Alfa Romeo 12C

The Alfa Romeo 12C is one of 194 Alfa Romeo 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 1936. 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 Alfa Romeo 12C properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1930s were the streamline decade, when aerodynamics entered body design, independent suspension spread, and grand-prix engineering began flowing into road cars even as the Depression thinned the industry. 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 Bugatti Bugatti Type 57, the Volkswagen Volkswagen Beetle, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Suburban — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Alfa Romeo 12C reads like this: the record lists its engine as Roots supercharged 4.1 L 4064 cc 60° V12 / 370 bhp at 5800 rpm (12C-36) / Roots supercharged 4.5 L 4495 cc 60° V12 / 430 bhp at 5800 rpm (12C-37); kerb weight is recorded at 818 kg (1804 lb) (12C-36) / 808 kg (1782 lb) (12C-37); drive goes through 4-speed manual transmission; 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 Alfa Romeo story

Within Alfa Romeo's own catalogue the Alfa Romeo 12C sits alongside the A.L.F.A 12 HP, the A.L.F.A 15 HP, the A.L.F.A 15-20 HP, the A.L.F.A 24 HP. The record names the Alfa Romeo 8C-35 as its predecessor and the Alfa Romeo Tipo 308 / Alfa Romeo Tipo 312 / Alfa Romeo Tipo 316 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Vittorio Jano. Assembly is recorded at predecessor = Alfa Romeo 8C-35.

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.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Alfa Romeo 12C 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.