Vallelunga De Tomaso's first road-going production model was the
Vallelunga (named after the
racing circuit) introduced in 1963; a spider competition version was being raced a few months before the introduction. This mid-engine sports car had a 104 hp (78 kW) 4 cylinder engine shared with the
Ford Cortina, and was able to attain a top speed of 215 km/h (134 mph). It had a fabricated steel
backbone chassis, which was to become a common feature of De Tomaso cars. The
aluminium coupé body was designed and several built by
Fissore before production was moved to
Ghia in 1965 where they were assembled with
fibreglass bodies. In all, approximately 60 were produced.
Mangusta The
Mangusta, introduced in 1966 was the first De Tomaso produced in significant numbers. With the Mangusta, De Tomaso moved from European to American Ford engines. The car had a 4.7-litre iron-block
V8 engine and
steel and aluminium coupé bodywork from
Ghia—an Italian coachbuilder also controlled by
Alejandro de Tomaso. About 400 Mangustas were built before production ended in 1971.
Pantera The Mangusta was succeeded by the
Pantera. It appeared in 1971 with a
351 Cleveland Ford V8 and a low, wedge-shaped body designed by
Ghia's
Tom Tjaarda. Through an agreement with Ford, De Tomaso sold Panteras in the USA through Ford's
Lincoln-
Mercury dealers. Between 1971 and 1973, 6,128 Panteras were produced in
Modena, the largest number of cars De Tomaso produced. The
1973 oil crisis and other factors compelled Ford to pull out of the Pantera deal at the end of 1973, a few months after buying all of De Tomaso's shares and getting control of the entire production process in the three factories that shared the workload in northern Italy. But De Tomaso retained from Ford the right to produce the car for the "rest of the world" market, so he continued Pantera production at a greatly reduced scale of fewer than 100 cars per year during the 1970s and 1980s. From then on, the cars were largely hand-built, even more than before. Incorporating a
Marcello Gandini facelift, suspension redesign, partial chassis redesign and a new, smaller Ford engine, the
Pantera 90 Si model (the
i standing for
iniezione—Italian for
fuel injection) was introduced in 1990. There were 41
90 Si models manufactured with 2 crash tested, 38 sold, and 1 example going directly into a museum before the Pantera was finally phased out in 1993 to make way for the radical,
carbon-fibre-bodied
Guarà.
Guarà The
Guarà succeeded the Pantera and began production in 1993. The Guarà was designed by Carlo Gaino of Synthesis design, an Italian design house; Gaino also designed the
Maserati Barchetta. Based on a Maserati competition car from 1991, using Ford and
BMW parts in a composite body, the Guarà was available in coupé and barchetta versions. As with all De Tomasos except the Pantera, production was both limited and sporadic.
Biguà and off-road vehicles In the early 2000s two other cars were planned by De Tomaso, but both proved abortive. A two-seat
Gandini-styled convertible, the
Biguà, was developed from a 1996
Geneva concept in partnership with
Qvale, an American firm which had long imported European sports cars into the USA. But as production of the Biguà—renamed the Mangusta—began, the relationship between De Tomaso and Qvale soured; Qvale took over the car and rebadged it as the
Qvale Mangusta. Production was short-lived, and Qvale's Italian factory was bought in 2003 by
MG Rover and the Mangusta's mechanicals were then used as the basis of the
MG XPower SV. In April 2002, De Tomaso began a project to build off-road vehicles in a new factory in
Calabria in partnership with the Russian company
UAZ, but this too floundered. The deal projected a production rate of 10,000 cars a year by 2006: however, no cars were built and De Tomaso went into voluntary liquidation in June 2004 after the death of Alejandro de Tomaso in 2003. The Guarà remained available in some markets in 2005 and 2006, but it appears that no cars were built after 2004.
P72 The P72 is a retro-styled sports car introduced at the 2019
Goodwood Festival of Speed under the newly reformed DeTomaso brand. Designed by Jowyn Wong, the car is a homage to the P70, a race car built by
Carroll Shelby and styled by Peter Brock for De Tomaso, introduced in the late 1960s. The design of the car is meant to be hailing back to the LeMans race cars of the 1960s. The interior of the car is meant to have a modern outlook with opulent instrumentation. The chassis built to LMP1 standards is shared with the sister company
Apollo Automobil's Intensa Emozione. == De Tomaso luxury cars ==