Obviously, though, it’s a runt Porsche 928, achieving the look without using any Porsche parts. The lights reportedly came from a second-gen VW T2 bus, with the taillights being mounted laterally rather than vertically, presumably to look more similar to the 928’s. The T2 also donated parts to the interior along with the VW Gol (not the Golf), while the mechanicals were largely from the air-cooled Beetle.

That began with a Beetle frame that was shortened by almost 31 inches, which apparently meant that the driver sat in what was the Beetle’s back seat in the prototype. (It also gave the 828 its odd pro-Porsche-ns.) The rear suspension came from a Type 3 wagon (known locally as the Variant II), and the engine was VW’s 1.6-liter flat-four. Mated to a four-speed transmission (likely manual), its 65 horsepower struggled to move the roughly 1,500-pound 828 at more than a snail’s pace. Zero to 62 mph took around 20 seconds, and the top speed was just 88 mph. Good luck with that, Marty McFly.

As you can imagine, this 92-Ain’t sold as well as it performed. Between 1983 and 1994 when production ended, Dacon moved just 47 units. Dacon went under in 1996, seemingly leaving the concept to the pages of history. Strangely though, it was revisited by an unrelated company in the 2000s, which envisioned a re-engineered 828 with an aluminum tube-frame chassis and a 200-hp hybrid drivetrain as a Smart ForTwo-killer. But it doesn’t seem to have ever been more than vaporware.

Maybe they should’ve tried copying Porsche’s design again. Then again, seeing as the fried egg-eyed Porsche 996 was still in production at the time, maybe it’s better they didn’t.

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