Small company, big-name car

The story of AC’s ever-popular Cobra.

Few firms in any industry have had such a complicated history as AC. It reads more like a Dostoyevskian novel than a company Powerpoint presentation. In its 110-plus years, it has had innumerable owners and premises.

It has produced arguably the world’s most sought-after performance car but also the most derided vehicle ever to appear on British roads.

It also made the trains that rolled for many years out to the far end of Southend pier.

The Weller brothers made their first car in 1903 under the name Auto Carriers, a name soon abbreviated to AC.

One brother designed an engine in 1920 so good it was still being fitted to cars in the early ’60s.

Output was always small, with AC in a niche market far removed from the high-volume sector of Ford, Austin and Morris. After 1945 AC increasingly focused on exotic, high-powered sports cars admired to this day.

AC also manufactured the Invacar, a rickety blue NHS three-wheeler for the disabled. It had a BSA motorbike engine, handlebar steering, fibreglass bodywork and space for one disabled driver and wheelchair. It was slow and very unstable, especially in crosswinds. However, it survived until 1976, when racing driver Graham Hill showed on TV just how bad the Invacar was.

They were withdrawn and scrapped, to be replaced by production cars of all makes under the Motability scheme. Invacar’s demise was a body blow for AC.

However, some years earlier, in 1961, American motorsport enthusiast Carroll Shelby picked on the AC’s Ace model to challenge the Chevrolet Camaro in US sports car racing.

The upshot was a short-block US Ford V8 engine being shoehorned into an AC Ace bodyshell – creating the Cobra, pictured, to this day one of the most sought-after cars on this planet.

However, AC still struggled, as so many small UK car makers have done. In 2004 it finished up making cars in Malta but that hit the buffers in 2007.

Efforts to re-start production in the UK have been mooted but so far seem to have come to nothing. However, the firm still exists, with its HQ at Thames Ditton in Surrey.

Its name and repute will survive for decades yet.