Daimler DS420

Among the 19 Daimler Company entries in the MotorJury library, the Daimler DS420 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 1968. 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 Daimler DS420 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. 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 Peugeot Peugeot 504, the Toyota Toyota Hilux, the Pontiac Pontiac Firebird — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Daimler DS420 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 4235 cc Jaguar XK straight-six; kerb weight is recorded at 2133 kg (4702 pounds); drive goes through 3-speed automatic: / • BorgWarner Model 8 / • BorgWarner Model 12 / • GM Turbo-Hydramatic 400. 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 Daimler Company story

Within Daimler Company's own catalogue the Daimler DS420 sits alongside the BSA Light Six, the Critchley Light car, the Daimler 250, the Daimler Conquest. The record names the Daimler DR450 and Vanden Plas Princess limousines as its predecessor and the None as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to sp = uk. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Kingsbury, England (1968–1979) / United Kingdom: Coventry, England (from 1979).

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

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 Daimler DS420 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.