There’s a Sad Audi RS2 Avant Awaiting Its Doom at a Junkyard in Portugal
The super-rare Porsche-tuned wagon deserves better than this, but its fate is likely sealed.
There's currently an Audi RS2 Avant sitting in a junkyard in Portugal collecting dust, and it's breaking all our collective hearts. The RS2 is one of the coolest German cars of the 1990s and fewer than 3,000 were built. It was a weird collaboration between Audi and Porsche and sort of kicked off the fast wagon market that's still thriving today. Such a car absolutely deserves better than to rot in the sun, next to a banged-up first-gen Toyota Rav4.
According to various online discussions about the car, the decrepit Audi RS2 is either ineligible to be sold whole or was seized and state-owned. One Facebook commenter claiming knowledge of the car added the RS2 may have escaped the crusher at least a week ago thanks to a "greased" worker, but its fate—and history—is mostly unknown.
The Audi RS2 Avant never came to the U.S. the first time around. It's now legal to import to the States, being more than 25 years old but this one might be tricky. According to Twitter user Mané Naranjo, who initially found the car, the junkyard isn't selling it whole but is parting it out instead, which is a tragedy for such a special car. I'm not sure if anything can change the scrapyard's mind but, if anything can be done to do so, it might be worth it.
Despite its humdrum Audi 80 Avant body, the RS2 Avant is a fascinating car. In the early '90s, Porsche was struggling and was financially getting by with development projects for other brands through its Porsche Engineering arm. At the time, Audi needed a competitor to take on the BMW M3 but didn't know how to make one on its own. So it turned to Porsche, who saw the project as an opportunity to get Porsche's performance and engineering in front of a more mainstream audience.
Porsche then got to work heavily tuning Audi's tried-and-true turbocharged 2.2-liter five-cylinder powerplant, giving it 311 horsepower and pairing it with a five-speed manual transmission and Audi's signature all-wheel drive. The Audi RS2 Avant also had Porsche-tuned suspension and brakes, Porsche 964 wing mirrors, and the lightweight wheels from the 964 cup car.
This specific Audi RS2 Avant has certainly seen better days. It has tons of scratches on the front bumper, a dent in the rear tailgate, and it seems that its front passenger window was smashed, evidenced by the broken glass on the passenger seat and footwell. Aside from those issues, though, it doesn't seem too bad. Especially when you consider that most of those issues are entirely fixable. Sure, its interior is filled with enough spiderwebs to make an arachnophobe like me pass out. But nothing a good Shop-Vac can't fix. It's also wearing Audi's famous Nogaro Blue paint, the most desirable of all RS2 colors.
A decent example of the RS2 Avant can set you back about $50,000-$60,000, with super-pristine examples fetching six figures on certain auction sites. I'm not sure how much this beat-up RS2 would cost if the yard even decided to sell it as a whole car. However, given its rarity and history, it could be worth whatever it costs just to save it from its dusty hell.
