AC Cobra

This is the catalogue record of the AC Cobra, one of 15 models AC Cars has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1962. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the AC Cobra properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. 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 Alfa Romeo Alfa Romeo Giulia, the Ferrari Ferrari 250 GTO, the Buick Buick Riviera — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the AC Cobra reads like this: the record lists its engine as 260 or 289 CID V8; kerb weight is recorded at 2019 lb; 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.

Its place in the AC Cars story

Within AC Cars's own catalogue the AC Cobra sits alongside the AC 2-Litre, the AC 3000ME, the AC 378 GT Zagato, the AC Ace. The record names the AC Ace as its predecessor and the AC MK IV as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Thames Ditton, Surrey, England, UK (AC Cars (EU) Ltd.) / Los Angeles, California, U.S. (Shelby American, Inc.).

How this catalogue works

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.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

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.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the AC Cobra was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.