Alvis Firefly
Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd
Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd
The Alvis Firefly is a car manufactured by Alvis from 1932 until 1934. It followed on from the 12/50 TJ model. The car has a straight-four engine with overhead valves. The engine, with a single SU carburettor and a displacement of 1,496 cm3, develops 50 bhp (37 kW) at 4,500 rpm. The engine is essentially the same as that of the 12/50 TH model from 1927, and of the 12/50 SD from 1927 to 1929. This made it economical to manufacture, and put the car in the 1.5-litre class, which was popular at that time.
A roadster was introduced in 1932. In 1933, a four-door tourer, a saloon, and a two-door convertible were introduced, all under the name Alvis Firefly 12. The car has rigid axles at the front and rear, from which it is suspended by semi-elliptical leaf springs. The wheelbase, the type of suspension and, in some cases, the bodies, corresponded to the previous straight-six Alvis Silver Eagle SE and TB. The top speed was about 71 miles per hour (114 km/h), depending on the design. In 1934, the Alvis Firebird replaced all the Firefly models. In all, 904 Firefly Roadsters and 871 Firefly 12s were built.
From the Wikipedia article Alvis Firefly, CC BY-SA.
Among the 18 Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd entries in the MotorJury library, the Alvis Firefly 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 1932. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Alvis Firefly 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 Chevrolet Chevrolet Suburban, the British Motor Corporation MG J-type — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Alvis Firefly reads like this: the record lists its engine as weight =; kerb weight is recorded at 1118 kg; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. 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 Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd's own catalogue the Alvis Firefly sits alongside the Alvis 10/30, the Alvis 12/50, the Alvis 12/70, the Alvis 12/75. The record names the Alvis 12/50 as its predecessor and the Alvis Firebird as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology.
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.
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 Firefly was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts 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.