The car
The car is a 1957 AC Aceca that left the Thames Ditton works on 2 July 1957. What makes it unusual is under the bonnet: a two-litre Triumph TR3 engine, fitted by AC rather than by a later owner. AC designated the car a prototype on account of that engine, and then sold it to the public anyway. AC Heritage, which knows these cars as well as anyone, describes it simply as the unique Triumph-engined car.
That matters here because the Aceca is normally described as having been offered with three engines: AC's own Light Six, the Bristol six from 1956, and at the very end the Ford Zephyr unit tuned by Ruddspeed. This car is the reason that list is not quite complete.
The restoration
Car SOS restored the car for an episode first shown in April 2016, in the programme's fourth series. The workshop did most of the work in house, with the engine rebuilt by the Triumph specialists TRGB, and the original red leather seats and door cards were kept rather than replaced, which is the decision this archive would have argued for.
Sources differ on whether the episode is the first or the second of series four. The April 2016 broadcast date is consistent across all of them.
Afterwards
The car was displayed at the National Motor Museum in 2015 and 2016 and at the British Motor Museum at Gaydon in 2019. It later came to auction with Iconic Auctioneers, carrying an estimate of ninety to a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
Television restorations attract a good deal of scepticism, some of it earned. What can be said of this one is that the car has been shown publicly at two national museums since, and has been offered at a figure well above what an ordinary Aceca commands.
What the register says
This archive's register records three Acecas fitted with Triumph engines. Two are 1957 cars, AE 618 and AE 619, both noted as carrying a Triumph TR3 overdrive engine. The third, AEX 594 of 1956, is recorded as Triumph-engined and was exported to the United States in 2012.
Two things about that are worth stating openly. The register gives the identical Triumph engine number for both AE 618 and AE 619, which cannot be right and is almost certainly a transcription error carried in from the source data. And AC Heritage refers to the Car SOS car by an identifier close enough to one of those chassis numbers to invite the obvious conclusion, without this archive being able to confirm it.
So the honest position is that the register holds Triumph-engined cars, that one of them may well be the car in the programme, and that the archive would rather say so than assert a match it has not verified. If you know which car it is, or hold the correct engine numbers, the contact page is at the foot of every page on this site.
Sources: AC Heritage's record for the car; Classic Motorsports' listing of the same vehicle; the archive's own register. The episode number within series four is given differently by different listings and is therefore not stated here.
