Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  The Chevrolets of 1959 looked almost as futuristic as their Cadillac cousins. At the top of the range was the full-size Impala. In many ways the quintessential Golden Age car, the ’59 Impala was a resonant symbol of the era before safety concerns and the need for fuel economy encouraged the American consumer to look to smaller, more frugal and betterprotected models. The Impala had been first introduced in 1958 but was completely redesigned by Earl’s department for the following year. In front was a vast hood extending from a curved, wraparound windscreen; aft were vast bat-wing fins (which projected sideways rather than up), sheltering huge teardrop tail lights. The new Impala was lower and wider, and heavier, than its predecessor, with a hefty 42 foot turning circle. And there were now numerous versions to choose from; the four-door hard-top and four-door sedan were complemented by a convertible and a twodoor Sport Coupe with a shortened roof-line and wrap-over back window which promised a ‘virtually unlimited rear view’. The hard-top Sport Sedan had a huge, pillar-free back window under what Chevrolet described as a ‘flying wing’ roof-line. And under the hood, a variety of V-8 engines offered from 185 to 315 hp, assuming you had already rejected the cheaper, wimpish, six-cylinder version. Inside, Impalas were equipped with front and rear armrests, an electric clock, dual sliding sun visors, and a contoured instrument panel with deep-set gauges, positioned below hoods to prevent glare. You could even add a new Flexomatic six-way power seat. Small wonder that the Impala rapidly became America’s most popular car and helped Chevrolet back to the number one spot as the nation’s favourite automotive brand.

  Priced just below the Impala was its cousin, the Chevrolet Bel Air.1 The Bel Air name was now six years old, but 1959’s Bel Air was like nothing that had gone before – and nothing else on the road. The car’s headlamps were placed as low as the law would allow, and it was longer than ever; at 211 inches (5,400 mm) long, the Bel Air was 11 inches (280 mm) longer than even the 1957 model. At the front, quadruple headlamps were sited beneath huge air intakes, at either end of a wide, grinning grille which was partitioned to look like shark’s teeth. (The apex of each vertical partition on the grille was emphasized with an aggressive cylindrical projection, which would have made mincemeat of any pedestrian unlucky enough to be sandwiched against the car’s front end.) Behind the elongated hood, the Bel Air’s roof swooped down in a single, graceful arc from the wraparound windscreen to alight on the rising tail fins. At the rear, two enormous bat wings rose up above giant teardrop lights. Never again was car design to be so expressive or so assertive.

  Over at Chrysler, Virgil Exner’s Forward Look still held sway. Excess was de rigueur: tail fins had never been so prominent, chromed eyebrows never so sweeping, chrome fenders never so boldly sculpted, tail lights never so bullet-like, and colours never so daring. Headlamp eyebrows for the 1959 Plymouths were undulated to make the cars seem even more anthropomorphic. Dodge’s flagship car for 1959, the Custom Royal Lancer four-door hard-top, was more bedecked with chrome than any other Chrysler model, before or since. The Royal Lancer’s vast fins, which started at the front of the rear doors, sheltered two pairs of giant, chrome-encased projecting tail lights, while its pillar-less glasshouse incorporated huge wraparound front and rear windshields, and its vast front grille was topped with quadruple headlamps, shielded under chromed eyebrows which swept majestically down to the front wheel arches.

  Even Ford dipped a cautious toe into the pond of Golden Age styling. Ford’s ’59 Thunderbird boasted Exner-style quadruple headlamps, fins and an aggressive-looking front end, while its fender framed a large, ovoid grille. In 1959, even Ford’s mid-price Mercurys looked rakish. Soon, however, the company’s stylists settled down to what they did best: making unexciting but reliable, midsize family cars. Their 1960 range largely abandoned fins and chrome, as Ford’s designers scuttled back to straight lines some time before their Big Three rivals similarly rediscovered the virtues of sober modesty.

  Nineteen fifty-nine in Britain was a motoring annus mirabilis, too: the year of the Mini, the Ford Anglia, the Triumph Herald and the impeccably styled Jaguar Mark 2 – four of the most innovative (and handsome) cars in the world. The Mini in particular broke new ground and has deservedly come to be regarded as one of the world’s classic cars, one which changed the face of motoring and transformed how cars were configured.

  BMC boss Leonard Lord was determined to develop a ‘proper’ car to trounce the Germans; in 1957 he demanded that BMC’s designer Alec Issigonis ‘drop everything … and build me something to beat the bloody bubble cars’, and he championed Issigonis’s Mini from the start. Yet the Mini was not the first innovative small car that BMC produced. In 1958 the combine had launched the new-look Austin A40, a revolutionary ‘two-box’ design which was a sharp contrast to the ‘three-box’ pattern of bonnet/hood, glasshouse, and boot/trunk to which most cars then conformed. The A40’s snappy, angular design, commissioned from Giovanni Battista Farina’s Turin-based Carrozzeria Pininfarina coachbuilding operation, was light years away from the comforting, rounded shapes that BMC loved. And with its rear access door, BMC had, in the A40, effectively created the world’s first hatchback.

  ‘Pinin’ Farina was born in Turin in 1893 and began work for Fiat aged only seventeen. His infant nickname ‘Pinin’ – ‘baby’ in the Piedmontese dialect – stuck with him all his life; indeed, in 1961 he legally changed his name to Battista Pininfarina. Depressed by the lack of work in Mussolini’s Italy, Farina, along with thousands of Italians, emigrated to America. However, he found the US little better; declining the offer of a menial job at Ford, he soon returned to Italy to work in his brother’s body shop. Farina founded his own company in 1930, but it was only after the Second World War that his business really took off, when he was asked to design car bodies for Fiat, Lancia, Alfa Romeo and, after 1952, Ferrari. In 1957 BMC decided to try and enliven their products by introducing some Italian visual flair and, controversially, invited Farina to help design not only the A40 but also the new Morris Oxford and its BMC stablemates, the Austin Cambridge, the MG Magnette and the Riley 4/68. Peugeot had the same idea, and ended up with the Pinfarinastyled Peugeot 404 of 1960 – a car that looked strikingly similar to Farina’s Morris Oxford.

  So pleased was BMC with Pininfarina’s work on the A40 that they originally added a suffix, Farina, to the car’s official name. Sadly, the car’s underpinnings did not live up to the promise of Pininfarina’s crisply styled body. Underneath, indeed, the car was virtually identical to the oldfashioned if loveable Noddy car, the A30/A35, which had been introduced by Austin in 1951 as their answer to the Morris Minor. The A40 even shared the A35’s 948cc engine and running gear; only in 1962 were these features updated. For its breakthrough model, BMC needed a wholly new concept. And for that it turned to more local talent.

  Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis was born in 1906 in the Aegean port of Smyrna, then part of the Ottoman Empire. His father was a British citizen; this stroke of luck meant that, when Smyrna was threatened by the nationalist Turks under General Mustafa Kemal in 1922, the Issigonis family was able to find refuge first in British-owned Malta and later in Britain itself. This last move was, sadly, achieved without Alexander’s father, who had died in a Maltese hospital in June 1923. Thereafter, Alec (as he now called himself) lived with his mother for the next sixty-six years.

  Issigonis went to work as an engineer for Humber in Coventry.1 Then, in 1936, he moved (along with his mother) to what was at the time the largest car factory in Europe, the Morris plant at Cowley. At the time, his favourite car was not a Morris but the ‘baby car’ made by Morris’s bitterest rival, the Austin Seven. Issigonis’s two greatest creations, the Morris Minor and the BMC Mini, were direct descendants of this influential little car.

  Even his strongest admirers would not deny that Issigonis was a difficult man. As motor historian Graham Robson has written, to most observers he seemed ‘a haughty, single-minded individual who was unable to accept that anyone else’s ideas were equal
to his own’, who ‘was … scornful of cost-cutting managers’ and ‘put passenger comfort way down his list of priorities’. He was, concludes Robson, a ‘remote, ascetic and arrogant engineer’. Nor did Issigonis seem very impressive on paper, having only a diploma in mechanical engineering to his name. Leonard Lord accurately observed that the designer had no people skills whatsoever, and ‘wasn’t able to have a conversation without a pen in his hand’. Even after the phenomenal success of his Mini design, Issigonis continued to live with his mother in a modest flat on Five Mile Drive, off the Oxford ring road, commuting to Birmingham by car. He went to bed at 9 p.m. every night, appears to have been asexual in inclination, and spent most of his leisure time playing with his giant model railway in the Edgbaston bungalow he inhabited during the week. Yet unsentimental, distant and notoriously caustic as he was, he nevertheless made lasting friendships outside the car industry. Peter Ustinov, who counted himself a friend of Issigonis’s, likened ‘the wide-eyed innocence of the Mini’s headlights, an innocence which is at once childish and highly sophisticated’ to the personality of its creator.

  One of Issigonis’s principal ambitions was to maximize the interior space in the prototype Mini. He was determined to find space for four full seats – not two barely usable back seats, as in Giacosa’s Fiat 500. To do this he employed thin-sectioned sliding windows, sited the engine so it lay transversely across the car, not in line with it, and placed the transmission under, rather than alongside, the engine. The result was that, although it was over 20 per cent smaller than the Morris Minor, the Mini offered its passengers far more space.

  Issigonis also saved both weight and space by starving the Mini of accessories. His ascetic nature did not comprehend the concept of customer comfort, and he fought long and hard to avoid wind-up windows (even though water collected in the runners of his sliding window panels) and more comfortable front seats (insisting that the excessively upright rake of the seats was necessary to stop the driver falling asleep). The Mini’s revolutionary hydrolastic suspension, though, was the creation not of Issigonis but of his talented colleague Alex Moulton.

  As we have seen, Lord had already granted a BMC styling consultancy to Pininfarina of Turin, and now he sought the Italian’s advice on the Mini. Both Battista Farina and his son, Sergio, generously hailed Issigonis’s design as ‘unique’ and told Lord ‘not to change a line’. Much to his credit, the BMC chairman stood by Issigonis’s revolutionary design all the way, even when senior managers preached caution.

  The new Mini was smaller, lighter, more spacious, faster and far more manoeuvrable than all its rivals. It was only 10 feet long but seemed much bigger than genuinely larger cars like the Minor and the A40. It was significantly cheaper than the VW Beetle, the Renault Dauphine, the Fiat 600 and the Ford Anglia, boasted a top speed that bettered all except the Anglia,1 and offered a rate of acceleration that was by far the best in its class.

  Predictably, much of the conservative management of BMC had not wanted the radical little car in the first place, preferring the traditional certainties of the Morris Minor and the Austin Cambridge. (At the top of this long list was Lord’s deputy, George Harriman, who was later to prove an ineffectual company chairman after Lord’s retirement.) Now BMC’s top brass were nervous about how to badge and market the prodigy with which they found themselves saddled. Their unhappy compromise was to issue the car in two corporate guises, which both appropriated the names of tried and trusted former models. One version, made at both Cowley and Longbridge, was called the Morris Mini-Minor; while its Austin-badged twin was dubbed the Austin Seven, in memory of a car last made in 1939. In reality, the two versions differed only in the design of their front grilles. Even the Austin and Morris press offices – still, despite the merger of 1952, run entirely separately from each other, in an appalling waste of corporate resources – were uncertain how to market the new car. Austin’s executives uncertainly concluded that it was aimed at the female driver. ‘Women of the world rejoice,’ declared Austin’s advertisements, ‘in a man’s world, a car has been designed with women in mind.’ Their opposite numbers at Morris, however, preferred to emphasize the new car’s historic pedigree, bizarrely invoking Nelson, Samuel Johnson and Leonardo da Vinci in their eccentric promotional campaign. No wonder consumers were confused; indeed, it is astonishing that BMC sold any Minis at all in 1959. Before long, however, Austin’s marketing department changed tack and hired the famous racing driver Stirling Moss to try out the car. (Moss liked it, although even he complained about the uncomfortable driving position.) And for the first time in the British car industry, a manufacturer began to personalize a car. Austin’s adverts gradually began to celebrate not just the Mini but also the talented ‘genius’ behind its design. Issigonis found himself a lionized celebrity. Unfortunately, he came to believe all the media hype and became even more reluctant to work with his BMC colleagues.

  In 1962 it was agreed, at least at Longbridge, to abandon the pretence that the Mini had been developed from past successes, and the Seven brand name was at last dropped. Cowley dragged its feet, though, and it was not until 1967 that the Morris Mini-Minor became simply the Morris Mini. Why Harriman’s BMC management did not intervene long before to end these damaging inconsistencies remains a mystery. Only in 1969, after Harriman had weakly acceded to BMC’s absorption into British Leyland, was the decision finally taken to abandon the now meaningless marques altogether and let the strong Mini brand stand on its own.1

  The Mini was kept in production until October 2000, a lifespan of forty-one years. In retrospect, the barely modified model may have lived a little too long and should have been either significantly updated or else quietly put to sleep when it reached its twilight years. The Mini’s sales peak of 318,475 in 1971 was never matched over the next three decades; sales dropped significantly at the end of the 1980s and by 1997 Minis were selling less than fifteen thousand per year. Altogether, though, over 5.3 million Minis were sold between 1959 and 2000.

  The Mini soon became a cult. Like the Austin Seven, it was classless and gender-free, proving as popular with women as with men. It was the car of the moment. Issigonis lent a Mini to his new friend, the society photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who was soon filmed bowling along in it along with his fiancée, Princess Margaret. Soon all the glitterati of the sixties – the Beatles, Twiggy, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Sellers, Christine Keeler – were being filmed or photographed driving Minis.

  The Mini also became an unlikely sporting star. In 1961 Issigonis collaborated with racing car manufacturer John Cooper to produce a gutsy, racing-friendly Mini Cooper. The high-performance 997cc car was a big success, as was the even more powerful S version launched two years later. By the mid-sixties the Mini Cooper S had become the most successful competition car in Europe for road races and rallying. When a Mini won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1964, European sales of the diminutive auto soared.

  In 1966 the model reached its racing peak, when Minis came first, second and third in the Monte. Yet BMC’s finest were then mysteriously disqualified by the French authorities for carrying ‘illegal headlamps’, an arbitrary ruling that allowed the French Citroën team to claim victory. (Citroën’s driver was thoroughly embarrassed to receive the winner’s trophy and vowed never to race for the Citroën team again.) The Mini’s riposte was simply to win the Monte again in 1967. That same year the Mini Cooper proved equally adept at the new British sport of rallycross, a short-course (and therefore easily filmed) combination of track and offroad racing invented by Independent Television to fill a gap in its Saturday afternoon schedule.

  Mini Coopers were also the stars of the 1967 movie The Italian Job, which was devised as a celebration of the Mini as much as of Swinging Britain. Once again, though, Britain’s motor industry failed to rise to the occasion. As the film’s star, Michael Caine, later wrote: ‘We went to the British Motor Corporation, as it was then, and asked if they would donate some [Minis] in return for the publicity the Mini would
receive. They were fantastically snooty about it and said they could only manage a token few. Fiat, on the other hand, completely got the idea, and offered as many cars as we wanted, including sports cars for the mafia scene. No wonder the British car industry went down the toilet …’ The excuse for the film’s eponymous ‘job’ was, ironically, a looming Chinese deal with Fiat. And Fiat’s far-sighted management ensured that their products – and particularly the Mini’s great rival, the splendid 500 – were prominently showcased in the traffic chaos of Turin which was the film’s centrepiece.

  In the event, BMC’s negligence extended far beyond its cinematic parsimony. Incredibly, the runaway success of the Mini on both road and track never made BMC rich – and it sowed the seeds of British Leyland’s ultimate collapse. Leonard Lord’s typically brusque dictum was: ‘If you build bloody good cars, they’ll sell themselves.’ Reflecting his boss’s decidedly oldfashioned approach to auto manufacture, Alec Issigonis refused to let either BMC, Austin or Morris have any say in the appearance of the car, and was particularly scornful of cost accountants, whom he continued to keep at arm’s length. Financial experts from other car makers across the globe puzzled how BMC could sell such a revolutionary car so cheaply. Ford calculated that each Mini cost £5 more to make than a Ford Anglia, but was priced at £30 less. And they were right: BMC had not costed the car properly. But when Ford executives generously shared their findings – Patrick Hennessey even phoned Harriman personally to inform him of his team’s findings – BMC did not want to know and stuck their corporate heads in the sand. BMC preferred, like Herbert Austin, to concentrate on maximizing sales rather than ensuring profit per unit, and felt they had to make the Mini cheaper than all its rivals. Car executives across the world were soon familiar with the joke about Mini cars making mini profits, and despite the outstanding success of both the Mini and Issigonis’s next project, the bestselling 1100/1300, BMC lurched into the red. As Issigonis’s biographer, Gillian Bardsley, has astutely noted: ‘In the final analysis men like Leonard Lord and George Harriman paid too much attention to the engineering of their products and too little attention to the efficient running of the business. They operated on instinct, barely attempting to understand the market. They paid scant attention to the pricing of their products, which were often too cheap, nor did they undertake sufficient capital investment or plan properly for the future.’