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What the hell happened to the British car industry is one of those amazing, eye-popping facts that you have to pinch every now and then to convince you that it is true, but it really is the case that, in 2011, there is no longer possible to buy a family car made in Britain by a British manufacturer owned.
In fact, apart from a few quirks sports and tailor a compromise, it is not possible to buy any car made in the UK by a company in the UK In 1950 the UK was the largest exporter global vehicles UK- now fully owned motor companies, export of a handful of exotic plants This is quite extraordinary and needs further explanation that most often received wisdom on offer.
I read a fascinating book by hack and automotive expert James Ruppert automotive explains, in grim detail, what happened to an industry that used to include more than two dozen brands and used to sell goods worldwide.
There are in fact several received wisdoms The right tends to blame the unions, everyone inept left management accepts our cars were rubbish compared to those made by the Germans, Italians, and especially cars Japanese British may have been good in the 1950s, the thinking goes, but these dear old Wolseleys and LGM had no chance against the Vorsprung durch RNS Tecknik Volkswagen and Toyota powerful.
There is a grain of truth in this, but only a grain and some of these assertions are simply false For starters, it is a myth that British cars were waste We all remember the allegro machines and Morris miserable Marinas, but than the original Mini Jaguar Type E Morris Minor, World-beaters far superior to anything on offer from Germany, Italy or Japan.
It is a myth that British cars were all evil is part of that can be considered by the British tend to do down over foreign As Ruppert said, if you see a Lotus broken by road people tend to sneer, make cruel remarks about the quality of British construction and remember that Lotus is usually for many serious problems, but broken Ferraris are forgiven as temperamental Latin thoroughbreds in the 1970s Decrees rusted as badly as Austins and French cars worse you still see the odd Allegro trundling around, but what happened to all those 16S Renault and Citroen visa iron oxide, each of them.
It is also a myth that Britain could not make a car business work Unfortunately, the most impressive example of British automotive success story is not with a British company but with a German Until I read Rupperts account, I did not fully appreciate the existence of the VAG behemoth, which now includes the Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, Skoda brands, Bentley and Bugatti is entirely the result of work one British major Army, Ivan Hirst, who alone revived production at Wolfsburg factory after the war.
At the end of 1945 the Volkswagen plant in Shift Hirst was churning Kübelwagens a military version of the Beetle for the British army and thousands of civilian cars on general sale, it galvanized the demoralized workforce and had the factory to the damaged bomb repaired.
In 1946, Volkswagen was on track to become the history of world success, it remains to this day and it was entirely in British hands What happened The plant was put on sale at Ford, which the apparently rejected on the grounds that Wolfsburg was too near the french communist East Germany did not either and Hirst man actually responsible for the success of the VW Beetle, the most sold car in the world foiled an attempt of Volkswagen dismantling and ship the entire operation in Australia instead of war reparations Then surely the British take on, especially as we had one of our men in charge and doing a great job.
If things had gone to plan Volkswagen would have ended as an Anglo-German company We saw Beetles built in Essex, perhaps Minis in Wolfsburg and a clever fusion of British flair and German technical brilliance But of course, this n ' is not what happened instead, another Brit, Sir William Rootes visited the plant on behalf of the government, he said that the Beetle was too ugly and noisy sell he said Hirst If you think you will build cars there, young man, you are a bloodthirsty madman for a while Hirst was able to ignore it and VW has gone from strength to strength, but in the final control was handed back to the Germans and the rest is 'history.
The piece of bad guys tend to be large in the British car industry, which often took the most perverse decisions imaginable If Austin Rover and the rest were blessed by the best and most imaginative engineers and designers in the world, men like Alec Issigonis, David Bache and Spen king, the conference rooms were often run by clumsy amateurs, people who thought it was a good idea for Austin and Morris to sell nearly identical cars compete directly with each other despite being part of the same company.
Yes, didn t help unions in the quality of the 1970s building was so bad on some BL products that their first unfortunate owners and dealers poor often had to rebuild from the ground effectively Allegro was in fact a very good car below, ruined by the management to reduce costs, poor workmanship and a desire not to rock the boat with anything revolutionary.
Another mistake was to find auto factories in places without engineering tradition such as the decision to Hillman Imp in a new plant in Scotland The idea was to stimulate employment in disadvantaged areas, but the result cars was set up by inexperienced workers who really do not know what they were doing.
We can also blame the obsession with Britain to put our national assets for sale The main reason France and Italy still have large indigenous automobile industry is that the French and Italian governments would never in a million years face selling priceless companies such as Renault and Fiat to foreigners.
In the darkest days, these companies were protected by the state and allowed to grow when times were better, we sold Austin Rover to the Germans, who in turn sold to a group of venture capital that managed to transform a once thriving British company in a Chinese, destroying thousands of lives in the process and walking away with 40million as the just received 2,800 redundant workers Longbridge.
It is a sad story of course people will insist we still have a motor industry; after all, we are more than a million vehicles a year on these shores, but these are not really British cars The benefits of our automotive industry flow for most of the return to shareholders in Germany, Japan and America, I know people who drive a Ford Mondeo apparently unaware that their British car was made in Belgium and Germany by an American company if you really want to buy British, you have to drive a McLaren or Morgan, for heaven's sake Like I said, a sad story.
The British car industry Our party's Downfall James Ruppert, is published by Publications Foresight.
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How many times do you think Fiat Fix It Again Tony as has been rescued by the Italian Fiat ever went to the wall of a civil war it applies to Puegoet Citroen and Renault should have been 75 car was a beautiful highley considered Italy the house style that I would liked to have seen her the blame lay with management and consultants who milked the company never known truth.
The British car industry has gone the same way that the motorcycle industry and for the same reason three quarters of the sentence would be for the management industry was riddled with managers who had no idea how products have been manufactured or how they worked the management took the decision to produce, how to produce, when to produce it, that the level of investment in this product and that the marketing stategy would labor had nothing to say then, any more than they do now in the attitude of the British Automobile management was is how we've always done, you have to take what we give you from that time, the industry has been condemned as potential customers went elsewhere true that labor was certainly not blameless, but they were not as black as they were the last forty ann ed, I heard many people blame the Germans and the Japanese of the death of our auto industry people who really killed were British themselves.
I rember as a young man growing up in melbourne Australia and see the street after street full of British cars morris minor Humbers Sunbeam Talbots etc., it makes me sad to think about how the British car industry has Vanished not to mention the British motor cycle industry I remember seeing a lot bsa triumph norton and unequaled around the place I remember that my father owned a car called a vanguard which required cranking before starting, good memories and I miss them all.
It happened in other countries, Spain also had some brand motorcycles mast trucks, as Ebro, Bultaco, Pegasus, Seat, Santana, Barreiros, LPI, Derbi, Hispano-Suiza, and are divided between German, Italian and Japanese.
Clever inventors paralyzed by fatty politicians twits toffee nose in the conference rooms, and an eager workforce, stupid manipulated by Marxist agitators was not only the British car industry, he was the country his outfit.
Alas brilliant but tragic tale we Brits are great at engineering and innovation, but unfortunately we are led by incompetent greedy pigs in the boardroom The jet engine is a similar story, it makes me want to cry .
What a beautiful and funny section one, how could could not notice this kind of stagnation in some countries in economic growth and downward turn, a basic economic analysis could even understand this, but sad to know that it takes too long to notice something like that, I guess it takes a long time and all the problems of the economy has come to this day to get their hands on something could so much to change something for best products and standards for the future.
Good luck for companies who see this as a setback for Bounceback.
The UK had a wonderful automotive industry until Fords Dagenham and Vauxhall Motors in Luton decided to strike after strike, mainly for more money, even though they were already receiving wages well above other local industries, such as trade hat commercially hat Luton lost hundreds of women machinists GOT powered pending delivery of their new cars, so they looked for foreign cars and Datsun was one of the first to be readily available in the UK and that began at the end of the automotive industry in the UK.
Hopefully, companies like Riversimple and Gorden Murray Design change all that in the coming years.
A good article, though I hope you will allow me a nod contrite on your suggestion that Scotland was no tradition of engineering If you are right on this point, then engineer typecast Star Trek Scottie has any sense.
By all means decry the fact that benefits millions more cars made in the flow of the UK into foreign hands, but most of the revenues generated by building cars here happened here - parts, service, transportation, taxes, and most of all, wages for labor all that flows into the UK and local economy; the profit element is a small part of the wealth generated.
Michael was the clearest and most literate science journalist for the British newspaper.
And writing scientific functions and a review for the Daily Mail, he is the author of five popular science books, including Ten questions that science can still meet t and eternity our next billion years Palgrave Macmillan.
With its support of nuclear energy and dismissal of alternative medicine, Michael was never afraid of controversy court, and he managed to enrage the climate change skeptics and believers.
Why is there no British car industry Mail Online blog Michael Hanlon Science section, then British industry.