Austin 30 hp

The Austin 30 hp is one of 20 Austin 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 1912. 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 Austin 30 hp properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1910s were the decade the automobile became an industry — Ford's moving assembly line cut the price of motoring by an order of magnitude and forced every rival to industrialise or vanish. 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 Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce Silver-Ghost two-seater phaeton, the Praga Praga Grand, the Panhard Panhard & Levassor type X 12 coupé-chauffeur — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Austin 30 hp reads like this: the record lists its engine as 5883 cc straight-four engine / I4 / 6077 cc straight-four engine / I4; quoted output is not reported / Tax horsepower 30.56; kerb weight is recorded at predecessor = Austin 18-24; drive goes through clutch, 4-speed gearbox, propeller shaft within a torque tube, brake drum behind first universal joint; the layout is platform =. 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 Austin story

Within Austin's own catalogue the Austin 30 hp sits alongside the Austin 10 hp, the Austin 12/4 "Low Loader" Taxi, the Austin 14, the Austin 18. The record names the Austin 18-24 as its predecessor and the Austin 20 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to class =. Assembly is recorded at Longbridge, Northfield Birmingham.

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

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Austin 30 hp 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.