Among the 15 De Tomaso entries in the MotorJury library, the De Tomaso 505/38 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
The record does not fix a firm introduction year for the De Tomaso 505/38, which is itself informative: cars without a clean launch date are usually prototypes, coachbuilt specials, or models whose history was written down long after the fact. The catalogue keeps them anyway, because the odd corners of the record are where the interesting machines hide.
On paper, the De Tomaso 505/38 reads like this: kerb weight is recorded at 563 kg. 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 De Tomaso's own catalogue the De Tomaso 505/38 sits alongside the De Tomaso Deauville, the De Tomaso Deauville, the De Tomaso F1, the De Tomaso Guarà. The record names the F1 / 801 as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Design is credited to Giampaolo Dallara.
The De Tomaso 505/38 also has a competition record: 0 recorded wins from 11 starts and 0 championships. A race history changes how a car should be valued — competition machines appreciate on provenance, not depreciation curves.
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.
Some pages in this library brim with specifications; others, like corners of every archive, are thin. The honest response to a thin record is to say so, not to pad it. What is shown here is exactly what the public record supports today — and because the harvest re-runs nightly, the page you are reading is the fullest version of this car's open record that existed the last time the site was built.
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 De Tomaso 505/38 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.