Vauxhall A-Type

This is the catalogue record of the Vauxhall A-Type, one of 67 models Vauxhall has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1908. 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 Vauxhall A-Type properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1900s were the pioneering years, when motoring was still an adventure for the wealthy, roads were unpaved, and every manufacturer was effectively an experimental workshop. 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 Ford Ford Model T, the British Motor Corporation Austin 15 hp, the Oldsmobile Oldsmobile Model M — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Vauxhall A-Type reads like this: the record lists its engine as 4-cylinder inline / 3054 cc / 3402 cc; quoted output is 1909 38 bhp / 1910 60 bhp / 1913 80 bhp / tax horsepower: / 3054cc 20.09hp / 3402cc 22.38hp; kerb weight is recorded at depends on coachwork; drive goes through manual: 4-speed and reverse / (some early cars 3 speed) / clutch: early cars— cone / later cars— multi-plate in graphite; 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 Vauxhall story

Within Vauxhall's own catalogue the Vauxhall A-Type sits alongside the Vauxhall 10-4, the Vauxhall 30/98, the Vauxhall B-Type, the Vauxhall Cadet. The record names the successor = as its predecessor and the class = as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Laurence Pomeroy. Assembly is recorded at Luton, Bedfordshire, England.

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

The catalogue records what the Vauxhall A-Type 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.