AC 3000ME

Behind every "new" car, there's an army of engineers, designers, testers, and manufacturing experts who have already planned out every aspect of the vehicle's introduction.

Before this, product planners, suppliers, and executives, who know a few years in advance what's coming down the pipeline. In many cases, a “new” car is launched with its successor already in mind.

In the traditional space, this can take five years or more. In China, this process is ideally 18 months or less. At a small manufacturer in England and Scotland in the ’70s, 18 months would have barely gotten you a body shell.

On debut, you can see a lot of energy is put into just making the vehicle, with smaller carmakers putting all of their effort into the design, development, and launch of a new model — only to ride the afterglow of success for as long as possible.

At an auto show, rarely will an automaker will then see someone else's design that they'd like to sell as their own. Then buy it and do just that.

Welcome to the AC 3000ME.

Though AC had decades of success behind them, including the Ace, which became the Shelby Cobra, by the early 1970s, the company was making a few hundred cars here, a few hundred there (mostly "Cobra"-er-"Ace"-based sports cars.) If it was to survive the next few decades, AC was going to need a more modern car.

In 1972, at the Racing Car Show, a small design firm called Bohanna-Stables showed the Diablo, an affordable mid-engined sports car that looked like a cross between the Saab Sonnet III and Ford GT70. 

Compact, low, sleek, but angular — as was all the rage back then — the car was penned by Lola designers Peter Bohanna and Robin Stables working in their spare time.

AC loved it, and bought it, announcing shortly after that the Ford V6-powered sports car would be in production by 1974 and would carry a price tag of between £3000 and £4000.

The company put its resources behind the car, the first fresh design for AC in quite some time. By the early 1970s, crash tests were mandatory, and the 3000ME failed its first type approval when the steering column was pushed back a reported 'half inch' beyond the maximum.

Four years later, after an expensive and time-consuming redesign, it was ready. Orders were taken at the 1978 NEC Motor Show and 50 names put onto the waiting list. The following year, 1979, saw the production cars finally introduced…at a price north of £11,000.

I call that “double and a bit”.

What was its price just a year later, in 1980? More than £13,000 for the standard car, but closer to £14,000 with leather and a cassette radio and unassisted disc brakes. At that time, a Porsche 924 Turbo cost £14,000, and a Lotus Esprit S2 was £15,000.

Not a problem, right? After all, the sports car experts at AC were introducing a car that took more than £1m to develop and that, although challenging to look at, had performance that lived up to the firm's last major success, the V8-powered AC "Cobra".

Right?