Bonito

The Bonito began outside Britain as the FT Bonito, designed by Kuhnle for Fiberfab-Karosserie in West Germany and shown at the 1969 Frankfurt motor show. Its low nose echoed the American Fiberfab Avenger GT and ultimately the Ford GT40, but the taller greenhouse and restrained rear quarters made it a distinct European design. German production used a standard, unshortened Volkswagen Type 1/Beetle platform and rear-mounted air-cooled engine, with mass-produced glazing and fittings drawn from Ford Taunus, Opel Rekord or Commodore, Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and NSU vehicles. When German manufacture ended, Alan Bradshaw and Hans Alma founded ACM Limited at Poole, Dorset, in 1981 to import kits. ACM purchased the design rights in 1982, moved to Torpoint in Cornwall and shortened the marketed name to Bonito. Graham Keane's AED International continued the same car from Torpoint and later Bristol during 1983–84. Bonito Performance Center at Torpoint became the final original British producer in 1984–85. The entire British marque range is therefore one Bonito model family; changes of company and address did not create new models, and donor engines, registration years and builder choices remain configurations. Seraph Cars used a modified body on a bespoke front-engine, rear-drive chassis for its 1985–87 Seraph 3000, while Excalibur Cars developed the close-clone Crusader; both are materially separate marques and excluded from Bonito. Whitfield Specialist Cars could still make Bonito bodies to order around 2010, but isolated replacement or reproduction shells do not prove resumed series vehicle production. No reliable total specifically for the British ACM/AED/Performance Center sequence survives, so German FT Bonito production estimates are not misapplied to it.

Text adapted from “Bonito” on Wikipedia ↗ · CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗