AC 3000ME
AC Cars
MarqueAC Cars
Production1979–1984 (AC Cars) / 1984–1985 (AC (Scotland) plc)
Engine2994 cc Ford Essex V6
AC Cars
The AC 3000ME is a mid-engined sports car originally sold by AC Cars. The two-door coupé debuted at the 1973 London Motor Show.
Sales did not begin until 1979 and lasted until 1984. Rights to the 3000ME and tooling were transferred to a second company who managed to produce a small number of additional cars before going into receivership themselves in mid-1985. A third company acquired the rights to the car with plans to begin selling a revised version under a different name, but only a single prototype was ever produced.
From the Wikipedia article AC 3000ME, CC BY-SA.
The AC 3000ME is one of 15 AC Cars models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1979. 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 3000ME properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. 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 Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz G-Class, the Lancia Lancia Delta, the Mazda Mazda RX-7 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the AC 3000ME reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2994 cc Ford Essex V6; kerb weight is recorded at 1085 kg; top speed is given as 193 km/h; drive goes through 5-speed manual; the layout is MR layout with Transverse engine. 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 3000ME sits alongside the AC 2-Litre, the AC 378 GT Zagato, the AC Ace, the AC Ace Bristol. The record names the successor = as its predecessor and the sp = uk as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Peter Bohanna / Robin Stables. Assembly is recorded at England: Thames Ditton / Scotland: Hillington, Scotland / Hillington.
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.
What this page cannot yet tell you is what the AC 3000ME costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.
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.