Hillman
This is the catalogue record of the Hillman 20 8-cylinder, one of 23 models Hillman has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1929.
To read the Hillman 20 8-cylinder properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1920s were the vintage era, when coachbuilt bodies, six- and eight-cylinder engines and the first true luxury marques defined a golden age of craftsmanship. 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 Fiat Fiat 514, the Bugatti Bugatti type 40 coupé, the Peugeot Peugeot 201 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Hillman 20 8-cylinder reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2620 cc / straight-8; quoted output is 58 bhp @2,0 rpm / Tax horsepower 19.69; kerb weight is recorded at fabric saloon 24 cwt, 2688 lb / Vortic all-steel saloon 32½ cwt, 3640 lb; drive goes through single plate dry clutch, 4-speed gearbox, Hardy Spicer propeller shaft with metal universal joints is mated with a half-floating spiral bevel driven back axle; the layout is FR. 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 Hillman's own catalogue the Hillman 20 8-cylinder sits alongside the Hillman Imp, the Hillman "Sixteen", "Hawk" and "80", the Hillman 14, the Hillman Avenger. The record names the none as its predecessor and the Hillman Vortic 8 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to sp = uk. Assembly is recorded at class = Executive car.
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.
The catalogue records what the Hillman 20 8-cylinder was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in 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.