AC Petite
AC Cars
AC Cars
The AC Petite is a three-wheeled British microcar with a rear-mounted 350 cc (21 cu in) Villiers single cylinder, two-stroke engine. The car has a single bench seat seating two adults, and was said to be capable of 60 mpg‑imp (4.7 L/100 km; 50 mpg‑US) to 70 mpg‑imp (4.0 L/100 km; 58 mpg‑US) and 40 mph (64 km/h). There were two versions of the car.
Between 1952 and 1955 the car was fitted with a Villiers 27B engine and two different sizes of wheel; the rears were 18-inch (460 mm) spoked wheels whilst the front was only 8 inches (200 mm). In 1955 a Mark II version was launched, incorporating minor changes to the exterior trim, a slightly more powerful Villiers 28B engine and 12-inch (300 mm) wheels front and rear. Approximately 4,000 AC Petites were built until 1957.
From the Wikipedia article AC Petite, CC BY-SA.
This is the catalogue record of the AC Petite, 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 1952. 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 Petite properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1950s were the optimistic post-war boom, when chrome, tailfins and new unibody construction met the first purpose-built motorways and sports-car racing shaped reputations. 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 Cadillac Cadillac Eldorado, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Corvette, the Toyota Toyota Land Cruiser — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the AC Petite reads like this: the record lists its engine as 350 cc, two-stroke, single ; kerb weight is recorded at 355 kg; top speed is given as 64 km/h; the layout is RR 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 Petite sits alongside the AC 2-Litre, the AC 3000ME, the AC 378 GT Zagato, the AC Ace. 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.
Some pages in this library brim with specifications; others, like corners of every archive, are thin. The honest response to a thin record is to say so, not to pad it. What is shown here is exactly what the public record supports today — and because the harvest re-runs nightly, the page you are reading is the fullest version of this car's open record that existed the last time the site was built.
The catalogue records what the AC Petite 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.
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.