AC Ace (1993)

The 1993 AC Ace was a new car that Brian Angliss introduced at the 1993 London Motor Show and named after the 1950s AC sports car, though it shared nothing with it but the name. It was a modern automobile with a stainless steel chassis and an aluminium body, and it was expensive to develop and to build. The costs hit Angliss hard enough that he sold his large motorcycle collection, a vintage Bentley and other assets to try to make ends meet, and the receivers were called in by 1996 after about 50 new Aces had been built. When AC Car Group under Alan Lubinsky took over the company at the end of 1996 it kept making both the Cobra Mk IV and this Ace, and two Aceca coupes, the enclosed version of the Ace, were also made. The earlier car is the separate entity AC Ace.