Sunbeam Talbot
Sunbeam-Talbot was a brand owned by the British automobile company Rootes and was used from 1938 to 1953.
History of the brand
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Sunbeam and Talbot were initially independent companies that began producing automobiles in Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1919, the French car manufacturer Darracq took over both Sunbeam and Talbot. The Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq Group (abbreviated to STD or STD) was formed from the individual components and produced automobiles in Great Britain and France for the following decade and a half. For the UK market, STD mostly used the Sunbeam and Darracq brands, while the Talbot brand was preferred for France. Sunbeam produced in Wolverhampton while Talbot built the cars for the UK market in London . In the 1920s, Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq was heavily involved in motor racing; Sunbeam racing cars set a total of five world records (two of them by Malcolm Campbell ), the last with the Sunbeam 1000 hp . However, the group was not run efficiently. While Talbot made profits in Great Britain and France, the company made big losses with Sunbeam cars for years. At the end of 1934, Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq was insolvent.
In January 1935, the London-based Rootes Group, to which Hillman and Humber belonged, took over the Sunbeam brand and - for the British market - also the Talbot brand. The Italian entrepreneur Antonio Lago bought the French branch of the Talbot brand ; the cars built in France were then called Talbot-Lago . In Great Britain Rootes stopped the production of Sunbeam models just a few weeks after the takeover, while the British Talbot models lost their independence by 1938 and were converted to Rootes technology. In the British-speaking world, this process Rootesifizierung (will Rootesifying ) called. Attempts to revive the Sunbeam brand with the newly developed upper-class model Sunbeam Thirty 1936 failed early on.
In 1938 Rootes established the new Sunbeam-Talbot brand in Great Britain, which offered sister models of the popular Hillman cars with slightly different styling. In 1953 the brand name was changed to Sunbeam. The Rootes Group and its successor Chrysler Europe used the Sunbeam brand until 1976. From 1977 the term Sunbeam was the model name of a compact car produced in Great Britain that was sold in Europe under the Chrysler brand (see Chrysler Sunbeam ). The term Talbot, on the other hand, was initially dropped without replacement in 1953 until the French PSA group revived it in 1978 as the new owner of the Rootes successor, Chrysler Europe (see Talbot (car brand) ).
Models
The Sunbeam-Talbot Ten and the largely identical 2-liter , which came on the market in 1938 and 1939, were among the first models of the new brand . They were technically based on the contemporary Hillman Minx . The larger 3-liter and 4-liter model pair based on Humber technology was positioned above them . Production of these series ended in autumn 1939 after the outbreak of World War II. After the end of the war, the Sunbeam-Talbot 80 and 90 models appeared ; the latter were offered until 1953.
| Models 1938–1953 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Construction period | Cylinder / valve control | Displacement | power |
| 3 liter | 1938-1940 | 6 / sv | 3181 cc | 60 kW |
| 4 liter | 1938-1940 | 6 / sv | 4086 cc | |
| Ten | 1938-1948 | 4 / sv | 1185 cc | 30 kW |
| 2 liter | 1939-1948 | 4 / sv | 1944 cc | 41 kW |
| 80 | 1948-1950 | 4 / ohv | 1185 cc | 34.5 kW |
| 90 Mark I. | 1948-1950 | 4 / ohv | 1944 cc | 47 kW |
| 90 Mark II | 1950-1952 | 4 / ohv | 2267 cc | 51 kW |
| 90 Mark IIA | 1952-1954 | 4 / ohv | 2267 cc | 51-56.5 kW |
literature
- Geoff Carverhill: Rootes Story: The Making of a Global Automotive Empire , The Crowood Press, 2018, ISBN 9781785004803
- Graham Robson: The Cars of the Rootes Group , Motor Racing Publications, London 2007, ISBN 978-1903088296
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Graham Robson: The Cars of the Rootes Group , Motor Racing Publications, London 2007, ISBN 978-1903088296 , pp. 20 f.
- ^ Graham Robson: The Cars of the Rootes Group , Motor Racing Publications, London 2007, ISBN 978-1903088296 , p. 131.