There is a story that the Coventry car company name Alvis originated by taking “Al” from the word aluminum and “vis”, the Latin word for power or force. The supposed author, Geoffrey de Freville, founder of the Aluminum Piston Company, who had commissioned the company’s founding father, T. G. John, to produce a four-cylinder engine using aluminum pistons denied such a story. However, there’s another, which states the word Alvis is a word that is pronounced the same in whatever language it is spoken in. If we take the latter, would it assume that the company was set on producing automobiles to be available in every corner of the globe? To do the latter, those automobiles had to be something special and, looking back, they truly were. In fact, they were probably some of the first to be ascribed with the title “supercar.” The Alvis Car & Engineering Company Limited, or simply Alvis, was certainly on a par with heady names such as Rolls-Royce and Bentley, companies that have always been synonymous with engineering excellence.
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