AC 2-Litre
AC Cars
AC Cars
The AC 2-Litre is an automobile that was produced by AC of Thames Ditton in Surrey, England between 1947 and 1956. Two and, from 1952, four-door saloons were sold. In addition, as from 1949, a small number of drophead coupés and "Buckland" tourers were produced. The car's wetliner, aluminium cylinder block, six-cylinder 1991 cc engine was the unit first offered by the company in the AC 16, back in 1922. However, by 1947 the engine was fed by three SU carburettors, and boasted a power output of 74 bhp (55.2 kW), increased again in 1951 to 85 bhp (63.4 kW) which was more than twice the 35 bhp (26.1 kW) claimed for engine's original commercial application. The aluminium-panelled body on a wood frame was fitted to a conventional steel chassis with rigid axles front and rear with semi-elliptic leaf springs with, for the first time on an AC, hydraulic dampers.
Until 1951 the car had a hybrid braking system, hydraulic at the front and cable at the rear with 12 in (305 mm) drums. The car changed very little during its ten-year production run, though the wheel size did increase slightly to 16 in (406 mm) in 1951. The AC 2-litre was outlived by its engine, which continued to be offered in other AC models until 1963. A 2-door saloon car tested by The Motor magazine in 1948 had a top speed of 80 mph (130 km/h) and could accelerate from 0-60 mph (97 km/h) in 19.9 seconds. A fuel consumption of 23 miles per imperial gallon (12 L/100 km; 19 mpg‑US) was recorded. The test car cost £1277 including taxes.
From the Wikipedia article AC 2-Litre, CC BY-SA.
Among the 15 AC Cars entries in the MotorJury library, the AC 2-Litre holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1947. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the AC 2-Litre properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1940s were a decade split in two by war — civilian production stopped almost everywhere, and the cars that followed 1945 carried pre-war engineering into a world desperate for transport. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Citroën Citroën 2CV, the Porsche Porsche 356, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Bel Air — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the AC 2-Litre reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1991 cc I6 ohc / 74 bhp/76 bhp; kerb weight is recorded at 2912 lb; top speed is given as 130 km/h; drive goes through 4-speed manual; the layout is FR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within AC Cars's own catalogue the AC 2-Litre sits alongside the AC 3000ME, the AC 378 GT Zagato, the AC Ace, the AC Ace Bristol. The record names the successor = as its predecessor and the transmission = 4-speed manual as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Thames Ditton, Surrey, England.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the AC 2-Litre was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.