Apal cars: true Belgian classics

Even the most serious of car enthusiasts may not be familiar with Apal. It is a small company that was founded in Belgium to produce low volume cars. Their designs have usually been pretty wild but some of them have proven to be quite popular, at least by the standards of low volume car builders.

Apal was founded in the early sixties when glass fiber car construction was first starting to appear. The use of glass fiber gave designers the chance to create cars that had designs that were radically different than those who had come before. The reason is that you can shape glass fiber into almost any shape that you want. The first car that Apal produced was a GT coupe with gull wing doors. The car was powered by a Volkswagen engine and transmission. The cars were produced in very limited numbers but they did sell quite well.

From there Apal moved into designing formula V race cars. These were intended for club racers and they proved to be reasonably successful and they sold in decent numbers. That being said the race car market was always going to be limited so starting in 1968 the company got back into making street cars. They came up with several different body designs all of which were based on Volkswagen floor plans. The most successful of their original designs was the 1200 saloon which proved to be a fun little saloon.

While the company was having reasonable success with their original designs their biggest seller by far was a replica of the Porsche 356 that they put into production in 1981. Like the other cars that they produced it was a glass fiber body that was based on a Volkswagen drive train. At around this time the 356 was becoming a very popular collector car so the replicas sold very well. They would remain in production until 1994 with more than seven hundred being sold.

In 1998 Apal was sold to a German company who used it to put the 356 replica back into production. This time sales were not as good as they had been the first time around and by 2006 they had stopped producing them. This was partly due to issues with things like safety standards and crash testing, expecting a replica of a car that was designed in 1948 to meet these standards proved impossible. These days the company continues to offer the replica in kit version so that people who are really interested can build their own.

While Apal may not be the best known car company in the world they have certainly come up with some interesting designs. They have been in business for nearly fifty years so they have clearly been producing cars that people are interested in.