Bristol 404 and 405
Bristol Cars
MarqueBristol Cars
Production1953–1958 / 52 (404) / 308 (405)
Engine1,971 cc ohv I6 / 2,216 cc ohv I6
Bristol Cars
Among the 19 Bristol Cars entries in the MotorJury library, the Bristol 404 and 405 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 1953. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Bristol 404 and 405 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 Chevrolet Chevrolet Corvette, the Cadillac Cadillac Eldorado, the Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz S-Class — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Bristol 404 and 405 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1,971 cc ohv I6 / 2,216 cc ohv I6; kerb weight is recorded at 1040 kg; 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 Bristol Cars's own catalogue the Bristol 404 and 405 sits alongside the Bristol 400 (1947), the Bristol 401, the Bristol 402, the Bristol 403. The record names the Bristol 403 as its predecessor and the Bristol 406 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Filton.
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 Bristol 404 and 405 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.