In 1974 Ralph Nader’s Center for Auto Safety urged a recall of all Ford Pintos. But both Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca refused to acknowledge the car’s fatal flaw, and Henry II even lobbied vigorously in Washington against new safety legislation. Ford’s considered response to Nader’s allegations was that ‘he’s full of crap’, adding: ‘The American people want good cars, good-looking cars, fast cars, cars with power and styling, and that’s the kind of cars we build. We spend a hell of a lot of time trying to make them better and safer, and then some pipsqueak who doesn’t know a thing about the industry comes along and tries to tell us how to do what we’ve dedicated our lives and billions of dollars to doing.’
However, in 1977 Mother Jones magazine revealed how the Ford Motor Company had conducted its own crash tests, and had indeed been aware of the Pinto’s shortcomings well before 1972. Damningly, the publication estimated that as many as nine hundred drivers had died since then in Pinto fuel-tank fires. The magazine article, written by Mark Dowie, also revealed how Ford’s cost-benefit analysis had chillingly calculated that the cost of each fatality (assessed at an implausibly precise $200,725, which included a mere $10,000 for the ‘victim’s pain and suffering’) and of serious burns (estimated at $67,000) was less than the cost of making each Pinto safer. Ford had no answer to this devastating assault and agreed to withdraw 1.5 million Pintos. Meanwhile, Pinto victim Richard Grimshaw won a record $125 million in damages from a Californian court.1 After Ford had been charged with reckless homicide, had been forced to recall yet more Pintos, and had belatedly improved protection for the fuel tank, only to find that the car was now far too unwieldy to drive, the Pinto was finally withdrawn in 1980.
The disasters of the Vega and Pinto, however, appeared almost trivial when compared with the industrial implosion currently occurring on the other side of the Atlantic, where, as the 1970s progressed, large chunks of Britain’s and France’s motor industries appeared to be blithely heading towards meltdown.
Both Citroën and its owners, Michelin, were struggling by 1970. Citroën was still producing two of the most iconic and impressive cars of the century, the 2CV and the DS. But its engineers and stylists simply could not leave well alone. Designating the classic DS for replacement well before its time, the firm had spent far too much on developing its mediocre substitute, the CX, which never quite delivered what it promised. At the same time, Michelin’s dependence on oil-derived carbon black (then the basis for all synthetic rubber products) in an age of escalating oil prices severely weakened its finances.
In the midst of all this, Citroën made one of the most bizarre purchases of the automotive era when it bought the legendary Italian niche sports car manufacturer Maserati in 1968. The principal fruit of this strange alliance, the Citroën SM, was a massively oversized twodoor coupé which Citroën launched in 1970. Powered by a Maserati V-6 engine, it was packed with innovations typical of Citroën’s progressive past: hydraulic, selflevelling suspension even more sophisticated than that used on the DS; an all-glass nose; self-centred power steering; selflevelling headlamps; disc brakes at all corners; and rain-sensitive windscreen wipers. Yet the SM failed to find much of a market in a world in which its splendid performance and advanced technology were fatally undermined by its voracious fuel consumption.
Having spent enormous sums of money on the disappointing CX and the exotic SM, by 1973 Citroën was close to collapse. An alliance with Fiat foundered when the Italians withdrew, worried by the French firm’s mounting debts. The SM predictably proved a sales disaster, and even the CX – which, despite its cutting-edge engineering, still looked cheap and plasticky – was selling poorly. Fortunately for Citroën, France’s government was in no mood to let such a large and prestigious national car maker go to the wall. In 1974 Georges Pompidou’s administration saved the firm from collapse by arranging a shotgun marriage with its old rival Peugeot – the tortoise to Citroën’s hare. Peugeot’s first actions was to sell Maserati, stop production of the SM and close Citroën’s historic Quai de Javel factory in the centre of Paris. There was no place for romance in the stark economic context of the oil crisis.
That year, 1974, was also the year in which the British government stepped in to save the country’s largest car maker from ruin. At the beginning of the 1970s British motor manufacturing was still dangerously fragmented. While it remained a key part of the country’s economy – as late as 1975 vehicle manufacture still accounted for 11 per cent of industrial output – the car industry’s practices were sadly outmoded, its workforce increasingly unreliable, and its management palpably inadequate. As early as 1962, business analyst Samuel Saul had accused the British car industry of a lack of commercial acumen and a ‘passion for technical perfection and individuality for its own sake’. A decade later, Saul’s astute warnings had come true.
Much of the problem stemmed from poor senior management. BMC boss George Harriman’s laissez-faire approach to the combine meant that little was done to rationalize its overlapping product lines and multiplicity of plants. Harriman’s principal concern was merely that his shareholders should always get a generous dividend – a philosophy that he dutifully followed until 1967, when there was simply no money left for any sort of dividend at all, because BMC, despite its bestselling Minis and 1100s, stood on the verge of bankruptcy. Weakness at the top infected the whole company; morale on the shop floor was perilously low, and a 1971 Which? report damned the former BMC’s dealers as the worst in the country.
The British auto industry’s decline and fall makes for grim reading. In 1950 Britain was the largest car exporter in the world, but by 1970 the UK’s auto exports had been surpassed by France, Italy and Japan. Most revealingly, by 1976 the productivity of Germany’s car makers was 40 per cent higher than their UK equivalents. Between 1973 and 1977 Ford was the only British car maker to post a consistent profit: in 1975 British Leyland lost £23.6 million, Rootes (now owned by Chrysler) £35.5 million and GM’s Vauxhall £2.5 million – while Ford made a £40.8 million profit. By 1974, 25 per cent of car-making capacity in the UK was being lost to strikes. Small wonder that in that year Cowley workers’ wives demonstrated at the plant gates against their husbands’ ‘perpetual strikes’ and in support of the beleaguered BL management.
The consolidation of most of Britain’s mass car makers at the end of the sixties was not just promoted by Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Prudential Assurance, the largest shareholder in both BMC and Leyland-Triumph, also urged the merger. Together, the government and the insurers forced the ailing BMC into a series of alliances, first with Jaguar and Pressed Steel in 1966 and two years later with Leyland Motors, which had itself already absorbed Triumph and Rover.
Leyland was a truck and bus maker with little experience of car production. In the 1920s the firm had produced just two models of car: a large Straight Eight, designed to compete with Rolls-Royce (which it signally failed to do); and, from 1925, the Trojan, a solid-wheeled ‘utility car’ with a wheelspan that exactly matched that of most of Britain tramlines, triggering a number of horrific accidents and unintended diversions. Leyland built the Cromwell tank during the Second World War (and the magnificent Centurion tank afterwards), and in 1951 embarked on a spending spree that, in sixteen years, procured such household names as Scammell, Triumph, AEC, Bristol and Rover.
The new British Leyland combine of 1968, headed by Leyland’s former boss, Donald Stokes, seemed unable to offer anything new. Even the marriage had been unhappy: George Harriman had found himself railroaded by stronger characters such as Wilson and Stokes, and subsequently complained to Alec Issigonis that, having arrived at the prime minister’s country residence of Chequers in October 1967, supposedly to discuss the proposed merger between Leyland and BMC,1 he found Stokes already there and the deal secured. Thereafter, Harriman fell conveniently ill and took little part in the negotiations. Thus, just as the creation of BMC in 1952 was in reality a takeover of Morris by Austin, so the creation of British Leyland – whic
h industry minister Tony Benn hailed as ‘a fantastic achievement’ – actually represented a takeover by Leyland-Triumph of BMC, which was now haemorrhaging money at an alarming rate.
British Leyland served no one well. Austin and Morris still retained their separate dealerships, which needed to be supplied with a range of appropriately badged cars. In 1968 BL had forty-eight factories, many of which were ponderously oldfashioned and operated with antiquated piecework contracts – complex agreements that differed from department to department. Most tragically, two of BL’s world-beating models, the Rover 2000/3500 (P6) and the Triumph 2000/2500, now not only competed with each other but also with the executive-market Jaguars from elsewhere in the conglomerate. The powerful Sir William Lyons (who had cannily shoehorned himself into the deputy chairman’s role at BL) ensured that Triumph’s impressive executive range was killed off prematurely and that the marque was forbidden to develop any further products in that area. Lyons also ensured that Rover’s planned Jaguar-sized replacement for the P6, the four-door P8, was axed in 1971 because it might conceivably have competed with Jaguar’s own models. The chance to compete with BMW and Mercedes (and the design for the P8 did look very much like the BMWs of the late 1970s and early 80s) was thus heedlessly tossed away. Rover and Triumph were instead chained together in a ‘Special Division’ whose single product, the Rover SD1, did not appear until 1976. Over at Austin Morris, the racy Mini Cooper was discontinued in 1971 because BL did not want to pay John Cooper his miserly royalties – which worked out at roughly £5 per car – and the charismatic Austin Healey was killed off for much the same reason. Thus were two splendid brands flushed away for myopic, short-term gains.
Even Sir Alec Issigonis1 seemed mysteriously to have mislaid his talent. The celebrated designer of the Minor and the Mini had been promoted by Harriman into senior management positions for which his prickly temperament and pronounced opinions made him ill-suited. His Austin/Morris 1100 of 1962 had proved Britain’s bestselling car through the 1960s, but his subsequent models – the Austin 1800 of 1964 (which Issigonis saw only as ‘a giant Mini’); its bloated cousins the Austin 2200, Wolseley Six and Austin 3-Litre; and the much-derided Maxi of 1969 – were all squat, overweight, oversized and poorly built. Issigonis simply applied the principle of the Mini to ever-larger cars, maximizing internal space but providing little in the way of boot area or interior sophistication. Issigonis’s inherent parsimony also meant that the interiors of these ungainly ‘land crabs’, as the models were unaffectionately known in the trade, were very sparsely furnished. The genius of the Mini did, after all, have feet of clay.
Stokes later admitted of the Austin Maxi: ‘It was ghastly … It looked wrong; you couldn’t change gear on it; it just wasn’t developed.’ BL’s desperate advertising agency was reduced to promoting the Maxi as a double bed on wheels; certainly, there was nothing to brag about in its poor performance, fault-prone gearbox and excruciating build. Once again, a British car maker had released a new model far too early, just at the time when the Germans, and particularly the Japanese, were ensuring that all of their new models were rigorously tested before, and not after, their launch. Thus all of Issgonis’s new cars, from the 1800 to the Maxi, were plagued with wholly avoidable post-production faults. At the same time, the successful models that Issigonis had previously designed for BMC were never properly updated. While European manufacturers stole a march on the British – the highly successful ‘superminis’ of 1972, the Renault 5 and the Fiat 127, suddenly made the original Mini look old – BL had nothing to offer in response. Stokes’s British Leyland actually abandoned the Mini replacement project, ADO74, just in time for the oil crisis of 1973 – after which superminis were massively in demand. It took BMW to recognize what Austin and its successors should have acknowledged decades before: that the marvellous Mini could be adapted to contemporary parameters and still retain its innate charm and uniqueness, and sales appeal.
BL’s supremo, Donald Stokes,1 was hardly the ideal figure to lead the British car industry out of its slough of despond. The Plymouth-born engineer had joined Leyland’s sales department in 1930 and had demonstrated great flair when, twenty years later, he both expanded Leyland’s bus range and won the company new export markets. But Stokes always remained at heart a bus enthusiast and seemed ill at ease in the world of mass car production. He was an excellent salesman and a good communicator. But he failed to comprehend the scale, complexity and internal fissures within British Leyland, and often shied away from making difficult decisions. In short, he seemed unable to grasp the big picture. He was the man, after all, who had described the unfortunate overlap between two of the most promising British cars of the postwar era, the Rover P6 and the Triumph 2000, as merely ‘friendly competition’. Most revealingly, when in 1968 Harold Wilson asked Stokes for BL’s long-term plan, he simply did not have one. Highly embarrassed by his failure, he asked his financial director, John Barber (formerly of Ford), to concoct something in a day. Barber merely copied out Ford’s five-car strategy – which, depressingly, seems to have satisfied both Stokes and Wilson. Stokes later admitted: ‘I think I was probably good at selling’, but ‘I was not and have never pretended to be a manufacturing expert.’ John Barber was the only member of the new BL board who had any experience of mass-market car production.
Stokes’s new empire went from bad to worse. BL’s production rate was about half that of Ford of Britain, while its naive ‘no search’ policy on which the unions had insisted meant that bootfuls of car parts – even whole engines – regularly disappeared out of the factory gates. In addition, the continued application of antediluvian piecework agreements meant that many British Leyland factories were half deserted by midafternoon. (Ford of Britain, in contrast, paid its workers a fixed daily rate.) Strikes, too, became more frequent; in 1969–70 BL lost 5 million man-hours to stoppages, and the next financial year the figure doubled to an appalling 10 million man-hours. On top of all this, the model development BL had inherited from BMC was shambolic. Issigonis’s ‘land crabs’ proved a stylistic and technological dead end, and little real effort had been put into updating either the Mini or the Austin/Morris 1300. The ‘new’ Morris Marina of 1971, the last car to use the Morris name, was supposed to be BL’s answer to the Vauxhall Viva and Ford Cortina (Cowley dubbed it the ‘Cortina Beater’). Yet it was created mostly by cannibalizing existing models and ended up as little more than a re-skinned Morris Minor, likened by critics at the time to ‘a skip on wheels’. While European saloon cars were increasingly being built with frontwheel drive, the Marina retained the Minor’s ancient and unresponsive rear-wheel drive. Worse still, the Cowley plant where the Marina was made had been expanded in such a cack-handed, stopgap way that the conveyor belt taking half-built cars over the Oxford bypass was left open to the elements, ensuring that parts were corroding even before they left the factory. Marinas arrived at the showrooms with their paintwork already bubbling with rust, and quickly sprung leaks. (One Cowley worker, Bill Roche, blamed the ‘gate-line’ assembly process, by which the two sides of a car were each built in a jig and then put together at the end of the line, a demoralizingly imprecise manufacturing method which Renault, Fiat and the Japanese had already dismissed as obsolete.)
Against Ford’s Cortina – and, after 1974, VW’s immensely superior Golf – the Marina never stood a chance, and the export sales on which British Leyland had based its over-optimistic forecasts never materialized. The Marina did, in Stokes’s Panglossian phrase, ‘quite well’ in sales terms. But, as historian Martin Adeney has noted, ‘quite well’ was ‘not sufficient for a company which was striving to push up its profits in the face of increasing … industrial disruption’. America was less forgiving: the Marina was soon placed on Consumer Reports’ notorious ‘Cars to Avoid’ list.
British Leyland’s second new mass-market car of the 1970s, the Austin Allegro of 1973 (‘our Song for Europe’, in the words of Longbridge supremo George Turnbull), was a dumpy disaster whose
curious, lumpy shape found few admirers. Turnbull had promised that the car would appeal to customers ‘from the Arctic Circle to the toe of Italy’ because of the way ‘the eye is beguiled by its excellent proportions’. It was intended as a replacement for the bestselling 1100/1300; yet, as critic James Ruppert has observed, ‘strike-torn and terrorist-threatened Britain got the car it deserved’. The Allegro’s blobby styling – light years away from the razor-sharp edges of Giorgetto Giugiaro’s groundbreaking VW Golf – earned it the nickname of ‘the Flying Pig’. And its ‘revolutionary’ square (or, rather, ‘quartic’) steering wheel was dismissed as an eccentric joke; even skilled police drivers had trouble steering their Allegro panda cars. The Allegro had a boot, whereas its rival, the Golf, was an easy-to-access hatchback;1 the car’s hydragas suspension (introduced by BL just as Citroën was thinking of abandoning the system) proved highly unreliable on the road; there was actually less room inside an Allegro than there had been in a 1300; and, once again, build quality was very poor, with leaks being commonplace. As a result, the car sold significantly less than the successful and much-loved models it was designed to replace. In its best sales year, 1975, only 63,339 Allegros were sold (very few of them overseas); in contrast, the 1100/1300 had regularly sold over 100,000 per year. The car was hardly improved when, in 1974, the venerable, premium coach-making marque of Vanden Plas was inappropriately harnessed to an upmarket Allegro variant equipped with a uniquely hideous, pig-like nose. In that bleak year, British Leyland’s bestselling model was not the Allegro, nor the Maxi, but the ageing Mini.
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