Tell me about British Leyland
Discussion
Olivera said:
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.
Mostly because BMC gave Alec Issigonis too much power. Issigonis was a genius - probably one of the great British (let's overlook that he was born to a Greek father and a German mother) minds of the 20th century - and like many geniuses he needed direction. Left to his own devices he designed cars that he believed people should drive, not the cars he thought people would want to drive. He had his own particular ideas about car design and engineering and he followed them dogmatically, with a very real streak of "if it's my idea, it must be good." He wasn't called 'Arragonis' in the Longbridge drawing office for no reason!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.
When Issigonis was tightly controlled and had some limit or oversight on his creative flow he produced truely great work. The Morris Minor was produced when he was still a relatively junior draughtsman at Morris, with Vic Oak (technical director) and Miles Thomas (managing director) overseeing him and even William Morris himself fighting his ideas at almost every step. He was also less set in his ways and less self-assured, so he was happy to take in ideas from others (a lot of the Minor's engineering is drawn from the Citroen Traction Avant while the styling is cribbed from American cars of the time, but with a distinct Issigonis twist). The basic underlying engineering of the Minor was tweaked by BMC after Issigonis left Morris in 1952 to underpin some very good (if unexciting) cars like the Morris Major, the Riley/Wolseley 1.5 and the Morris Oxford/Isis/Cowley trio.
What is IMO his best design, the ADO16, came about because when Issigonis was wholly absorbed in getting the Mini into production and fixing its myriad teething troubles, George Harriman put Charles Griffin (chief engineer of passenger cars) in charge of the project. Griffin, with the help of Pinin Farina and Alex Moulton, was able to remove a lot of the typically Issigonis features and prevented it from being just a big Mini. The result was a much more stylish, refined, upmarket and generally more likeable car that proved itself by being a bestseller for more than a decade around the world.
But when Issigonis had free rein the results could be very hit and miss. The TA350 that he designed for Alvis was brilliant but completely different from what Alvis had asked him to design and had absolutely no regard for the financial, technical and production resources of the company he was employed at. He had basically designed his 'dream car' from scratch. Noteably it had a clean-sheet 3.5-litre V8 engine which was a complete (and almost literal) non-starter. Issigonis' genius never extended to engine design. He only ever saw the engine and transmission as a neccessary evil that had to be packaged away in as small a proportion of the car as possible.
He had a free rein when he went back to BMC to do the Mini, and that worked because the brief he was given all-but-required some brilliant out-of-the-box thinking and he had been doodling ideas for a radical, ultra-efficient economy car since the 1930s. He had the absolute backing of the BMC management and all the resources of one of the world's largest car makers to push the Mini (one of the most radical car designs in history) from idea to production in three years. Of course it was riddled with problems, in the long term proved to be complete engineering dead end but as a concept it was brilliant.
The Mini made Issigonis a superstar and when he became technical director of BMC the few people who out-ranked him were too in awe of his power to do so. Issigonis should have been given a consultancy role and put in charge of a small, hand-picked engineering team to conceive, develop and test new car designs - a sort of BMC Skunk Works- the results of which could be fed into a corporate engineering and product design system. But they did the complete opposite.
Issigonis was never going to design the conventional, basic, cost-effective family saloon that BMC needed. He didn't believe cars like that should exist, so he wasn't going to build them. He was never going to listen to market research, product planners, sales representatives, production managers, service agents or, indeed, anyone. He wanted the Maxi to be a front-wheel drive car with Hydrolastic suspension. He wanted the E-Series to have its gearbox in the sump and be produced as a transverse straight six. He decided that the Maxi should be a hatchback and have seats that converted into a bed. He didn't like unneccessary styling so the Maxi was bland and ugly.
There was no oversight and no conception of how each car fitted in with the broader range.Issigonis considered each car as its own individual technical problem, or in some ways like an individual work of art. Each car was developed by its own very small team (overseen by Issigonis) in a 'cell', which meant that none of the developers had any idea what their colleagues were doing. So there was no joined-up thinking and no idea of parts commonality.
At Ford there was a corporate product plan so everyone knew that the Anglia was the small car, the Cortina/Corsair was the medium car and the Zephyr/Zodiac was the big car. Engineers were handed a strict brief, drawn up with input by the entire Ford UK organisation with reference to the needs of the market and Ford's future business plan. There were certain redlines ("this car must be produced for cost X or margin Y and must use existing components A,B and C with no change") and they were rigidly enforced. BMC didn't do any of that. And if they did Issigonis would have ignored them.
And when people realised that the Maxi was going to be a complete turd of a machine, there was no one with the combination of guts and authority to tell Sir Alec that he'd messed up.
Raygun said:
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.
I've owned 4 Stags, the last 25 years ago. They had a reputation for rot back then, but only one of them was rusting, ironically the newest a 78 mimosa. A good one is a lovely thing.
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.
You beat me too it.. I bought the book for 2p from Amazon. A very honest and open account of the struggle BL/ Edwardes faced. I highly recommend anyone with an interest in the Motor Industry reads it..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.
My dad worked as a spot welder at Cowley on the Marina line in the early 70s for a while. Ironically he left because the constant strikes meant he rarely earned a living wage.
Some of the stories he tells me make me wonder how they got any cars built at all. Things like:
Teams of 5 welders taking it in turns to do 90 minute "shifts" doing all 5 jobs while the other 4 slept / worked on their own stuff / read the paper. So for 5 employees, only one was doing any work at any given time. The line supervisor's view was as long as the line kept going, it was OK.
Various cottage industries / sidelines with workers making everything from jewellery to ornaments and ironmongery on company time and materials (in conjunction with shift system above).
Putting coke cans and stones in sills and floor box sections before welding them up.
Unpainted bodies being left out in the rain, and having a layer of surface rust on them before going for paint.
One story of a guy going to sleep in the back of a part finished car on a line stoppage,and not waking up when the line restarted. He had to be rescued from a tunnel .
Unions calling everyone out several times a month, with the resulting loss of pay.
I'm amazed anything got built, or worked at all.
Some of the stories he tells me make me wonder how they got any cars built at all. Things like:
Teams of 5 welders taking it in turns to do 90 minute "shifts" doing all 5 jobs while the other 4 slept / worked on their own stuff / read the paper. So for 5 employees, only one was doing any work at any given time. The line supervisor's view was as long as the line kept going, it was OK.
Various cottage industries / sidelines with workers making everything from jewellery to ornaments and ironmongery on company time and materials (in conjunction with shift system above).
Putting coke cans and stones in sills and floor box sections before welding them up.
Unpainted bodies being left out in the rain, and having a layer of surface rust on them before going for paint.
One story of a guy going to sleep in the back of a part finished car on a line stoppage,and not waking up when the line restarted. He had to be rescued from a tunnel .
Unions calling everyone out several times a month, with the resulting loss of pay.
I'm amazed anything got built, or worked at all.
I was born in Oxford in 72 and grew up I guess in a nice area, where everyone had a drive and car or two. So everyone had BL junk.
My memories of them is rust, oil stains on drives, oil pans catching drips, cars endlessly up on ramps and so on.
Just utter utter junk.
You have to remember different times: eg I can only recall one mum picking her child up in a BMW- a rare car back then.
As for my parents- foreigners, they knew well enough not to have anything British.
So a Volvo for my father, Toyota for my mother. Both of which rusted, but not as quickly.
what people forget on PH, when they're moaning about their cars/sheds is rust and reliability of that era. cars didn't do 100k miles before they'd fallen to bits in every way possible. Plus stuff like fuel economy. everything was petrol: what did you get out of a volvo- 25 mpg ?
My memories of them is rust, oil stains on drives, oil pans catching drips, cars endlessly up on ramps and so on.
Just utter utter junk.
You have to remember different times: eg I can only recall one mum picking her child up in a BMW- a rare car back then.
As for my parents- foreigners, they knew well enough not to have anything British.
So a Volvo for my father, Toyota for my mother. Both of which rusted, but not as quickly.
what people forget on PH, when they're moaning about their cars/sheds is rust and reliability of that era. cars didn't do 100k miles before they'd fallen to bits in every way possible. Plus stuff like fuel economy. everything was petrol: what did you get out of a volvo- 25 mpg ?
swisstoni said:
I really hope there won’t be a similar thread in about 20 years called Tell Me About The NHS but I fear their might.
Surely the NHS is a result of the same sort of thinking as BL - nationalised inefficiency. Except they for political reasons we just keeping chucking more money at the behemoth (c.£125billion last year). If BL had a fraction of that money being thrown at it might be still around now like PSA - albeit making tired sh8tboxes though the valuable brands would still have been sold off. BL is a lesson in why you need competition and market forces.Dr Jekyll said:
Raygun said:
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.
Praise indeed.Didnt they do Aerospace too?
ETA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_Industries
wiki said:
In 1976, the militant workforce within Lucas Aerospace were facing significant layoffs.
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.
Untrue. Rover and Triumph were entirely separate when the Stag and P6B were being developed, and Rover could not have made enough engines anyway. A Rover V8 powered Stag could never have happened. There was talk however off fitting the 2.0 O Series - a good robust engine - into both the MGB and the TR7.The problem of BL stems from Austin and Morris merging in 1952 - a stupid, stupid idea brokered by a stupid government. Both firms could/would have made it on their own or failed without bringing the whole house of cards down. Austin were about churning out profitable porridge, Nuffield made the nice/ interesting stuff.
Bosch for comparison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch
Maybe Cadbury and Rowntree were in the same ilk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch
Maybe Cadbury and Rowntree were in the same ilk
2xChevrons said:
Mostly because BMC gave Alec Issigonis too much power. Issigonis was a genius - probably one of the great British (let's overlook that he was born to a Greek father and a German mother) minds of the 20th century - and like many geniuses he needed direction. Left to his own devices he designed cars that he believed people should drive, not the cars he thought people would want to drive. He had his own particular ideas about car design and engineering and he followed them dogmatically, with a very real streak of "if it's my idea, it must be good." He wasn't called 'Arragonis' in the Longbridge drawing office for no reason!
When Issigonis was tightly controlled and had some limit or oversight on his creative flow he produced truely great work. The Morris Minor was produced when he was still a relatively junior draughtsman at Morris, with Vic Oak (technical director) and Miles Thomas (managing director) overseeing him and even William Morris himself fighting his ideas at almost every step. He was also less set in his ways and less self-assured, so he was happy to take in ideas from others (a lot of the Minor's engineering is drawn from the Citroen Traction Avant while the styling is cribbed from American cars of the time, but with a distinct Issigonis twist). The basic underlying engineering of the Minor was tweaked by BMC after Issigonis left Morris in 1952 to underpin some very good (if unexciting) cars like the Morris Major, the Riley/Wolseley 1.5 and the Morris Oxford/Isis/Cowley trio.
What is IMO his best design, the ADO16, came about because when Issigonis was wholly absorbed in getting the Mini into production and fixing its myriad teething troubles, George Harriman put Charles Griffin (chief engineer of passenger cars) in charge of the project. Griffin, with the help of Pinin Farina and Alex Moulton, was able to remove a lot of the typically Issigonis features and prevented it from being just a big Mini. The result was a much more stylish, refined, upmarket and generally more likeable car that proved itself by being a bestseller for more than a decade around the world.
But when Issigonis had free rein the results could be very hit and miss. The TA350 that he designed for Alvis was brilliant but completely different from what Alvis had asked him to design and had absolutely no regard for the financial, technical and production resources of the company he was employed at. He had basically designed his 'dream car' from scratch. Noteably it had a clean-sheet 3.5-litre V8 engine which was a complete (and almost literal) non-starter. Issigonis' genius never extended to engine design. He only ever saw the engine and transmission as a neccessary evil that had to be packaged away in as small a proportion of the car as possible.
He had a free rein when he went back to BMC to do the Mini, and that worked because the brief he was given all-but-required some brilliant out-of-the-box thinking and he had been doodling ideas for a radical, ultra-efficient economy car since the 1930s. He had the absolute backing of the BMC management and all the resources of one of the world's largest car makers to push the Mini (one of the most radical car designs in history) from idea to production in three years. Of course it was riddled with problems, in the long term proved to be complete engineering dead end but as a concept it was brilliant.
The Mini made Issigonis a superstar and when he became technical director of BMC the few people who out-ranked him were too in awe of his power to do so. Issigonis should have been given a consultancy role and put in charge of a small, hand-picked engineering team to conceive, develop and test new car designs - a sort of BMC Skunk Works- the results of which could be fed into a corporate engineering and product design system. But they did the complete opposite.
Issigonis was never going to design the conventional, basic, cost-effective family saloon that BMC needed. He didn't believe cars like that should exist, so he wasn't going to build them. He was never going to listen to market research, product planners, sales representatives, production managers, service agents or, indeed, anyone. He wanted the Maxi to be a front-wheel drive car with Hydrolastic suspension. He wanted the E-Series to have its gearbox in the sump and be produced as a transverse straight six. He decided that the Maxi should be a hatchback and have seats that converted into a bed. He didn't like unneccessary styling so the Maxi was bland and ugly.
There was no oversight and no conception of how each car fitted in with the broader range.Issigonis considered each car as its own individual technical problem, or in some ways like an individual work of art. Each car was developed by its own very small team (overseen by Issigonis) in a 'cell', which meant that none of the developers had any idea what their colleagues were doing. So there was no joined-up thinking and no idea of parts commonality.
At Ford there was a corporate product plan so everyone knew that the Anglia was the small car, the Cortina/Corsair was the medium car and the Zephyr/Zodiac was the big car. Engineers were handed a strict brief, drawn up with input by the entire Ford UK organisation with reference to the needs of the market and Ford's future business plan. There were certain redlines ("this car must be produced for cost X or margin Y and must use existing components A,B and C with no change") and they were rigidly enforced. BMC didn't do any of that. And if they did Issigonis would have ignored them.
And when people realised that the Maxi was going to be a complete turd of a machine, there was no one with the combination of guts and authority to tell Sir Alec that he'd messed up.
You could say Gerald Palmer was a better designer. He had his work of genius (Jowett Javelin) and designed some other intresting stuff, some of which was too advanced for BMC's crude manufacturing techniques. The MGA Twin Cam engine and the Riley Pathfinder are two. The Z Magnette was his and what a cracking thing that was. BMC replaced that with a fWhen Issigonis was tightly controlled and had some limit or oversight on his creative flow he produced truely great work. The Morris Minor was produced when he was still a relatively junior draughtsman at Morris, with Vic Oak (technical director) and Miles Thomas (managing director) overseeing him and even William Morris himself fighting his ideas at almost every step. He was also less set in his ways and less self-assured, so he was happy to take in ideas from others (a lot of the Minor's engineering is drawn from the Citroen Traction Avant while the styling is cribbed from American cars of the time, but with a distinct Issigonis twist). The basic underlying engineering of the Minor was tweaked by BMC after Issigonis left Morris in 1952 to underpin some very good (if unexciting) cars like the Morris Major, the Riley/Wolseley 1.5 and the Morris Oxford/Isis/Cowley trio.
What is IMO his best design, the ADO16, came about because when Issigonis was wholly absorbed in getting the Mini into production and fixing its myriad teething troubles, George Harriman put Charles Griffin (chief engineer of passenger cars) in charge of the project. Griffin, with the help of Pinin Farina and Alex Moulton, was able to remove a lot of the typically Issigonis features and prevented it from being just a big Mini. The result was a much more stylish, refined, upmarket and generally more likeable car that proved itself by being a bestseller for more than a decade around the world.
But when Issigonis had free rein the results could be very hit and miss. The TA350 that he designed for Alvis was brilliant but completely different from what Alvis had asked him to design and had absolutely no regard for the financial, technical and production resources of the company he was employed at. He had basically designed his 'dream car' from scratch. Noteably it had a clean-sheet 3.5-litre V8 engine which was a complete (and almost literal) non-starter. Issigonis' genius never extended to engine design. He only ever saw the engine and transmission as a neccessary evil that had to be packaged away in as small a proportion of the car as possible.
He had a free rein when he went back to BMC to do the Mini, and that worked because the brief he was given all-but-required some brilliant out-of-the-box thinking and he had been doodling ideas for a radical, ultra-efficient economy car since the 1930s. He had the absolute backing of the BMC management and all the resources of one of the world's largest car makers to push the Mini (one of the most radical car designs in history) from idea to production in three years. Of course it was riddled with problems, in the long term proved to be complete engineering dead end but as a concept it was brilliant.
The Mini made Issigonis a superstar and when he became technical director of BMC the few people who out-ranked him were too in awe of his power to do so. Issigonis should have been given a consultancy role and put in charge of a small, hand-picked engineering team to conceive, develop and test new car designs - a sort of BMC Skunk Works- the results of which could be fed into a corporate engineering and product design system. But they did the complete opposite.
Issigonis was never going to design the conventional, basic, cost-effective family saloon that BMC needed. He didn't believe cars like that should exist, so he wasn't going to build them. He was never going to listen to market research, product planners, sales representatives, production managers, service agents or, indeed, anyone. He wanted the Maxi to be a front-wheel drive car with Hydrolastic suspension. He wanted the E-Series to have its gearbox in the sump and be produced as a transverse straight six. He decided that the Maxi should be a hatchback and have seats that converted into a bed. He didn't like unneccessary styling so the Maxi was bland and ugly.
There was no oversight and no conception of how each car fitted in with the broader range.Issigonis considered each car as its own individual technical problem, or in some ways like an individual work of art. Each car was developed by its own very small team (overseen by Issigonis) in a 'cell', which meant that none of the developers had any idea what their colleagues were doing. So there was no joined-up thinking and no idea of parts commonality.
At Ford there was a corporate product plan so everyone knew that the Anglia was the small car, the Cortina/Corsair was the medium car and the Zephyr/Zodiac was the big car. Engineers were handed a strict brief, drawn up with input by the entire Ford UK organisation with reference to the needs of the market and Ford's future business plan. There were certain redlines ("this car must be produced for cost X or margin Y and must use existing components A,B and C with no change") and they were rigidly enforced. BMC didn't do any of that. And if they did Issigonis would have ignored them.
And when people realised that the Maxi was going to be a complete turd of a machine, there was no one with the combination of guts and authority to tell Sir Alec that he'd messed up.
king A60 based Farina shed. It wasn't just Issigonnawork? but BMC's generally clueless management.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
It didn't.Sorry, but I remember 120Y's as new cars and they weren't being scrapped after 11 months.
The worst cars for rot were early Alfasuds and they were often beyond repair at 3-4 years old but 11 months? No chance. That's nonsense.
I've read quite a bit about the car industry, and BL in particular. It was basically an impractical conglomerate formed from well known UK companies which instead of having the ability to achieve economies of scale and have a corporate overview continued to maintain a semblance of brand identity. For a middling size company they thus had a bewildering range of vehicles, engines and plants, a ghastly mess made worse by dreadful industrial relations and equally poor management systems. For example, there were two V8 engines on the go, two different sized 6 cylinder Triumph engines, the Rover 4 cylinder, a host of smaller 4 cylinder engines for Austin/Morris/Triumph in front and rear wheel drive versions and so on. They also held on to antiques like the last of the Morris 1000 series for far too long, and Landrover still made the big 6 cylinder petrol engine based on the last engine from the Rover P4 and P5. Jaguar still made the XK engine but then went for a V12 in time for the oil crisis in the early 70s.
For what it's worth, my own experience of BL cars is a bit limited, but I thought Triumph Heralds were good cars, as were the Dolomite/Toledo etc. cars which came after (an illustration in themselves of ludicrous diversity). I of course experienced a variety of Minis, and while handling was excellent they were all uncomfortable for long journeys and rusted badly, though it must be admitted that most cars did in those days.
BL also wasted a few excellent designs as a previous poster mentioned. Rover made a sharp looking mid-engine coupe, using the well proven ex-Buick V8 - a story of fortuitous circumstances and far sighted engineering - but it would have competed with the E-Type Jaguar in terms of performance as well as being much less expensive, so was dropped.
For what it's worth, my own experience of BL cars is a bit limited, but I thought Triumph Heralds were good cars, as were the Dolomite/Toledo etc. cars which came after (an illustration in themselves of ludicrous diversity). I of course experienced a variety of Minis, and while handling was excellent they were all uncomfortable for long journeys and rusted badly, though it must be admitted that most cars did in those days.
BL also wasted a few excellent designs as a previous poster mentioned. Rover made a sharp looking mid-engine coupe, using the well proven ex-Buick V8 - a story of fortuitous circumstances and far sighted engineering - but it would have competed with the E-Type Jaguar in terms of performance as well as being much less expensive, so was dropped.
iSore said:
Untrue. Rover and Triumph were entirely separate when the Stag and P6B were being developed, and Rover could not have made enough engines anyway. A Rover V8 powered Stag could never have happened. There was talk however off fitting the 2.0 O Series - a good robust engine - into both the MGB and the TR7.
Or they could have just kept the V8 at 2.5 litres as it was originally designed. My dad used to pootle around in the 4-cylinder version (Dolomite 1.2) and it never broke down as far as I recall. A lot of excuses but essentially it was a poorly-designed engine.What about the story of the power cables disappearing into a section of wall and after investigating found a sort of dormitory?
I had a marina, amongst other BL products. The pin at the bottom of the gear selector would move and you could "stir" the lever like mixing a pie.
BL cars....and british....Marina 1.3 coupe, bmc1300 gt, P5 rover, Montego, (why did I buy that heap o ste), 1360 Herald, mgb gt and an mgb
I had a marina, amongst other BL products. The pin at the bottom of the gear selector would move and you could "stir" the lever like mixing a pie.
BL cars....and british....Marina 1.3 coupe, bmc1300 gt, P5 rover, Montego, (why did I buy that heap o s
te), 1360 Herald, mgb gt and an mgb Gassing Station | Classic Cars and Yesterday's Heroes | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff