Talbot Horizon

The Talbot Horizon is one of 24 Talbot models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1978. 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 Talbot Horizon 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 Toyota Toyota Supra, the GM (General Motors) Saab 900, the Mazda Mazda RX-7 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Talbot Horizon reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / petrol: / 1118 cc Simca Poissy engine#1118 cc / Poissy Straight-four engine / I4 / 1294 cc Simca Poissy engine#1294 cc / Poissy I4 / 1442 cc Simca Po; kerb weight is recorded at 950 kg; the layout is FF layout. 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 Talbot story

Within Talbot's own catalogue the Talbot Horizon sits alongside the Talbot 14-45, the Talbot Express, the Talbot Samba, the Talbot Tagora. The record names the Simca 1100 / Hillman Avenger as its predecessor and the Peugeot 309 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Peter Horbury, Roy Axe. Assembly is recorded at Finland: Uusikaupunki (Saab Automobile / Saab-Valmet) / France: Poissy (Peugeot) / Spain: Madrid / United Kingdom: Ryton-on-Dunsmore / Ryton (Ryton plant).

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

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Talbot Horizon costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.