At a time when most British motor executives were opting for safety over innovation, Lyons cleverly built on the XK120’s success by venturing into a different market segment – while taking care that the XK120’s core brand values of looks, performance and luxury (or, as the Jaguar sales slogan of the time had it, ‘Grace, Space, Pace’) were just as relevant to this new sector. The Jaguar 2.4 and 3.4 fast executive saloons of 1955, which in turn metamorphosed into the splendid Mark 2s we have already seen in debuting in 1959, were beautiful to look at, exciting to drive, and luxuriously well-appointed. And as the fastest four-door saloons in the world, they, too, were swiftly snapped up by Britain’s lucky police forces.
In 1960 Sir William Lyons1 took advantage of his firm’s spectacular US sales to create the Jaguar Group of Companies. He took Jaguar out of motor racing (now proving prohibitively expensive) and concentrated instead on building a modest automotive empire. Over two years he bought the bankrupt operation of Daimler of Coventry – then producing very few cars and absorbed with their new, rear-engined bus, the Fleetline – along with BSA (Birmingham Small Arms), bus and truck makers Guy Motors and, in 1963, Coventry Climax engines. The purchase of both Daimler and Guy gave Lyons badly needed factory space, which in turn allowed him to make more cars; thus while around thirty thousand XKs had been made between 1947 and 1959, during the next twelve years over seventy thousand E-Types were produced.
The E-Type was launched to a rapturous reception in 1961. It was a beautiful, twoseater touring car that looked like a racing car – but wasn’t. The fact that it rarely ever reached its advertised top speed of 150 mph rather missed the point; like the Ford Thunderbird, it was devised as a personal style accessory and not as a performance car. Its 3.8 litre engine was buoyed by a new suspension system, and in later models the narrow and small wheels were enlarged to give better grip and cornering.
The E-Type’s classic curves, devised partly by Lyons himself, instantly won over motoring critics and customers on both sides of the Atlantic. To many, then and now, the E-Type – along perhaps with the Mini, the Aston Martin DB5, Bill Mitchell’s ’63 Corvette and the 1964 Mustang – embodies sixties style. Even Enzo Ferrari called it ‘the most beautiful car ever made’. Less reverently, American journalist Henry Manney, demonstrating an impressive knowledge of British slang, termed the E-type ‘the Greatest Crumpet-Catcher Known to Man’.
In twelve years Sir William Lyons had designed, produced and sold three of the greatest and most characterful cars of the twentieth century. His innate business acumen also ensured that they were outstanding commercial successes. In 1968 he added yet another global hit to this impressive roster: the XJ6 large executive saloon. If his British contemporaries and successors had followed Lyons’s example, the British motor industry might well have weathered the vagaries of the 1970s and 80s. As it was, his vision and daring were inherited not by the bosses of British Leyland but by the managers of BMW, Mercedes and Toyota.
Inevitably, as he grew older, even Lyons’s vision began to become clouded. In 1966 Sir William made perhaps his biggest mistake, agreeing to merge the Jaguar Group with BMC and its Pressed Steel body making subsidiary to form British Motor Holdings (BMH). Lyons was nearing retirement, had no obvious successor within the firm (his only son, racing driver John Lyons, had been killed in a car accident in 1955), and thought BMH offered Jaguar its best bet for future investment. Two years later, and much against Lyons’s wishes, BMH merged with Leyland, now owners of both Triumph and Rover, to form the giant conglomerate British Leyland.1 Jaguar’s reputation and standards plummeted and took almost two decades to recover.
Aside from the Porsche 911 of 1963, there were few direct equivalents to the E-Type Jaguar (and the DB5 and TR4) made in continental Europe during the Swinging Sixties.2 This is not to say that continental car makers were only making lacklustre cars at this time. During this decade Renault, for example, introduced a series of impressive cars. The Renault 4 of 1961 was a very belated response to Citroën’s 2CV, but its tardiness did not prevent its spacious, hatchback design generating wide appeal in Europe, and it continued in production for thirty-one years. The Renault 8 small family car of 1962, with its distinctive, dihedral bonnet, borrowed from the Triumph Vitesse, was moderately successful, but was eclipsed by the innovative Renault 16 of 1965. The 16 invented a whole new car form: it was a large family car that was also a hatchback. It was stylish, too; its ‘bird-beak’ grille and pugnacious snout were balanced by the vast, gently tapering rear ‘fastback’ roof, which also constituted the ‘fifth door’.
In 1968 Peugeot unveiled its response to the Renault 16 in the form of the four-door 504. More conventionally styled than the 16 (as Peugeot customers had come to expect), its taut, Pininfarina lines nevertheless earned it public and critical acclaim; declared European Car of the Year for 1969, it remained a familiar sight on French roads until well into the 1980s and continued in production under licence in China, Africa and South America until 2004.
Citroën’s incomparable DS and its quirky, adaptable 2CV had long been in full production. In 1961, though, Flaminio Bertoni, Citroën’s legendary designer, launched an ‘upmarket’ version of the 2CV, the Ami 6. With its bizarre, bug-like nose, tiny tail lights, windswept roof and exaggerated, reverse-rake rear pillars (C-pillars), the Ami qualifies as one of the ugliest cars ever made. Nevertheless, the ‘3CV’, as it was popularly known, was cheap and frugal, and accordingly sold well in France and southern Europe until axed in 1978.
Under the rule of company president Dr Vittorio Valletta, and with its distinctive cars still styled by chief designer Dante Giacosa, Fiat had by the sixties become synonymous with Italy’s postwar recovery. Indeed, in many ways industrial Italy of the 1960s was Fiat. Valletta had steered the company to success after 1945 and continued to rule it with a rod of iron, firing any workers who were suspected of leftist leanings and sacking managers who disagreed with him. But in 1966 the grandson of the firm’s founder, Giovanni Agnelli, quietly took the helm of the automotive giant from the 83-year-old Valletta. The succession was seamless and painless (at least to everyone except Valletta, who did not want to go), and demonstrated to the rest of the world that corporate Italy had come of age.
Gianni Agnelli (he was generally called by the diminutive in order to distinguish him from Fiat’s founder) was a very different person from his revered grandfather. His father, Eduardo, had been killed in a bizarre aircraft accident when he was only fourteen.1 Freed from the control of his father, young Gianni developed a reputation firstly as a war hero after 1940 (he was wounded once in North Africa, where he was serving in a Fiat-built armoured car division, and twice on the Russian front) and secondly as a playboy, whose mistresses ranged from American socialite Pamela Harriman to Swedish film star Anita Ekberg. Gianni seemed to display more enthusiasm for the progress of Juventus (the Fiat-owned, Turin-based football team) than for Fiat’s product strategy. As a result, Valletta became increasingly nervous about the prospect of grooming Gianni for the succession, preferring instead to promote his assistant, Gaudenzio Bono, as Fiat’s future boss. Agnelli appeared to agree with the tyrannical doctor’s judgement; he publicly declared, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea how to build a car’ and that ‘Fiat is a machine which needs a chief who is an expert in all phases of its operations, like Bono’. But when the ailing Valletta was forced by the Italian government to retire, the high-living Prince Hal of Italy’s premier motoring dynasty unhesitatingly seized the reins. Valletta naively asked Agnelli whom he believed would be his successor as chairman, assuming the notorious playboy would suggest Bono, but Agnelli stunned the ageing technocrat by succinctly announcing: ‘I believe I shall do it myself.’ (‘I decided,’ Agnelli later commented, ‘that I was the best person.’) Almost overnight, the former lounge lizard became an active and committed leader of, and advocate for, Fiat, which he ran for thirty years.1
Agnelli’s energy and flair for the automotive business were soon evident. In 1969 he bo
ught Fiat a controlling interest in Ferrari and Lancia.2 Vincenzo Lancia, a big man who barely squeezed into the cars he loved to race, had started his career as Fiat’s chief test driver. In 1906 he founded his own automobile company, which soon became famous for unconventional, racy models. Like Citroën, though, Lancia found by the late 1960s that it could no longer afford the development costs of innovative cars.
In 1969 Agnelli also unveiled the firm’s first mass-produced midsize car. The Fiat 128 combined economic performance with frontwheel drive and good handling, and became an instant classic. Its mundane, box-like body, which made it easy to assemble, concealed a gutsy new power plant designed by the famous Ferrari racing-engine designer, Aurelio Lampredi. Soon Agnelli had set up factories in Russia, Yugoslavia and Poland to make derivatives of the 128, models that were still being produced by some Eastern Bloc countries when the Iron Curtain came down twenty years later.
Fiat was keen to expand eastwards. In 1966 the firm collaborated with the Russian government to create AvtoVAZ (Avtomobilniy Volzhsky Avtomobilny Zavod, or ‘Automobile Volga Automobile Plant’), a car maker based in the new city of Tolyatti (named after the legendary Italian communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, who had died two years before) on the Volga river. The company made its name with the VAZ-2101 of 1970, a rugged adaptation of the uninspiring but reliable and widely acclaimed Fiat 124 saloon of 1966. The VAZ-2101 was sold under the brand name of Lada abroad, but as Zhiguli in Russia (where Lada was already well known as a type of cheese). The Lada/Zhiguli’s steel body panels were 30 per cent thicker than the 124’s, and the Fiat’s suspension, steering and gearbox were all strengthened to survive the bumpy Soviet roads and atrocious Russian winters. Although they handled very poorly, and their fuel economy was atrocious, Ladas could take a lot of punishment and accordingly sold well in Europe and South America – particularly after 1973, when consumers were looking for cheap alternatives to local car marques. Soon Russian trawler-men visiting Britain and Iceland were buying up export Ladas, which were made to a better specification than the home-market Zhigulis, and taking them back to Russia to be cannibalized for badly needed spare parts.1
The appeal of the Lada for Western consumers was rather hard to define. Academic Peter Hamilton recalls the ‘strangely brittle plastic, lumpy foam and clingingly uncomfortable fabric, hideously inadequate fittings, parts that came off in your hand when using them – such as handbrakes. Erratic gauges, either wildly optimistic or non-functioning. Keys that broke in the locks. Seats that listed drunkenly. Paintwork whose surface recalled the bark of a tree rather than the peel of an orange.’ But Ladas were cheap, they were hardy, and they won an affectionate following across the world.
At the same time as the Russian Lada was becoming a byword for ugliness, the Germans were quietly creating one of motor history’s classic designs. One of the best-looking European cars of the 1960s, the NSU Ro80 was also one of the most innovatory. Unfortunately, however, its radical engineering proved a bridge too far. NSU had begun life in 1873 as a knitting-machine manufacturer in Württemberg in southern Germany. It diversified into bicycles and (for a few years) cars, and by 1955 had become the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. In 1957 the firm restarted automobile production, and a decade later launched, to worldwide surprise, the astonishing Ro80 car.
The Ro80 was beautifully designed by NSU’s Claus Luthe. Its sleek, subtle, aerodynamic wedge shape and quadruple headlights echoed those of Michelotti’s Triumph 2000 and anticipated the executive saloons of the subsequent two decades. It had disc brakes, power-assisted rack-andpinion steering, frontwheel drive and independent suspension. It was extremely quiet and possessed almost-unknown extras such as a heated rear window and a rear ski hatch. Most importantly, it was powered by a revolutionary rotary engine devised by German engineer Felix Wankel. The Wankel engine worked by a system of rotors rather than pistons, which made it far more compact than its conventional predecessors, while at the same time enviably powerful. (The Ro80’s original engine produced what was then a highly impressive 128 bhp.) However, the Wankel’s development was rushed and in the Ro80 it proved highly unreliable. While many European motor magazines hailed the Ro80 as their Car of the Year for 1967, by 1968 they were acknowledging that it was plagued with faults and failures. The numerous manufacturers who had expressed interest in the rotary concept now melted away; only Mazda stayed the course, developing the rotary engine (at great cost) into a viable power plant by the mid-1970s. Today, the Wankel engine is once more the subject of widespread interest, as its compact size and quiet operation make it an ideal candidate to partner with electric motors in hybrid cars.
The Ro80’s failure, allied to the vast cost of developing the car, led to NSU’s collapse and in 1969 the bankrupt firm was absorbed into Volkswagen. The Ro80 itself limped on in production until 1977, but by then mechanics were used to substituting Ford’s far cruder Essex engine (the engine that powered the rough and ready Ford Transit van) for the delicate Wankel rotary.
Following the 1969 takeover, NSU’s gifted designer, Claus Luthe, worked for a time for VW’s Audi division, where he helped create the Audi 50 (the parent of the VW Polo) and revised the brilliant Audi 100. In 1976 he moved to BMW as chief designer; there he created many of the iconic 3, 5 and 7 Series BMW saloons of the 1980s. Luthe’s 7 Series of 1986 (known internally as the E32) actually bore a distinct resemblance to his classic Ro80 of almost twenty years before. Luthe’s career evaporated in tragic circumstances, however, when in 1990 he was convicted of fatally stabbing his drug-dependent, 33-year-old son.
The executive saloon market that the Ro80 had sought to conquer was by the end of the 1960s captured (outside Britain, France and North America, at least) by Mercedes. Not only did Mercedes have an impressive range of four-door saloons in their 190, 200 and 300 series, but in 1964 Daimler-Benz also launched a top of the range limousine which offered Rolls-Royce and Cadillac quality at a far cheaper price. The Mercedes 600 was lengthy, heavy and powered by a massive 6.3 litre engine. Its long-wheelbase version could be supplied as a four-or six-door limousine, both of which could be adapted as chauffeured vehicles; in this latter guise it proved the quintessential car for heads of state who preferred to avoid the colonial baggage of vehicles from the former imperial powers, such as Britain and France, or the capitalist excesses implied by a Cadillac or a Lincoln. As a result, presidents, monarchs, tycoons and celebrities the world over flocked to buy 600s. Russia’s Leonid Brezhnev bought one, as did Albania’s ludicrous tyrant Enver Hoxha, Uganda’s despotic ‘President-for-Life’ Idi Amin, Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, the Philippines’ long-serving strongman Ferdinand Marcos, Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk, the Shah of Iran (who ordered a whole fleet of 600s), and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Production of the 600 ended in 1981, but today they are still highly sought after by collectors.
For Britain and the more anglophile Commonwealth countries, the Mercedes 600, no matter how far it could be stretched, could never hope to compete with a Rolls-Royce. In order to tackle the challenge of Mercedes’ new limousines in the rest of the world, in 1965 Rolls-Royce boldly introduced something very different: the compact and boxy Silver Shadow. This ultra-luxury flagship model, which was also available with a Bentley badge,1 was subsequently adapted as a convertible (called the Corniche) and, more improbably, as a coupé (the Pininfarina-styled Camargue). The Silver Shadow was the first Rolls-Royce to be built in one piece, as a monocoque; thus, even though the car was shorter and narrower than its predecessor, the stately Silver Cloud, its interior was more spacious. The Silver Shadow’s hydraulic, selflevelling suspension system, licensed from Citroën, represented a major departure in both technological and styling terms for the luxury car maker, but the risk paid off and the car sold very well in both the US and other overseas markets. Thankfully, the model’s original name of ‘Silver Mist’ was vetoed when Rolls discovered that ‘Mist’ was German for ‘manure’.
America remained a good
market for British exports in the sixties, from the Silver Shadow to the MGB.2 But Americans did not rely solely on British imports to satisfy their apparently insatiable demand for racy autos. By the mid-1960s America had its own contender in the small sports car market.
In 1961 GM’s chief stylist Bill Mitchell (who had succeeded his patron, Harley Earl, as vice president and corporate styling chief in 1958) bought a Jaguar E-Type.3 He soon fell in love with its graceful curves and wondered why GM did not produce something along the same lines. Using the E-Type as his starting point, and working with fellow stylist Larry Shinoda, he comprehensively restyled Earl’s open-topped Corvette as a sleek, hard-topped coupé. This second-generation (C2) Corvette of 1963, called the Sting Ray to distinguish it from Earl’s 1953 original (now retrospectively termed the C1), was reinterpreted as a compact, powerful, curvaceous racer and provided with hidden headlights and independent rear suspension. Its gently sloping rear roof mirrored that of its exact contemporary, the Porsche 911 (although its split rear windscreen, which Mitchell adored, severely reduced visibility, and was removed for 1964). And like the 911, its basic form lasted for decades.1 In contrast to the American-made ‘pony’ and ‘muscle’ cars which followed later, the Corvette Sting Ray was a genuine American sports car – a rare commodity in the 1960s. Chevrolet also recognized the importance of retaining a Corvette family resemblance, much as Porsche was to do with its evergreen 911. While the Ford Mustang changed out of all recognition during the 1970s, becoming a bloated, sagging parody of its taut 1964 namesake, the Corvettes of the early twenty-first century still bore a strong family resemblance to Mitchell and Shinoda’s masterly original.
The new Ford Mustang was a conundrum. Its performance was decidedly inferior to that of the Sting Ray; it was effectively little more than an old Ford family car, cleverly repackaged. But this gas-guzzling sports-family crossover still managed to become a runaway success – largely thanks to its fabulous styling, which created one of the signature cars of the decade. The brainchild of Ford’s ambitious young vice president Lee Iacocca, and styled by the talented Eugene Bordinat, the Mustang was launched in 1964 to great acclaim. Indeed, in later years almost everyone at Ford appeared to have had a hand in its development, demonstrating how success can spawn many fathers. Few of these men, interestingly, queued up to accept responsibility for the Ford Pinto.
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