Place Your Bets: Is Bristol Cars Actually Coming Back?

If you don’t remember Bristol Cars, it’s presumably because you’re not sufficiently old or British. However, the brand is allegedly in the midst of a comeback with its current CEO promising a formal relaunch in 2026.

The car company was formed following World War II during a period where many airplane manufacturers were either returning or pivoting back toward building automobiles. Bristol Cars became a division of the Bristol Aeroplane Company in 1945 and immediately started building luxury cars.

While its first products were effectively rejiggered and hand-built BMW models, Bristol gradually began making them more British during the 1950s. However, it kept utilizing German components due to industrial ties shared with BMW’s aircraft division prior to the war. At the time, Bristol was building some of the fastest vehicles available to British consumers.

The bespoke nature of the vehicles meant prices were high and production volumes were staggeringly low, forcing the company to rely heavily on maximizing luxury and performance. By the late 1960s, it was becoming clear that successive models were becoming heavier — encouraging the business to import Chrysler V8s to improve horsepower and torque.

The brand would be bought and sold a handful of times over the years. But it ended up sticking with the oversized Chrysler motors for decades. One of its final models, the Bristol Fighter, actually used a retuned version of the same V10 found inside the Dodge Viper. Despite being heavily based on the American coupe, the Bristol continued to be hand-built and used its own chassis.

By 2011, the company was in dire trouble and ended up going into administration as the factory was closed. A separate company was formed to liquidate the existing assets, which were purchased by Kamkorp. The initial focus was to restore and refurbish older Bristol models. But it wasn’t long before new models were being teased. We even got a couple of pre-production prototypes in 2016 and the promise that they’d be priced more competitively (relatively speaking) than some previous models.

Sadly, nothing came of this and the fate of the company was sealed in 2020. Bristol Cars was under court order to liquidate everything in order to pay off creditors. The intellectual property rights to Bristol Cars were re-secured the following year, with plans for its new owners to make it a “leading British electric vehicle company” by 2026.

Bristol Cars CEO Jason Wharton has since reiterated that the electrification plans persist, with a target date of the brand’s 80th anniversary. That still places the big day taking place sometime in 2026. But we’ve not seen much in the way of product and there were claims made a few years ago that Bristol could launch its first all-electric car by 2025.

That said, leadership doesn’t seem totally married to the concept of the brand being EV only. Initial models were supposed to be reimagined versions of the Bristol Fighter (above) and Type 411 (top of the page). They’d play host to modernized suspensions and powertrains, otherwise sticking closely to the original designs. However, those vehicles have yet to manifest.

Wharton’s latest promise is that subsequent models would be available with electric, combustion, or hybridized powertrains. But it’s not clear how that would be prioritized or where Bristol would even be sourcing the relevant components. In fact, its latest “launch” announcement isn’t so much for a vehicle but the “Vision 8.0” concept that will supposedly revive the brand within the next two years.

This was accompanied by a photograph (bottom of the article) that looks to be a mockup of some vehicle it has in development. But this isn’t what we’d normally expect from an automaker that plans to turn things around within the next 24 months. Still, the company has been talking about both the Fighter and 411 for several years and they may be further along in development than this sketch would seem to indicate.

There have likewise been swirling about an electrified Buccaneer being in development since 2021 and claims that the company had not yet given up on trying to build the Speedster roadster originally previewed in 2016 before the intellectual property changed hands.

The only real assurances we have is that any vehicles that do end up entering production should be quite luxurious and feature oodles of power if the plan is to keep Bristol affixed to its roots. The website is spartan and basically comprises a reference to the Vision 8.0 plan and a survey about interest in the revived brand.

I’m admittedly skeptical and not enough of an Anglophile for the above to be significantly important to me. These are cars that are likely not to immigrate to our shores, should they enter production, and would be far too expensive for the average consumer to purchase. But this is a historic brand vying to achieve redemption and that’s something all enthusiasts can appreciate. You may feel differently.

[Images: Bristol]

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