Alvis 12/70

Among the 18 Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd entries in the MotorJury library, the Alvis 12/70 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 1937. 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 Alvis 12/70 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 Volkswagen Volkswagen Beetle, the Ford Lincoln Continental, the Bugatti Bugatti Type 57 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Alvis 12/70 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1,842 cc OHV I4; quoted output is 63.5 bhp @ 4,250 rpm / Tax rating 13.22hp; kerb weight is recorded at Saloon 25cwt; drive goes through Single plate clutch, 4-speed centrally changed by a short lever gearbox, synchromesh on 2nd, 3rd and top, half-floating spiral bevel driven axle; the layout is engine = 1,842 cc OHV I4. 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 Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd story

Within Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd's own catalogue the Alvis 12/70 sits alongside the Alvis 10/30, the Alvis 12/50, the Alvis 12/75, the Alvis Firebird. The record names the Alvis Firebird as its predecessor and the Alvis TA 14 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Coventry, England.

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

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 Alvis 12/70 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.