AC 3000ME – Cult Classic, Not Best Seller

The Cobra, right? That’s what you’re thinking. At the mere mention of AC Cars that’s where most people’s thoughts go. We get it, it’s the same for us. When Carol Shelby approached the British automaker with the idea of dropping a Ford V8 into its Ace chassis it marked a seminal moment in time for the British sports car company that produced one of the most memorable cars ever made. It would be a similar result if we said Porsche. You naturally think 911. We say Subaru, you think Impreza. We’re not claiming to be mind-readers and we would never assume to know exactly what our readers are thinking but as fellow classic car fans we understand that’s just the way it is and the 3000ME simply doesn’t flash up in the old grey matter, generally speaking, when the AC name is bandied abound.

What we’re trying to say, in a roundabout way (this is the Car & Classic magazine after all so, words) is that there are other, lesser known cars from AC’s oeuvre that sadly didn’t get the breaks that the Cobra did, and that’s a shame because the car in question – the AC 3000ME – was pretty damn good. Stick a conjunction in there and the statement still rings true. It was pretty and damn good. So why don’t we remember it as fondly as its far more famous and successful brother? While its path to production was rife with incident, the idea for the 3000ME was a simple one – to build an affordable, mid-engined sports car. What could possibly go wrong? Well, to tell the story of the 3000ME we have to go all the way back to the early ’70s and a little-known project called the Diablo. No, not that one. See, there’s that word association again?

The Diablo was designed and built by quite the dynamic duo. Peter Bohanna, an experienced engineer previously of Lola and Ford’s Advanced Vehicle Operations, who had been involved with the GT40, joined forces with Robin Stables, a race engineer and Lotus dealer who also knew his onions when it came to vehicle engineering and design. The result was the Bohanna-Stables Diablo – a mid-engined (1.5-litre BMC E-Series) sports car built upon a tubular space-frame chassis with a GRP body that was clearly influenced by the pair’s motorsport experience. It was a good looking car and with front and rear subframes, independent coil springs and wishbone suspension, as well as disc brakes all round, the engineering was on point too.

Looking to put the Diablo into production, Bohanna and Stables (if that’s not a ’70s TV buddy cop duo we don’t know what is) presented the car at the Racing Show in London in 1972 where it would catch the eye of AC sales manager Keith Judd. Judd loved the car so much that, like a cat proudly displaying a fresh kill to its owner, he immediately took the car to company chairman Derek Hurlock at the AC factory in Thames Ditton. A deal was struck and the rights were purchased with the caveat that Bohanna and Stables were kept on in a consultancy capacity. Then the reality of the situation kicked in.

Building a one-off prototype/concept is one thing, but putting it into production is another entirely and AC quickly realised that a lot had to be changed to make the Diablo a viable production car. To keep costs down the tubular chassis had to be ditched in favour of a monocoque perimeter steel alternative with bolt-on sub-frames and the Austin Maxi E-Series four-cylinder was deemed too underpowered and subsequently replaced with the proven 3.0-litre Ford Essex V6. AC’s engineering team, headed by Alan Turner and Bill Wilson, spent the next few years developing and honing the car and a trick gearbox had to be designed to replace the Maxi engine’s in-sump configuration. It was a rather complicated affair that used Hewland gears and was driven from the crank by a triplex chain. A strong box it may have been but all of this fettling was further delaying production.

1973 saw the first public viewing of the car, now with the 3000ME moniker (3,000cc, mid-engined) in prototype form at the Earls Court Motor Show and despite the car still being a million miles away from the finished article, it garnered a lot of interest, with numerous orders being taken at the estimated £3,000-£4,000 list price quoted by AC – a figure, it would turn out, that the company had no hopes of sticking to. All the while development of the car continued behind AC’s factory doors and after various styling changes the 3000ME was ready for public consumption in ’74. Then it failed its crash test.

Recently implemented type approval regulations stipulated that in a head-on crash at 30mph the steering wheel of a car can move no further than 5 inches. Unfortunately for AC, the 3000ME’s wheel shifted 5.5 inches and so a further re-development of the chassis and steering was required, pushing the car’s official release date back even further. When the 3000ME finally went into production in 1979 the actual cost of the car had ballooned from that initial £3-4K to over £11,000, due in part to the rise in development costs. Not only that but the car now saw itself competing with the likes of the Lotus Esprit and Porsche’s 924 for the public’s affections, not to mention its hard-earned.

Outright performance from the stock 138bhp Essex V6 wasn’t exactly stellar. 0-60mph in 8.5 seconds and a top speed of 120 were a little disparate when compared to the car’s sleek, almost Stratos-esque aesthetic but the car excelled in pretty much every other respect. It was well-engineered, roomy, well-equipped and deceivingly comfortable. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to secure success for the 3000ME and sales were dire. Performance enhancements were available as early as 1980, however, when engineer Robin Rew’s tuning company strapped a Garrett AiResearch turbocharger to the engine, thus increasing power to a much more respectable 200bhp. Unfortunately Hurlock was not interested in adopting this turbo setup for the factory cars and so performance remained underwhelming for all but the few customers who did actually take their MEs to Rew.

By the mid-eighties AC Cars wasn’t exactly doing well, financially speaking and after just over 70 cars were produced Derek Hurlock had had enough and sold the rights and tooling for the 3000ME to Scottish entrepreneur David MacDonald in ’84, who set up AC Scotland plc in a bid to continue production of the car. His heart was in the right place but unfortunately this new company had similar cash flow problems and after just a year in business and a further 30 cars built it too closed its doors, thus ending the story of the 3000ME with only 104 cars having been made in total.

The 3000ME is another classic case of right car, wrong time, with its developers shooting for the moon and ending up in dead space. It didn’t fail as a concept and it didn’t fail as a car. It failed because of circumstance. If it could have gone into production a few years sooner, or perhaps with a slightly more dynamic and capable powerplant things might have been different. The fact remains that it was a great car, especially when its induction was well and truly forced. It was well made (most of those original production cars are still with us), it has pedigree and it still looks gorgeous. We’d have one in a heartbeat and it just so happens that at the time of writing there is one available via our classifieds…