It takes a pretty wild Facebook Marketplace find to stop me in my tracks these days. I feel like I’ve seen it all on there, from leaping Lexus suspension prototypes to a $1.7 million Jaguar XJR-15 and everything in between. But this crazy custom Chevy pickup with looks so bad they’re good made me do a double take. After looking into its history, I’m even more convinced one of you should buy it—not me, though. My hands are already full with my dump truck.
The rig is officially billed as a Shadi 2000 (pronounced “shaddai,” not “shawty”). I thought it was a re-bodied S-10 at first, but it’s hard to tell the scale from the photos. The listing clarifies that it actually started life as a crew cab, half-ton Chevy and it’s one of only four survivors. Supposedly, Shadi built just seven (or nine, according to an old Flickr post) of these unique beasts in the early ’90s.
This truck probably started life like all the other Shadi builds in Pasadena, Texas. While the company was in operation before the internet took off, a few pages from a brochure were snagged and uploaded in a YouTube video almost 17 years ago. That minute-long clip shows pricing for the kits, which could be purchased together or as separate pieces for the front and rear. If you wanted the front end only, it was $3,175. If you thought just the ground effects for the bed were better, they were $3,050 uninstalled or $3,885 fitted on your truck. Whoever spec’d out this example went for the whole shebang, which either cost $4,800 if they installed it themselves or $7,850 for Shadi to fix it all up.
It’s in good shape as you can tell from the photos. The bird-beak front end has just a few rock chips, along with what looks like a scratch or two on the passenger side of the nose. There aren’t any cracks in the fiberglass from what I can see, though. Red paint makes it even more of a looker, and it only gets better the longer you check it out. See those lights in front of the rear wheels, molded into the bedsides? They’re sealed beams. Holy cow.
Because it’s really a Chevy C1500 underneath, it has a 350-cubic-inch V8. This is right around the time they switched to throttle body injection but an air cleaner under the hood indicates this sucker is carbureted. The Marketplace listing says it has 53,300 miles on the odometer, though a Mecum ad for, seemingly, the same car from the summertime says it had more like 54,300 when it crossed the Tulsa auction block in July. I thought that was interesting so I dug in further.
Indeed, many of the same photos are used in the Marketplace and Mecum listings. But when I checked the Tulsa 2024 auction results page, it showed that the Shadi didn’t sell. It must not have met the reserve, though you can see on Facebook that the price has been reduced from $28,000 to $13,888. I’m not sure that another 50% cut is in the cards but as-is, it seems like the seller has come quite a way back down to Earth. I messaged them to get the full story but haven’t heard back at the time of publishing. Hence, the mystery—we figured out the origin of this car’s crazy-looking bodywork, but what the heck has this particular truck been up to?
One way or another, this is a Marketplace find with an interesting history. The listing says everything works as it should and compared to other classic trucks in similar condition, the price isn’t so outrageous. You’d have to really like the look to spend GMT800 money on it, but people have paid more for crazier-looking cars in the past. I can’t endorse it too much without seeing it in person; that said, I’d give anyone who buys it a virtual high-five for committing to the bit. Maybe you’re the one?
(Hat tip to Paul from The Awesomer!)
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