Tell me about British Leyland

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Discussion

jeremyh1

1,348 posts

126 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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I thought the Austin 1300 was a good car until I starting driving Ford ,Vauxhall,Renault and fiat Yes Fiat was poor but still better than BL
The fiat rusted faster than BL that was the only thing

2xChevrons

3,159 posts

79 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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aaron_2000 said:
That was a really interesting read
Thanks - glad you found it so. Reading it back it seems a rather disjointed, because I hacked a lot of it out because I realised I was on ther verge of writing out the entire contents of aronline.co.uk

Russian Troll Bot said:
Rust and reliability wise they weren't really any worse than many of their contemporaries, and many of their cars got good reviews from the motoring press at the time.
This is a valid point. A lot of BL stuff was actually quite popular with motoring journalists. This was because they were often very good (or at least perfectly decent) designs let down by the appalling build quality, which wouldn't surface on a journo test. The RWD Trimph saloons (Dolomite and 2000) were very well-liked as the BMW 3- and 5-Series equivalents of their day. The Rover SD1 and the Jaguar XJ6/12/S were always very highly praised (and scooped plenty of international awards). Many BL products got positive write-ups because their biggest failing was in how they were built rather than how they were designed. You could enjoy a Dolomite Sprint when you'd been loaned one for the weekend, but you wouldn't want to have to rely on one to get to work and back every day in all weathers.The motoring press certainly gave models a kicking when they deserved it, and turned on many models when they were cost-cut and lived on long after they should have been replaced.

It was the general press that really hammered BL, sometimes justly, sometimes unfairly. Of all the nationalised industries it was the one that people encountered every day - you had a BL car on your driveway (or your neighbour did), you saw dozens every day on the road. It contained famous one-great names. The car industry was a conduit for national pride (or national shame). And BL just went from worse to worse. The cars got shoddier and more obsolete. The company lost more and more money, the strikes got worse and worse. The market share dropped year after year while German, Japanese, French and Italian cars took their place. BL became a battleground between political sides and the partisan press (on both sides) put the boot in by either castigating management or the workforce.

Depending on which paper you read BL was either run by incompetent managerial capitalists who could see no further than three years into the future and were happy to make 250,000 people redundant if it could turn a profit while they kept making cars with square steering wheels, or was staffed entirely by workshy communists who had no interest in doing a good day's work and just wanted cushy jobs at the taxpayer's expense and actively resented having to be accountable to the public who paid for them. Neither viewpoint would make you rush out and buy a BL product.

Just another BL anecdote to demonstrate that, design-wise, a lot of their stuff was somewhat ahead of the curve- in the 1970s my Aunt worked for the BBC in Bristol, and some of her colleagues lived in Wales and commuted via the Severn Bridge. One of them drove a Ford Escort and one drove a Renault 8. But when it was a windy day they car-pooled with their friend who had an Austin Allegro, because the Allegro (FWD, independent suspension, rack and pinion steering, wide stance, radial tyres) was the only one which didn't feel like it was about to blown off the bridge in the gusts. Which is not to say that the Allegro was a 'better' car than the Escort, but it was a good decade (or more) ahead of it in terms of its design and today an Allegro feels surprisingly modern in a way that the leaf-sprung, live-axled, RWD Escort doesn't.

But that's the nature of the car industry. In the same year the Allegro was launched VW launched the Mk1 Golf. At the time VW was in a fairly fragile state because it had completely overplayed the rear-engined air-cooled platform and sales were in severe decline. Wolfsburg bet all its chips on a range of fairly unadventurous but carefully modern front-wheel drive cars using technology pinched from NSU. An early Mk1 Golf is actually a pretty crude thing - grumbly carb-fed engine, terrible brakes, unresolved ride (too tight springing, too loose damping), numb steering, torsion beam rear axle, very basic interior, bundles of exposed wiring visible under the dashboard and bits of sponge between the dash panels. The Austin Allegro actually bested it in some early group tests. Drive one and you would never guess that it would be the basis of a gamechanging driver's car.

But the Golf was build impeccably and consistently well. It looked crisp and modern and it had a practical hatchback. It would start every morning and keep running for as long you put petrol in it. It only needed to go to the dealer for servicing and you didn't have to spend your weekends crimping new electrical connectors to the headlamps because the original ones had dropped off. The dashboard didn't squeak. After five years your Golf still worked as well as it did when it was new, was still worth a useful trade-in amount and you could be sure that your second Golf would be as good as the first one. VW was committed to improving the design and working out the relatively minor faults, and nine years after they launched the Mk1 Golf they had a new, improved Golf to replace the old one. It's that complete package that BL could never manage.







TwigtheWonderkid

43,248 posts

149 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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Famous story of a new Marina pulling badly to one side when braking, only to discover it had one drum brake and one disc on the front.

The various companies within BL were usually at war with each other, hence the Triumph Stag ended up with a pretty fragile 3.0 engine developed at huge expense when across the corridor, Rover had hundreds or 3.5 V8 engines going spare. Many Stags ended up with that engine eventually anyway.

I had an Austin 1100 and 1300, a Marina, and a few Minis. Also an MG Maestro. They were all st. In later years I had an MGZT with the BMW diesel engine, and that was a fabulous car. Loved it.

Plug Life

978 posts

90 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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The Golden Era


soxboy

6,061 posts

218 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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If you want to read more it's worth reading 'Back from the Brink' by Michael Edwardes, the former chair of BL brought in in 1977 to try and stop the rot. It's not the easiest of reads but it does give some fascinating insights, and shows how close they were to shutting down completely when the cost of investment required to keep the firm running (£1bn) wasn't much less than the cost of shutting it down (£1.2bn).

Even with the best will in the world I don't think there was any way it could have been turned round into a serious player that could stand on its own two feet.

Buff Mchugelarge

3,316 posts

149 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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Some very interesting posts 2XChevrons thanks smile

saaby93

32,038 posts

177 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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For all that you only have to look how Mini has been turned into something worthwhile
Why wouldnt that have worked across other brands - where would standard triumph be now?
(probably the same place as SAAB cry)

Some things were very innovative - quartic sterering wheels, voice output dashboard, hydro suspension, de dion too


anonymous-user

53 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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mikal83 said:
Rust buckets, zero spec, ie no radio/mirrors/speakers unless it was a Rover. Engine would be knackered after 70k. When Jap cars starting coming over they were called japcrap...........guess who had the last laugh
I think you'll find Jap cars had a worse problem for rust than BL cars from that era but what I would say about Jap cars their radios always worked without the need for suppressors all over the engine bay.
Just sold my 1972 Triumph Stag, would of drove that anywhere and the amount of Triumph Stags still surviving is proof BL products didn't all rot away within a decade.

Olivera

7,068 posts

238 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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Raygun said:
mikal83 said:
When Jap cars starting coming over they were called japcrap...........guess who had the last laugh
I think you'll find Jap cars had a worse problem for rust than BL cars from that era
A friend's dad bought a Datsun 120Y estate brand new in the late 70s, it was scrapped after 11 months due to catastrophic and terminal rust. The driver's seat had gone through the floor and the entire underside was rotten.

He replaced it with a 4 year old Marina - no such issues.

aaron_2000

Original Poster:

5,407 posts

82 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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Olivera said:
Raygun said:
mikal83 said:
When Jap cars starting coming over they were called japcrap...........guess who had the last laugh
I think you'll find Jap cars had a worse problem for rust than BL cars from that era
A friend's dad bought a Datsun 120Y estate brand new in the late 70s, it was scrapped after 11 months due to catastrophic and terminal rust. The driver's seat had gone through the floor and the entire underside was rotten.

He replaced it with a 4 year old Marina - no such issues.
I just can't imagine living in a time where that would happen, where you'd be scrapping an 11 month old car that'd come to the end of it's life without being in a crash.

98elise

26,376 posts

160 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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swisstoni said:
Just for perspective, a 10 year old car from any manufacturer was quite the survivor back then.

Half of Halfords was devoted to bits and pieces for the home bodger to patch up his crumbling ride before passing it on.
So true. Tinkering with cars was not a hobby, it was a necessity.


2xChevrons

3,159 posts

79 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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aaron_2000 said:
I just can't imagine living in a time where that would happen, where you'd be scrapping an 11 month old car that'd come to the end of it's life without being in a crash.
That is an extreme case, but not impossible. The 'first gen' Japanese cars really did set new (low) standards in rust resistance, even by the standards of the time. But they made up for it by being near-faultlessly reliable until the rustworm set in. They were also very good value for money and offered a lot of 'kit' (radio, heated rear window, wing mirrors, two-speed wipers, cigar lighters, extra instruments etc.) that were cost-options on European cars of the same class and price. And they were thoroughly modern, well-engineered cars too. You can see why anyone who got out of a Mini into a Mk1 Honda Civic or a Datsun 100A Cherry would never go back.

TwigtheWonderkid said:
The various companies within BL were usually at war with each other, hence the Triumph Stag ended up with a pretty fragile 3.0 engine developed at huge expense when across the corridor, Rover had hundreds or 3.5 V8 engines going spare. Many Stags ended up with that engine eventually anyway.
No they didn't. Even if they had wanted to, BL couldn't have given the Stag the Rover V8 because Rover couldn't build enough engines for its own uses, let alone the 30,000 Stags Triumph was predicted it would sell each year. There were long waiting lists for the Range Rover because engine production could never keep pace with demand, and the MGB GT V8 was nothing more than a special limited run (and was never offered in America) because there would never be enough engines.

That point is rather moot anyway, because by the time Rover was purchased by Leyland (making the RV8 available to Triumph), Triumph had already sunk a lot of money and development into its own V8, which shared a lot of its casting and tooling with the slant-4 engine being produced for Saab and later put into the Dolomite, and on paper the Triumph unit was far superior to the rather old-fashioned pushrod Rover engine.

There were very sound reasons for the Stag getting the Triumph V8, and inter-departmental rivalry is pretty much at the bottom of the list.

soxboy said:
If you want to read more it's worth reading 'Back from the Brink' by Michael Edwardes, the former chair of BL brought in in 1977 to try and stop the rot. It's not the easiest of reads but it does give some fascinating insights, and shows how close they were to shutting down completely when the cost of investment required to keep the firm running (£1bn) wasn't much less than the cost of shutting it down (£1.2bn).

Even with the best will in the world I don't think there was any way it could have been turned round into a serious player that could stand on its own two feet.
Edwardes is (of course) a biased viewpoint and his book is very much a post-hoc justification of his tenure. But that said he handled what must have been one of the worst jobs in British business with remarkable aplomb. He managed to bypass the rule of the shop stewards and speak directly to the line workers. So when he sacked Derek Robinson and the union called for a walkout in protest, the action was rejected almost unanimously. And while talking round the workforce (or sacking the bits of it which didn't cooperate [Speke, Canley]) he was also able to wrangle a couple of billion pounds from a very sceptical Thatcher government to have one last-ditch effort at keeping BL as a viable mass-market car maker on the world stage. Unfortunately it wasn't quite enough. Had there been a little extra cash, or a little more time with government support, I think BL would have made it 'over the hump' into the 1990s and turned itself around. But that neglects the bigger picture of what was going on politically and economically at the time.

anonymous-user

53 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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aaron_2000 said:
Olivera said:
Raygun said:
mikal83 said:
When Jap cars starting coming over they were called japcrap...........guess who had the last laugh
I think you'll find Jap cars had a worse problem for rust than BL cars from that era
A friend's dad bought a Datsun 120Y estate brand new in the late 70s, it was scrapped after 11 months due to catastrophic and terminal rust. The driver's seat had gone through the floor and the entire underside was rotten.

He replaced it with a 4 year old Marina - no such issues.
I just can't imagine living in a time where that would happen, where you'd be scrapping an 11 month old car that'd come to the end of it's life without being in a crash.
Just to add also but Triumph Stags built before pre-74 are considered the ones made with the best steel becaused they were made from British Steel, once the steel was sourced from abroad post-74(why?) the cars tended to rot quicker, this was probably the same across the BL range.
Another company that comes in for harsh criticism is Lucas but in reality they weren't that bad at all especially compared to what Italian electrics were like.

JRdrums

111 posts

112 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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I learnt to drive in a 1983 1.0 metro. It was delicate and behind the times but was roomy and quite fun to drive. My sister wrote it off in 1990 when she had a head on with a Cavalier. The Cavalier was worse off with a shattered windscreen. She got out unharmed. I had a friend with a Meastro Turbo in bright white. Crazy fun car but very unrefined and the turbo was either on or off. I guess they were crap cars but I have good memories of them.

LordLoveLength

1,904 posts

129 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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BL made some bad cars badly. They really were thrown together a lot of the time.
A friend told me his dad bought a brand new Maxi in chocolate brown. A few weeks later they folded the back seat down revealing a factory fitted cheese sandwich! It had been sprayed over...

Difficult to know the ratio of the problems but neither workers nor management were blameless and a lot of the cars were parts bin specials. Problem being the parts weren’t up to much to start with.

Another problem being that, by and large, British industry is far better at innovation than mass production. British industry tended to scale up from cottage volumes, whereas US and Japanese makers invested in volume production facilities from the outset.

I read a great example of how they shot themselves in both feet with the E series engine.

BMC decided they needed a new modern engine to replace the A series, it would be OHC and available as a 4 or 6 cylinder. The 6 pot was needed for some transverse applications so the engine needed to be narrow. To achieve this the cylinders were siamesed making it impossible to bore out for more displacement - to increase capacity you needed to increase the stroke. Difficult with the gearbox in the sump which was where it had to be to get 6 cylinders transversely. But they needed a 6 cylinder top-of-the-range model, despite the existing 6 cylinder 2200s not selling in any volume...

So they went for a 1300cc 4 pot and a 2 litre 6 pot. Then the accountants decided that the new car (maxi) that this engine was to grace, was to use the doors from the Austin 1800/2200 (no idea why, parts bin again?) which in turn meant a longer wheelbase. The car then weighed too much for a 1300 engine, so they had to redesign to stroke it to1500cc.
It was then too tall to fit under the bonnet of the forthcoming allegro, so that got redesigned with a hump in the bonnet to accommodate the now-taller engine.

So they ended up not replacing the A series engine and ruining the design of the allegro as a result of reusing an old door design, and insisting on having a 6 cylinder car that nobody wanted to buy. This sort of thing was repeated many many times.


swisstoni

16,855 posts

278 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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LordLoveLength said:
A friend told me his dad bought a brand new Maxi in chocolate brown. A few weeks later they folded the back seat down revealing a factory fitted cheese sandwich! It had been sprayed over...
That’s brilliant hehe
A rare option.

2xChevrons

3,159 posts

79 months

Monday 19th February 2018
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LordLoveLength said:
I read a great example of how they shot themselves in both feet with the E series engine.
There are a few crossed wires here, but the E-Series/Maxi saga is a good example of how nearly all of the deep-rooted problems at BL were actually inherited from BMC, which doomed the whole enterprise from the moment it was created.

In the mid 1960s BMC felt they needed a car to compete head-on with the Ford Cortina. At the time the closest thing BMC had was the ADO16 (the 1100/1300 range). Because the ADO16 was a very advanced front-wheel drive car it was smaller than the Mk1 Cortina but had more interior space. Because it was smaller it had plenty of performance from the 1.1 and 1.3 A-Series engines while the Cortina had 1.3, 1.5 and 1.6 litre engines. But many people spurned the ADO16 precisely because of its high-tech, relatively unreliable running gear. The Cortina was physically larger and had bigger engines for the same money so it seemed better value. It was also much more popular with fleet buyers. If the ADO16 was too small, the next car up in the BMC range, the ADO17, was far too big. This was the Austin/Morris/Wolseley 1800 'Landcrab' which had the same problem as all the BMC FWD products - it was technically brilliant, with a ride quality to rival a Rolls-Royce, superb roadholding, a massively spacious cabin and one of the world's stiffest body shells. But all that engineering made it heavy and the only power unit was the old-fashioned B-Series pushrod engine. And against the stylish likes of the Ford Zephyr or Vauxhall Cresta the 1800, again, seemed expensive, under-specced and offered only a 1.8-litre four-pot (with sluggish performance) when the conventional equivalents offered a big straight-six. The Landcrab was massively undershooting its sales projections and losing BMC money. The only other Cortina-esque cars in the BMC range were the old RWD 'Farina' models but these were hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison to the stylish, slick and lightweight Cortina.

So BMC told Alec Issigonis to design them a 1.5-litre car to rival the Cortina. What Issy should have done was design a modern, conventional RWD car that could have been built cheaply and sold with high profit margins. But that wasn't his way, so he simply penned a car that was between the ADO16 and the ADO17 in size (and was, for some reasons, coded ADO14). Like the Cortina it would have 1.3 and 1.5 litre engines, and these would be a brand new overhead cam unit. It would have a conventional three-box, four-door saloon shape, like the Cortina. Instead of conventional engineering the ADO14 would have, like the Issigonis cars before it, FWD with a transverse engine and the gearbox in the sump and Hydrolastic suspension.

Issigonis also loved the idea of a refined, smooth, six-cylinder engine in his FWD cars, and the new engine was sketched out to be produced in four- and six-cylinder versions (1.3 and 1.5 four-pots, and 2.0 and 2.2 six-pots). This new engine could go in the Landcrab to give it some much-needed pepe. But to make the engine narrow enough to fit a straight six across the engine bay of the Landcrab meant it had to be very narrow, so (as you say) the bores were siamesed and the capacity was altered by lengthening the stroke. And even with the siamesed bores the E-Series had to be very undersquare to get the required capacity in the required space. It was also a preposterously tall unit, what with the gearbox in the sump, the long stroke and the overhead cam.

At this point development was trundling along nicely. The first spanner in the works came when BMC management dictated that, to save costs and make the most of the expensive and very under-utilised tooling purchased for the Landcrab, the ADO14 would have to use the same doors. Which immediately meant that the ADO14 would have to have virtually the same wheelbase as the ADO17, even though it was supposed to be a smaller, cheaper, lighter model.That made no sense, so the boot was chopped off and the ADO14 was turned into a 'two box' five-door hatchback (a very unusual body choice for the time) so it could sit size-wise between the ADO16 and ADO17. Not ideal, but it was a solution.

Then the first tests on prototype E-Series engines showed that, unsurprisingly, they were pretty terrible. The long stroke made it a clunky, slow-revving unit with almost none of the pep expected of a modern OHC unit. The 1.3-litre was so woeful that it showed little improvement over the 1.3 A-Series, which debuted in 1951, and would cost BMC a fortune to build for no real gain. The ADO14 was already over its specified weight as it was (due to the need to use the Landcrab's big and heavy doors and its last-minute conversion into a hatchback) and the 1.3 E-Series making barely 60bhp would have given it far worse performance than any other 1.3-litre car in its class. So that was scrapped and the ADO14 went into production as just a 1.5.

So in the ADO14 (the Austin Maxi) the car that BMC had (correctly) identified which had to be a conventional, low-cost, lightweight car fitting between the ADO16 and the ADO17 with a brand new engine design ended up being a car as big as the ADO17 but much slower, with a hatchback (and a bed) that no-one wanted, with a wheezy, slow-revving, heavyweight engine that felt older and was less reliable than the engine it replaced and sat on a unique and untrusted suspension system.

They famously botched the Maxi's cable-operated gearchange which was essentially unusable. When BL was created Donald Stokes drove a pre-production Maxi and immediately realised that it needed at least another year's development work, probably two- this was a car that Issigonis, and everyone else at BMC, had assured him was ready for immediate release. He got out of the car and told Harry Webster (head engineer of Triumph) "We can't sell this!". But he had no choice. BMC had scheduled the Maxi's launch and there was a brand new, purpose-built engine plant at Longbridge getting ready to churn out the terrible E-Series engines, costing the company a fortune every day that Maxi production was delayed. BMC hadn't launched a properly new car in years and needed something fresh. It had gone too far to stop so the Maxi was launched essentially while still in development. Harry Webster and Roy Haynes carried out a crash programme which led to the development of 1.75-litre E-Series engines (in single and twin-carb form) which at least gave the Maxi adequate performance but took it even closer to the Landcrab (and further from the Cortina) in specification. There was a quick restyle of the interior and exterior which improved things a bit and a hasty re-engineered rod-operated gear change which at least meant you could change gears, even if it was a distinctly unpleasant experience. The Maxi was essentially 're-launched' less than a year after it was announced. But by then the damage had already been done and the car was a complete flop.

It's a perfect example of how by the late 1960s BMC was utterly incompetent at almost every aspect of running a car company - product planning, marketing, cost control, project management, design, styling, engineering. The lot.

Westblue

48 posts

96 months

Tuesday 20th February 2018
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A past boyfriend of mine (OK he was quite a bit older than me but...) was a fuel chemist at Longbridge in the later years of BL. He told me stories of clever engineering, inspired designers, very clever cars, lousy managers, vicious union shop stewards and general lethargy and chaos amongst the workforce. He also remembered the severe political interference and starvation of capital investment.

He also told me of tales such as their amazing 'million mile Marina', which was driven for over 1 million miles without turning the engine off - they even changed the oil when the engine was running. Apparently, when the engine was dismantled and examined in the laboratory there was hardly any wear at all. He said their engineering was world-beating, their manufacturing was shocking.

I also remember my dad's experiences of horribly unreliable Renaults and Fiats and his awful, rotting Datsuns.

I think much of the reality has become submerged in a British-bashing mythology.


2xChevrons

3,159 posts

79 months

Tuesday 20th February 2018
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Westblue said:
A past boyfriend of mine (OK he was quite a bit older than me but...) was a fuel chemist at Longbridge in the later years of BL. He told me stories of clever engineering, inspired designers, very clever cars, lousy managers, vicious union shop stewards and general lethargy and chaos amongst the workforce. He also remembered the severe political interference and starvation of capital investment.

He also told me of tales such as their amazing 'million mile Marina', which was driven for over 1 million miles without turning the engine off - they even changed the oil when the engine was running. Apparently, when the engine was dismantled and examined in the laboratory there was hardly any wear at all. He said their engineering was world-beating, their manufacturing was shocking.

I also remember my dad's experiences of horribly unreliable Renaults and Fiats and his awful, rotting Datsuns.

I think much of the reality has become submerged in a British-bashing mythology.
I can believe that.

Up until about 1964 the British Motor Corporation especially was an absolutely world-class car maker. A complete range of cars of every sort and all decently engineered and often brilliantly designed, built and sold around the world. Then it about four years it it completely unravelled. There's a very good essay by Ian Nicholls on AROnline that lays out (very convincingly) I think that what torpedoed BMC was the UK's rejection from the EEC in 1963. BMC's forward planning from 1960 onwards was based on making 1 million car per year but it topped out at about 850,000. With a business model of making low-margin cars in high volumes that shortfall absolutely crippled the Corporation's finances, and that shortfall was because it had expected (and been all but-promised by the government) that it would have tarrif-free access to the Common Market from 1963.BMC had essentially bet all its chips on Europe and put a huge amount of capital investment into becoming that 1 million-per-year manufacturer, and much of its product planning (such as the focus on the FWD models) was geared towards Europe rather than the UK or the Commonwealth. When it didn't happen BMC turned from profit to loss and all the underlying problems bubbled to the surface and compounded on each other.



Olivera

7,068 posts

238 months

Tuesday 20th February 2018
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2xChevrons said:
I can believe that.

Up until about 1964 the British Motor Corporation especially was an absolutely world-class car maker. A complete range of cars of every sort and all decently engineered and often brilliantly designed, built and sold around the world. Then it about four years it it completely unravelled. There's a very good essay by Ian Nicholls on AROnline that lays out (very convincingly) I think that what torpedoed BMC was the UK's rejection from the EEC in 1963. BMC's forward planning from 1960 onwards was based on making 1 million car per year but it topped out at about 850,000. With a business model of making low-margin cars in high volumes that shortfall absolutely crippled the Corporation's finances, and that shortfall was because it had expected (and been all but-promised by the government) that it would have tarrif-free access to the Common Market from 1963.BMC had essentially bet all its chips on Europe and put a huge amount of capital investment into becoming that 1 million-per-year manufacturer, and much of its product planning (such as the focus on the FWD models) was geared towards Europe rather than the UK or the Commonwealth. When it didn't happen BMC turned from profit to loss and all the underlying problems bubbled to the surface and compounded on each other.
Some fascinating posts from you 2xChevrons.

However reading your above posts about the Maxi, how on earth did the design go so awry? A clean slate to design a new car, but they ended up with an ugly, badly proportioned car with piss poor new engines.