Vector M12 History: America's Only V12 Manual Supercar

V12 engines are already ridiculous. Huge. Expensive. Overcomplicated. Most brands avoid them entirely. Now add a manual transmission and you’re basically talking about something that shouldn’t exist.

But it did. Once. In America.

It was called the Vector M12, and chances are you’ve never seen one in real life. That’s because almost nobody has.

Back in the mid-1990s, a small California company called Vector wanted to build an American supercar that could sit at the same table as Lamborghini and Ferrari. Not a muscle car. Not a Corvette alternative. A real exotic.

So Vector did something bold and a little desperate: it used a Lamborghini Diablo as the starting point.

The M12 got the Diablo’s 5.7-liter V12 and its five-speed manual gearbox. Same engine. Same transmission. But instead of being built by Lamborghini in Italy, everything was assembled in the U.S. by a company that didn’t have Lamborghini’s experience—or budget.

And that’s where things started to fall apart.

On paper, the M12 sounded amazing. In reality, it wasn’t very good. The build quality was rough. The driving experience didn’t live up to the promise. Reviewers were harsh, sometimes painfully so. One outlet called it one of the worst supercars ever tested.

Production didn’t last long. Just 17 cars were built before the whole thing collapsed under legal fights, money problems, and general chaos.

Oddly enough, the Vector M12 found its audience somewhere else entirely: video games. It showed up in Gran Turismo 2 and a few arcade racers, where its flaws didn’t matter and its rarity made it cool. For a lot of people, that’s the only place they’ve ever “driven” one.

Vector as a company followed the same pattern. Big ideas. Wild designs. Constant struggle. Founder Gerry Wiegert spent decades chasing the dream of an American supercar, leaving behind a small collection of strange, ambitious machines before the story quietly ended after his death in 2021.

Today, the M12 is just a strange artifact. The only American car ever built with a V12 and a manual transmission. Not a success. Not exactly a failure either.

Just proof that sometimes, building the thing is easier than making it good.