Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd
The Alvis Speed 20 is a British touring car that was made between late 1931 and 1936 by Alvis Car and Engineering Company in Coventry. It went through four variants coded SA to SD. In October 1935 the Speed 20 was supplemented by a 3½-litre car initially sold alongside their Speed 20 SD and named 3½-litre SA. After their Speed 20 was dropped from their catalogue the 3½-litre car was given a shorter wheelbase and named Speed 25 SB.
From the Wikipedia article Alvis Speed 20, CC BY-SA.
The Alvis Speed 20 is one of 18 Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd 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 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 Speed 20 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 Chevrolet Chevrolet Suburban, the Bugatti Bugatti Type 57, the Horch Horch type 670 cabriolet (French language) — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Alvis Speed 20 reads like this: the record lists its engine as SA & SB 2511 cc / 3½-litre 3571 cc Straight-6; quoted output is SB 95 bhp @ 4,000 rpm / 3½-litre 102 bhp @ 3,600 rpm / SA to SD 19.82 tax horsepower / 3½-litre 25.63 tax horsepower; kerb weight is recorded at 3528 lb (4-door sports saloon); drive goes through 4-speed manual transmission; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 27 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. 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 Speed 20 sits alongside the Alvis 10/30, the Alvis 12/50, the Alvis 12/70, the Alvis 12/75. The record names the Alvis Silver Eagle as its predecessor and the Alvis Speed 25 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.
What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Alvis Speed 20 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.
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.