The Breckland Beira is a
sports car
A sports car is a car designed with an emphasis on dynamic performance, such as handling, acceleration, top speed, the thrill of driving and racing capability. Sports cars originated in Europe in the early 1900s and are currently produced by ...
launched in June 2008 at the London
Motorexpo, developed by the
British company
A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of people, whether Natural person, natural, Legal person, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common p ...
Breckland Technologies based in
Dereham
Dereham (), also known as East Dereham, is a town and civil parishes in England, civil parish in the Breckland District of the England, English county of Norfolk. It is situated on the A47 road, about 15 miles (25 km) west of the city ...
,
Norfolk
Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...
. Breckland Technologies was founded in 2000 specialising in manufacturing low volume specialist sports cars such as the
Leading Edge 240 RT and
Mosler MT900. The company became insolvent soon after the announcement of the new Beira, and was dissolved in July 2009.
Beira V8
Based on the
GM Kappa platform
Kappa was General Motors' subcompact rear-wheel drive automobile platform for roadster applications. The architecture debuted in the 2006 Pontiac Solstice and 2007 Saturn Sky, and ended production in 2009. These vehicles generally have a "M" in th ...
, the Breckland Biera was closely related to the
Pontiac Solstice,
Saturn Sky and
Opel GT. Featuring the 6.0 L V8
LS2 engine from
General Motors
The General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is the largest automaker in the United States and ...
producing around 400 bhp, and mated to a
Tremec six-speed manual gearbox, the Beira was developed to work with LPG to give it a dual fuel range of around 700 miles. Around 25 cm was added to the length of the car to accommodate a 70-litre LPG tank alongside the regular petrol tank.
Official performance figures were not formally issued, the 1400 kg car was expected to accelerate 0-62 mph in under 5 seconds.
It was anticipated that the first cars would be on sale from November 2008 at around £55,000 but only in left hand drive. According to Breckland Technologies director Mike Rawlings, ‘the Beira carries on from where
Marcos and
TVR left off’.
Beyond the initial launch cars, production never started though a facelift version was photographed by a
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
car magazine in November 2008.
Auto Motor & Sport 17 November 2008
/ref> The company folded in July 2009 without any known deliveries.
References
{{reflist
Cars introduced in 2008
Cars of England
Dereham
Roadsters