The motor industry has a tendency to pull in opposite directions at once. One week brings the debut of the Luce, Ferrari’s first fully electric road car, and the next delivers a snarling, five-litre, V8 muscle machine from one of Britain’s oldest surviving automakers. The new AC Cobra GT Coupé — the first production Cobra ever built with a fixed roof — makes no apologies for what it is, and for a certain kind of enthusiast, that’s precisely the point.
AC Cars, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year and is now based at Castle Donington in the English Midlands, unveiled the GT Coupé toward the end of May. The car had been announced the previous year but has now entered what the company describes as its ready-to-build phase. It is the first hardtop road car in a lineage stretching back to 1962. Track-only Cobra specials with roofs have existed before, but this is the first time a roofed version has been offered as a production road car.
With 125 years of coachbuilding experience behind them, AC’s in-house body team has shaped a body that is unmistakably Cobra — but dressed for a new century.
The figures are considerable. The five-litre Ford V8 has been tuned to produce 730 hp in a car that weighs under 1,600 kg (3,530 lb). The Clubsport variant is claimed to reach 198 mph (318.6 km/h) and sprint from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds. The construction method is traditional by supercar standards: an extruded aluminum spaceframe chassis wrapped in carbon fiber bodywork, with every car hand-built to individual client specification.
The five-litre Ford V8 sits in an aluminum and carbon fiber body that keeps the car below the 1,600 kg mark — essential for those performance figures. The roof itself is more than a styling decision. The GT Coupé features a double-bubble roofline — a design solution that keeps overall vehicle height low without compromising headroom, even for drivers over six feet tall. It also contributes to aerodynamic efficiency by smoothing airflow over the car. At the rear, the classic Kammtail treatment — a truncated tail design with decades of motorsport heritage — reduces drag without requiring an elongated body.
The double-bubble roof is engineered to keep the roofline low while still accommodating taller drivers in comfort. Buyers can choose between a six-speed manual gearbox for those who prefer the traditional experience, or a ten-speed automatic with steering-wheel-mounted paddle shifters. Interior appointments are in keeping with the car’s bespoke nature: hand-stitched leather, analog instruments, and the kind of detailing that reflects the time taken to build each example.
The Kammtail rear — a race-proven aerodynamic solution that dates back as far as the Cobra itself — gives the coupé its distinctive truncated tail.
Prices start at £231,900 excluding VAT, rising well past a quarter of a million pounds (approx. US$311,440). First deliveries are scheduled for 2028, and the waiting list process is handled personally by an AC Cars Concierge representative. The company is hoping the coupé will shift its production ambitions significantly — from around 100 hand-built cars per year to roughly 1,000 total units, a target CEO David Conza described at the launch as the transition from “a boutique manufacturer to a global performance brand.”
Cobra coupés have appeared as track specials before, but the GT Coupé is the first with a fixed roof to enter series production.
Source: AC Cars
