Lancia
This is the catalogue record of the Lancia Beta, one of 116 models Lancia has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1972. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Lancia Beta properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. 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 BMW BMW 5 Series, the Renault Renault 5, the Mitsubishi Mitsubishi Lancer — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Lancia Beta reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1.3 L Straight-four engine / I4 (Petrol engine / petrol) / 1.4 L I4 (petrol) / 1.6 L I4 (petrol) / 1.8 L I4 (petrol) / 2.0 L I4 (petrol) / 2.0 L Super; kerb weight is recorded at 1000 –; drive goes through wheelbase = Berlina: 2535 mm / Coupé: 2350 mm; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive / Rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive (Montecarlo). 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 436,613 units, which makes it a solid production run.
Within Lancia's own catalogue the Lancia Beta sits alongside the Lancia 037, the Lancia 2000, the Lancia Alfa-12HP, the Lancia Appia. The record names the Lancia Fulvia as its predecessor and the Lancia Prisma as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Centro Stile Fiat (Berlina) / Centro Stile Lancia under Piero Castagnero (Coupé and Trevi) / Pininfarina (Spider, HPE and Montecarlo). Assembly is recorded at Italy: Turin / Italy: Grugliasco (Pininfarina) / Italy: Milan (Zagato: Spider) / Spain: Pamplona (SEAT).
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.
The catalogue records what the Lancia Beta 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.
Tap a star. Ratings are kept on your device and feed the most-loved list.
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.