It's ‘60's Week on , and to kick things off we have a black plate Bimmer. This old school 2000CS is an excellent representative of the Neue Klasse, but does its price have you giving it a failing grade?

The sixties were an amazing decade. It was over its course that we saw space exploration's most monumental achievement to date - man walking on another celestial body. The decade also realized a cultural shift globally that fermented the questioning of political tradition, engendered the heyday of rock and roll music, and saw an explosion in cars offered around the world.

It's that last facet of the sixties that we're interested in this week. During that decade, American manufacturers created whole new classes of cars, offered remarkably innovative and forward-looking technologies, and engaged in a horsepower war in which the big winner was the car buying consumer. Foreign inroads made in the decade also provided the first significant evidence that the Americans wouldn't have the U.S. market all to their own any more.

One of fewer than 10,000 cars ever built, today's may not have been at the vanguard of that import invasion, but it did manage to help lay the groundwork for positioning BMW ‘s current positioning as the Ultimate Driving Machine.

Introduced as part of the Neue Klasse model redesign in 1965 the 2000 coupé was built for BMW by Karmann in Osnabrück. The fact that Karmann invented rust and used it as a means of planned obsolescence for their products, makes this car's solidity and claimed lack of swiss cheesification all the more remarkable. That body may seem familiar to you, and a stretched version was used for the successor six cylinder E9s.

This one originated that car's Hoffmeister Kinky roofline, and shark nose, but while the E9 sports four lights in a horizontal grille fronted by a subtle double kidney, the 2000's elongated twin grille and composite lights look disconcertingly like Hitler wearing Raybans.

Behind that grille is the twin-carb edition of BMW's M10 SOHC 1,991-cc four. The extra carb affords the car the S at the end of its name and an additional 20 ponies for a total of 120. Backing that up is a four speed stick, all independent suspension and a curb weight of less than 2,600 lbs.

The interior of this white over blue 113,000-mile edition seems equally serviceable, sporting some evidence of wear, but apparently - and more importantly - missing nothing but its factory wheel. That's been replace with a wood-rimmed Moto lita or the like, and the seller makes note of the car rocking a period correct Blaupunkt AM/FM/Shortwave radio.

The sixties are now more than more than four decades in the past, and it's probably that few of you were even born to see their close, much less remember them at all. A lot of wickedly cool cars came out of the decade, and this 2000CS is today vastly more rare than when the Beatles were still topping the charts.

Of course rarity doesn't always equate to desirability or value, and that's why we're here to determine if this car's not insubstantial $18,000 price tag is on the level or off the map. What do you think, is eighteen grand a good price for so nice a 2000CS? Or, is this a sixties survivor whose current cost is far out man, but not in the good, hippie kind of way?

You decide!

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