Silver Bullet

This is the catalogue record of the Silver Bullet, one of 11 models Sunbeam 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. 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 Silver Bullet 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 Delage Delage D8, the Lancia Lancia type Dilambda torpedo, the Bugatti Bugatti Type 35 B — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Silver Bullet reads like this: the record lists its engine as Two Sunbeam 2,000hp supercharged V12 engines, totalling 48 litres; quoted output is 2,000 hp (claimed) 4,000 hp for the car; kerb weight is recorded at designer =; drive goes through wheelbase =; the layout is platform =. 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 Sunbeam story

Within Sunbeam's own catalogue the Silver Bullet sits alongside the Sunbeam Rapier, the Sunbeam 1000 hp, the Sunbeam 3-litre, the Sunbeam 350HP.

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.

Reading a sparse record honestly

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.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Silver Bullet 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.