Lancia Aurelia

Among the 116 Lancia entries in the MotorJury library, the Lancia Aurelia 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 1950. 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 Lancia Aurelia 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 Toyota Toyota Land Cruiser, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Bel Air, the Porsche Porsche 356 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Lancia Aurelia reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1.8 L Lancia V6 engine#Aurelia / tipo B10 V6 engine / V6 / 2.0 L Lancia V6 engine#Aurelia / tipo B15/B20/B21/B22 V6 / 2.3 L Lancia V6 engine#Aurelia / tipo B12 V6 / 2.5 L Lancia V6; kerb weight is recorded at 1070-1215 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. 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. Production is recorded at 18,201 units, which makes it a low-volume car in industry terms.

Its place in the Lancia story

Within Lancia's own catalogue the Lancia Aurelia sits alongside the Lancia 037, the Lancia 2000, the Lancia Alfa-12HP, the Lancia Appia. The record names the Lancia Aprilia as its predecessor and the Lancia Flaminia as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Felice Mario Boano at Ghia (B20 coupé) / Pinin Farina (B24 convertible).

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