De Tomaso
The Modena sports-car marque behind the Ford-V8 Pantera, revived with the hand-built, 72-unit P72.
De Tomaso is an Italian sports-car marque from Modena, best known for the Ford-V8-powered Pantera and revived in recent years with the hand-built P72. Alejandro de Tomaso, an Argentine-born racing driver, founded the company in Modena in 1959. Its signature formula was an Italian body over an American V8, and that pairing gave the Pantera a long production run and a lasting place in the collector market.
Behind the brand
Alejandro de Tomaso founded the company in Modena in 1959, and the city’s network of specialist craftsmen gave the young marque a serious head start. Modena is home to several of Italy’s best car brands, and De Tomaso drew on that regional skill to build cars that stood apart from the beginning.
The classic era
The Mangusta came first, built from 1966 to 1971, a V8-powered coupe made in small numbers. The Pantera followed in 1971 and became De Tomaso’s most successful car. It paired an Italian body with a Ford V8, and Ford sold it in the United States through Lincoln-Mercury dealers, which put European style in front of American buyers who did not want to give up a familiar V8. The Pantera stayed in production until 1993, and its Italian-body, American-V8 formula still drives its cult status among collectors, which keeps it on guides to the best classic cars.
The revival
De Tomaso went dormant and has been revived more than once. The current revival dates from a 2015 acquisition by a Hong Kong-based investment group, and the marque’s modern car, the P72, was unveiled at Goodwood in 2019. The P72 is a retro-styled, hand-built car limited to 72 units and priced in the seven figures, a return to ultra-limited, collector-grade production rather than volume manufacturing. Its shape recalls the brand’s classic forms, and the 72-unit cap is the point more than any single spec.
Where De Tomaso sits
Modena heritage places De Tomaso alongside the region’s storied marques, and the Pantera’s cult status rests on that Italian-body, American-V8 formula. The P72 carries the idea into a new era, trading the volume sports car for a hand-built statement in tiny numbers. De Tomaso has always sat a little outside the mainstream, and the Mangusta, the Pantera, and the P72 are each bought as a deliberate choice rather than as everyday transport.
Frequently asked questions about De Tomaso
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How often AI mentions De Tomaso
Last month we counted De Tomaso’s AI mentions: every time one of the five most-used answer engines used detomaso-automobili.com as a source for an answer. That count places De Tomaso against every brand we cover, and it measures how readily an AI puts De Tomaso in front of someone deciding where to spend. See how we measure it.
- Rank
- 248thof 308 brands, and 44th among cars
- AI mentions
- 107 Across 5 of 5 engines
- Since August
- ↗36 Up from 284th in August · mentions +463.2%
- Visibility score
- 29.0/100 The five engines count equally, and the score adjusts for any engine we do not yet cover
Where the mentions come from
| Engine | Mentions | Pages used | Rank here |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 69 | 14 | 215thof 308 |
| Google AI Mode | 9 | 4 | 278thof 308 |
| Perplexity | 15 | 3 | 232ndof 308 |
| Google AI Overviews | 7 | 2 | 276thof 308 |
| Gemini | 7 | 3 | 246thof 308 |
Twelve months
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