A Man Robbed 13 Cars Of Parts To Turn A Chevy HHR Into A ’50s Buick And It’s Something Else

Back in the 2000s, America fell deeply in love with modern interpretations of retro cars, with vehicles like the Chrysler PT Cruiser and the Chevrolet HHR raking in sales. Despite scorn from traditional enthusiasts, these cars have carved out their niche of superfans, including folks who do bombastic mods to make their already loud cars practically scream at the world. One of those cars is the Buick Bijou Super, a Chevy HHR lovingly modified over two years and sacrificing parts from about 13 other cars to look like a throwback to a ’50s Buick. It’s as wonderful as it is nutty.

Our secret designer, the Bishop, has alerted me to a Facebook listing for the Buick Bijou Super. The car is for sale today and it shows some wear and tear from being a daily driver. The listing does say that the car was modified to look like a classic Buick, but that wasn’t good enough for me. A lot of people just slap on some cheap chrome and a woodie wagon graphic and call it a day. Whoever built this went through the work to make this HHR look entirely different. I mean, are those taillights from a Nissan? What is going on here?

To find out, I did some digging and sure enough, this HHR has a story that you’ll feel like rooting for even if you don’t like HHRs.

A Modern Cult Favorite

The story of the HHR (or Heritage High Roof) is about as weird as the car you’re looking at today. Its design is officially credited to the designer of the PT Cruiser, one Brian Nesbitt. However, as USA Today reported, the original concept of the HHR was not Nesbitt’s creation, but a rejected idea dusted off and rebooted by car nut executive Bob Lutz. The final car is supposed to be a modern nod to the 1949 Suburban and Chevy’s Advance Design trucks of the same period. It’s unclear how much of the HHR is Nesbitt’s doing, but it is clear that the PT Cruiser and the HHR are cut from the same cloth.

Many enthusiasts don’t have favorable opinions about the Chrysler PT Cruiser and the Chevrolet HHR. To some, these cars represent the worst of the neo-retro era. Both of these cars weren’t particularly awesome in quality or interior design. One of our readers compared the HHR’s outward visibility to a tank. Our very own Thomas Hundal declared the HHR a miss in his excellent GM Hit Or Miss series. Some also think that the PT Cruiser and HHR were shameless cash grabs.

I’m in the minority here, but I think the world needs more cars like the PT Cruiser and the HHR. Not every car needs to appeal to the brown manual diesel wagon enthusiast, to the endless fans of the Miata, or to the astonishing number of people who are into crossovers.

Despite all of the disdain for these cars, both the PT Cruiser and the HHR have amassed fan clubs. I’ve owned an HHR and I got to enjoy a PT Cruiser through my dad. While I get the hate, I grew to appreciate these cars. Yeah, the marketing for these things was exhausting, but in real life, they’re really practical cheap cars.

The Build

Ben was another Chevy HHR fanatic. He loved the retro look of the HHR and while he completed his studies at university in 2013, he embarked on taking the HHR’s design in a different direction. What if, instead of emulating a Suburban, the HHR looked like a Buick? Ben explained his inspiration on the ChevyHHR.net board:

The first time I saw the grille for the Buick Enclave I thought it looked like an old Buick Super 8 grille…only upside down. Buicks actually used to have that sort of menacing mouth look to the front end. Well at any rate, I hadn’t thought about that for quite a while until about a 2 months ago when I had an Enclave behind me at a stoplight. So that night, after business hours, I drove my HHR up to my local Buick dealership and began measuring both the Enclave and my car. I also eyeball the hex out of both cars to red to determine id the radius on the front of the Enclave would match the HHR close enough for a transplant. I came home and bought an Enclave grill off of Ebay and impatiently waited for it to arrive. I started looking closely at Buick parts on Ebay and came across the Regal chrome strip that I have on my liftgate now. Went back to the dealership and repeated what i had done with the Enclave grille and decide to bit it as well. I have been rapidly collecting Buick trim to complete my conversion, but I still have a long way to go.

Ben was quick to note that he didn’t mod cars. This was his first project, but he was determined to make his dream come true. Ben did what a lot of us do today and took to YouTube to teach himself some new skills to convert an HHR into a nod to the 1953 Buick Super.

The car involved is a 2007 HHR 1LT that, at the time, had 80,000 miles and cost Ben $4,500. It’s not particularly special or rare in any way, so Ben didn’t feel bad about putting it under his knife. The build kicked off in earnest in early May, with Ben showing off a mostly stock Chevy HHR wearing an inverted grille from an Enclave, a sculpted hood, and a sweet visor over the windshield.

The build thread is awesome and you should definitely read it. Over a series of 103 pages of posts, the members of ChevyHHR.net got to watch Ben mock-up parts before plastering them on his HHR in fiberglass and foam. Little by little, Ben’s HHR evolved from looking like something that crashed through a Pep Boys accessories area to an impressive build. Ben took ideas from the crowd and the car went through several different iterations over the course of the build.

What I love is that Ben also left no stone unturned here. The Chevy badging was quickly discarded for Buick badges. So, even when the HHR build was in its early stages, it was basically identifying as a Buick rebadge of the Chevy HHR that never happened. Ben was so serious that he planned on replacing the engine’s Ecotec badging with his own handmade “Fireball Four” decal, a riff on the old Buick Fireball V8 badging.

A lot of this build used some old-school tricks, too. Ben mocked up potential mods with tape and foam before laying down the fiberglass. But even when Ben finally made the parts, he would often back up and do it over again until he was satisfied with the look.

Toward fall 2013 the project started getting really serious. That’s when the Buick Bijou Super had its rear door handles shaved off and its taillight surrounds gouged out. If there was a point of no return it was probably here as now Ben was cutting into the vehicle’s sheet metal in his quest.

By about a year in, Ben’s HHR began to take on its final form. It looked a lot like the car you see today, but much rougher. Meanwhile, Ben worked on a ton of small projects like reshaping the fuel door and smoothing out the fiberglass. He even gave the car functional Buick Ventiports. By the fall of 2014, the car had even shed its original orange paint for a two-tone turquoise and white.

By the summer of 2015, the HHR turned into about what you see today. When all was said and done, Ben said the Buick Bijou Super was decked out in his custom fiberglass and paint work, but also parts from 13 different cars. From Ben:

1. Grille – 2009 Enclave
2. Hood shield emblem – 1953 Buick Super
3. Rear chrome trim w/ emblem – 2012 Regal
4. Ventiports – 2007 Lucerne
5. Buick Motor Division dash emblem – 1999 Century
6. Steering wheel tri-shield emblem – 2010 Excelle (Chinese market)
7. Chrome Buick license plate trim – 2004 Rendezvous

Non-Buick parts:

8. Aftermarket 350-Z l.e.d. tail lights
9. Front and rear bumper bullets – 1970s Ford truck hub covers
10. Rear quarter scoop chrome – 2012 Kia Optima fog light bezel
11. Sideview mirrors – 2007 Dodge Charger
12. Stainless exhaust bezels – 2010 Camaro
13. Scoop Grille – 2009 Toyota Hilux (non-American market)

Despite the vehicle’s dramatic transformation, it’s also pretty much stock underneath. The roofline and windows were left entirely unchanged. The new roof and windows that you perceive are just an illusion created by the fiberglass. Sadly, Ben says he didn’t have anything in his budget for the powertrain, so there’s a stock 2.2-liter Ecotec inline-four making 149 horses. At least the car has a manual transmission!

Ben says that over this two-year journey, building the HHR Buick solidified his dream to become a car designer. It’s also impressive when you realize he made this thing all by himself while working a full-time job, being a father to six children, being a husband, and going to school for a Master’s in Industrial Design.

After The Build

I noticed that the person selling the Buick Bijou Super today is not Ben. Likewise, the car has taken some damage since it was finished. The car’s face is a little mangled and some of the chrome bits are missing. I wondered what happened after 2015.

Ben stopped posting on ChevyHHR.net in 2016 and last logged in back in 2021. The promotional Facebook page he created for the car stopped posting in 2022. I reached out to Ben on Facebook and as of publishing hadn’t received anything back. The photos you see here come from the vehicle’s listings. As you can see, the interior is mostly unchanged:

I reached out to the vehicle’s current owner, Brooke, and she was able to pick up the story from more or less where I left off. Here’s what she told me:

I’m the 3rd owner of this car actually. There was the original builder then who he sold it to, and I bought it from that person. It was sitting in her driveway for as long as I can remember just rotting away but I absolutely fell in love with it and had to have it someday.

I remember being on the school bus from elementary to high school just seeing it in my neighborhood until finally when I was 19 I knocked on her door and asked about it and luckily she needed it gone before the end of the week or it was gonna go to a trash heap pretty much. I’m no mechanic so I had some guys do the main body work and cosmetics to make it pretty and run again, but other than that I’ve done a few things here and there to add my own touch.

And I still absolutely love the car but its my one and only and it’s not too great at being a daily driver so I unfortunately need to sell it bc I can’t really afford two cars. And I know the price it pretty high but I’m hoping someone will talk me down to a decent one. One day though I hope to own another car similar to this one and be able to keep it.

The build started its journey in Indiana before it moved south with Ben to Georgia. Now, it lives in sunny Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

Brooke notes some things Ben did not. The final iteration of this car got a rear air suspension and in the end, Ben ended up shaving off every door handle but the one on the driver door. Thankfully, all of the doors still work, but only the driver door has an outside handle. Brooke also says that she will replace the missing body parts for the buyer so the Buick Bijou Super will be about as it was when Ben finished it.

She’s asking $25,000 for the Buick Bijou Super. Admittedly, that’s a steep price for a 136,000-mile stock Chevy HHR with some fiberglass tacked to it, but this is also perhaps the wildest HHR build I’ve ever seen. However, you should also temper your expectations. This was the first custom job of a person who had never done bodywork on a car before. It’s going to be rough around the edges.

I have no idea what this thing is actually worth, but I love that someone adored the HHR so much to do such a bombastic custom build with one. Ben turned a polarizing economy car into something totally different. But perhaps even cooler is that the vehicle inspired him to get more into car design. Sadly, we don’t know what Ben is up to now, but I hope he’s living his dream.