Vauxhall Prince Henry

Among the 67 Vauxhall entries in the MotorJury library, the Vauxhall Prince Henry 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 1911. 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 Prince Henry properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1910s were the decade the automobile became an industry — Ford's moving assembly line cut the price of motoring by an order of magnitude and forced every rival to industrialise or vanish. 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 Alfa Romeo A.L.F.A 15 HP, the Panhard Panhard & Levassor type X 8 coupé-chauffeur — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Vauxhall Prince Henry reads like this: the record lists its engine as I4 / 1911—3054 cc / 1913—3969 cc; quoted output is 1911—60 bhp @2,800 rpm / 1913—75 bhp / maximum speed 2,500 r.p.m. / / Tax horsepower / 1911— 20.09 ("20 hp") / 1913— 23.82 ("24 hp"); kerb weight is recorded at 1250 kg depends on body; drive goes through four-speed sliding-pinion gearbox, live axle; the layout is FR layout. Worked together, those figures give roughly 1529 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. 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 Prince Henry sits alongside the Vauxhall 10-4, the Vauxhall 30/98, the Vauxhall A-Type, the Vauxhall B-Type. The record names the Vauxhall 20 hp as its predecessor and the Vauxhall 30-98 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Laurence Pomeroy. Assembly is recorded at Luton.

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.

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 Vauxhall Prince Henry was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.