Alvis TB 21
Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd
Production1951 / 31 produced
EngineAlvis 2993 cc Straight-6
Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd
The Alvis TB 21 was a two-seater open car produced by Alvis cars for 1951 only. It was based on the running gear of the TA 21 saloon. Alvis had previously contracted AP Metalcraft, a Coventry coachbuilder, to produce the TB 14 two door open car body to fit on the TA 14 chassis. With the replacement of the TA 14 by the larger TA 21 in 1950, AP were asked to modify their design for the new running gear. The TB 21 dropped the controversial grille used on the TB 14 in favour of the traditional Alvis one. The doors, rear hinged, were heavily cut away at the top and the windscreen could be folded flat.
The 2993 cc engine was slightly modified to produce 90 bhp (67 kW) with a single SU carburettor replacing the Solex one used on the saloon. The TA 21 suspension was retained, independent at the front using coil springs with leaf springs at the rear. As the car was lighter than the TA 21 the final drive ratio was changed from 4.09:1 to 3.77:1 helping to increase the top speed and improving economy. The car could reach 95 mph (153 km/h) but was very expensive at £1598 on the home market resulting in limited sales.
From the Wikipedia article Alvis TB 21, CC BY-SA.
The Alvis TB 21 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 1951. 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 TB 21 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 Toyota Toyota Land Cruiser, the Cadillac Cadillac Eldorado, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Bel Air — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Alvis TB 21 reads like this: the record lists its engine as Alvis 2993 cc Straight-6; 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.
Within Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd's own catalogue the Alvis TB 21 sits alongside the Alvis 10/30, the Alvis 12/50, the Alvis 12/70, the Alvis 12/75. The record names the Alvis TB 14 as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Coventry, 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.
What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Alvis TB 21 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.