Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Coventry-born Egan was, unlike Edwardes, steeped in engineering and familiar with the shop floor. The son of a garage owner, he had studied petroleum engineering at Imperial College and then worked for Shell, GM’s A C Delco and Canadian tractor maker Massey Ferguson (then controlled by Conrad Black, later notorious as the media mogul imprisoned for fraud in 2007), before joining BL. His arrival at Jaguar, on 27 April 1980, ended a long strike, as Egan gave workers his personal commitment to the company and its workforce. Jaguar, which had lacked any sort of chief executive or leadership between 1975 and 1980, now had a new heart and a sense of independent purpose. Egan hired racing guru Tom Walkinshaw to guide Jaguar back into the racing world for the first time in over twenty years. (In 1984 Walkinshaw ended a string of BMW victories by winning the European Touring Car Championship in a Jaguar.) At the other end of the spectrum, Egan was appalled by the poor quality of many of the cars Jaguar was then building and by the abysmal productivity of the workforce. He was particularly disgusted by the rock-bottom standards of many of his suppliers: ‘There were tyres that weren’t round; radio aerials which wouldn’t go up and down; switches that failed.’ He instituted a black museum of badly made car parts to show visiting suppliers, and instituted a new series of standards for supplies. At the same time, he reduced the workforce – while improving productivity.

  In 1984, to Egan’s delight, the firm was privatized by the Thatcher government, now seemingly invulnerable after victory in the Falklands War and its success in 1983’s general election. Jaguar was back to impressive profits, and Egan was knighted in 1986. In the 1980s and 90s the venerable XJ6, originally unveiled in 1968, was continually revamped and reinvented, appearing in its final guise as a lightweight, aluminiumbodied, long-wheelbase variant, simply called the XJ, in 2003. Meanwhile, the firm was made an offer it couldn’t refuse by Ford, which promised large-scale investment (and a Formula 1 racing team). Ford bought the company in 1990 – just in time for the recession of the early 1990s, which saw luxury car sales decimated. Egan, who had turned Jaguar’s fortunes around so spectacularly in the 1980s, sensibly decided to bow out of the new, Ford-owned Jaguar, and joined the British Airports Authority as chief executive.

  Both John Egan and Michael Edwardes were adept at manipulating the media – far better, indeed, than contemporaries such as Lee Iacocca of Chrysler or Roger Smith of GM. Edwardes carefully limited his appearances on television to times when he could announce good news, and staged ‘impromptu’ interviews while apparently getting in or out of his car, uttering carefully rehearsed statements that he believed would influence the workforce and union negotiators. He also ensured that his view of events – which, in true Thatcherite fashion, he firmly believed would be vindicated by history – was set down in an ‘autobiography’ published only a year after he stepped down as chairman.1

  Edwardes’s no-prisoners approach to labour relations also seemed to show immediate results. He culled a large tranche of the combine’s underperforming management; and, on 1 February 1978, followed a meeting with 720 union representatives with a snap vote on his restructuring plan – which only five stunned shop stewards voted against. Yet notorious strike-brokers such as Longbridge’s Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson continued to exercise huge influence over the workforce, while the ancient piecework system, whereby workers could leave the plant once they had performed their strictly measured, pre-agreed tasks, was still in place. Accordingly, Edwardes confronted the unions head-on, sacking Robinson on 27 November 1979 and replacing the piecework agreements with daywork rosters. Robinson’s dismissal prompted an immediate walkout at Longbridge, but the majority of BL’s workers realized that the days of guaranteed jobs were long past and that BL was now in serious trouble. To Robinson’s horror, in February 1980 a union vote rejected strike action. ‘On yer bike, Red Robbo’ read one worker’s placard.

  However, while Edwardes succeeded in cowing the unions and in launching some viable new cars – the Metro was the first successful mass-market model that British car makers had introduced in over twenty years – the development of new products at BL continued only at snail’s pace. Work on the Metro, Maestro and Montego was already well advanced when Edwardes arrived, and his only real innovation was to rebadge existing Hondas as Triumphs; this got BL nowhere, while handily giving Honda a leg-up in Europe. The disposal of Triumph’s brand-new factory at Speke (the first closure of a British car factory since 1945) was also hardly a model example of the sustainable adaptation of resources. (Edwardes’s brief flirtation in the early 1980s with GM, which would have permitted the US giant to make use of BL’s underused plants, would surely have been a sensible option for this facility.) The extinguishing of the Vanden Plas and Park Royal factories, and the mothballing and subsequent closure of the new Rover plant at Solihull, were similarly controversial. And the abandonment of MG production was, in hindsight, a serious mistake; Edwardes had effectively ceded the sports car market to the Germans and Japanese, and trashed fifty years’ worth of accumulated brand value.1 Typically, the historic and evocative octagonal MG badge was pressed into service to decorate upmarket versions of family cars, motors that had precious little in common with the famed MGB or Midget.

  In many ways, Edwardes’s tenure at BL was a false dawn. Altogether the firm lost £1 billion between 1979 and 1982, the year in which Edwardes departed, leaving someone else to clean up the mess. More days had been lost to strikes in British car factories in 1979–81 than ever before. And BL simply had no new models up its sleeve; thus the outdated and outclassed Allegro and Marina were simply relaunched as the Allegro 2 and Ital, in 1979 and 1980, respectively. The popular but boxy Austin Metro of 1980, hailed as the ‘Car for the 1980s’ (and the first British car to be made largely by robots, using technology borrowed from Fiat), was soon eclipsed by Ford’s Fiesta; the much-vaunted replacement for the Mini never appeared; the Austin Maestro of 1983, while innovative and good value, gained a well-deserved reputation for poor build and unreliability; and the Austin Montego’s only distinction was that it was the last car to bear the Austin name. While foreign manufacturers made huge inroads into the UK market with reliable and modern small models such as the VW Golf, Renault 5 and Datsun Cherry, BL’s own export market collapsed spectacularly. In 1984 BL, which ten years earlier had sold thousands of cars to America, sold precisely four.

  British Leyland and Chrysler were not the only automotive giants with problems in of post-oil crisis Britain. Ford was not immune from the scourge of poor industrial relations either. In 1970 the newly launched Cortina III was plagued by build problems, reliability issues and a nine-week strike at Dagenham; virtually all the ‘launch’ cars were so poorly made they were subsequently scrapped. Reg Birch, the Maoistinclined Amalgamated Engineering Union representative responsible for negotiations with Ford at Dagenham, was deliberately provocative (though personally charming) and did nothing to improve relations with the management or, when a Commons committee came to see for themselves, the government. Nevertheless, in the early 1970s there were indications that the Ford workforce was tired of being manipulated by a handful of extremist representatives. In February 1973 workers at Dagenham voted against their union convenors’ recommendation of a strike and overtime ban, prompting even Henry Ford II to send his personal congratulations.

  Ford was fortunate in that, unlike BL’s overlapping line-up, its model range was simple and sound. Rather than replace the bestselling Cortina, as British Leyland had done with the 1100/1300, Ford re-bodied and updated it in 1966 as the compact and handsome Mark II, in 1970 as the larger Mark III, and in 1976 as the sleek and stylish Mark IV. While the Mark III’s large scale, raised waist, protruding bumper and cheap interior looked more Dearborn than Dagenham – indeed, for many the Mark III epitomizes the ungainly style and brash, misplaced confidence of the crisis-ridden seventies – it still sold well, becoming Britain’s bestselling car in 1972. The Mark IV Cortina, while hardly Ford’s first Anglo-German collaboration,1 helped to weld tog
ether the constituent parts of Ford Europe. Previously, the German equivalent of the Cortina had been the Taunus, which had been differently styled and equipped, and which competed with the Cortina in international markets; even the Mark III, while developed by Ford of Europe as the TC (the Taunus Cortina), looked very different in Britain and Germany. But the crisp, angular Mark IV, which did away with the outmoded Americanisms of the Mark III, was designed in Germany by Uwe Bahnsen, already the author of Ford Europe’s answer to the Mustang, the Capri.1

  In 1976, the small car that Ford had been promising for Europe finally arrived, four years after Henry Ford II had sanctioned the project. The multilingual name for the new subcompact, Fiesta, lacked charisma, but was not up for discussion. Henry Ford II had personally picked the title – having rejected the market research winner, Bravo, and despite the fact that the brand name had, in the UK, been previously used for a packet dessert and a type of condom. (Other unsuccessful names in this exercise, such as Sierra and Tempo, were later used for other Ford models.) Moreover, the engine was intrinsically the same Kent power plant that had been used for the 1959 Anglia. But the Fiesta proved an enduring success. Its sharp, distinctly European boxiness was devised by stylist Tom Tjaarda in Detroit, who borrowed freely from the Fiat 127 and the VW Golf. Its pleasing looks, allied to its reliability and excellent handling (its frontwheel drive was a novelty for postwar Fords) won many admirers. In two years it was the UK’s bestselling supermini, and even made inroads into the US market. In 1981 a successful hot-hatch version, the XR2, was unveiled. At the time of writing, the Fiesta is still being made, and is still massively successful. It is no trend-setter – the sixth generation of the Fiesta was widely criticized for plagiarizing the styling of the Peugeot 207 – but continues to garner awards. And it remains a truly global car, being currently made in Germany, Spain, Mexico, Thailand and China.

  It is many years, however, since the Fiesta was made in Britain. By 1979 productivity in Ford’s UK factories had fallen alarmingly and stood at thirteen cars per employee per year, compared with thirty-one in Germany. Ford’s US bosses were not impressed, and began a slow withdrawal from Britain. At the same time, GM began to prioritize car production at Opel in Germany, with its UK Vauxhall factories becoming little more than assembly plants for foreign-made parts. In 2002 Ford’s Dagenham factory produced its last car, a Fiesta. From 2004 GM owned only one car factory in Britain: the Vauxhall plant at Ellesmere Port on the Wirral, which made Astras.

  While Britain’s foreign-owned auto manufacturers failed to impress their American and German paymasters during the 1970s, Italy’s leading car maker continued to plough a proudly independent furrow. In 1970, the year in which the Fiat 128 was named European Car of the Year by the motoring press, Fiat was the world’s largest automobile manufacturer outside the US, outperforming even the mighty Volkswagen. In 1974, Gianni Agnelli was elected president of Confindustria, the national employer’s association. And in 1975, at a time when most car makers were retrenching, Agnelli created a successful bus and truck division, Iveco, which ultimately absorbed Ford’s European commercial vehicle operation. Agnelli simultaneously agreed an astute deal with union leader Luciano Lama to establish an inflation-linked wage system (the scala mobile, or ‘sliding stair’), which would eliminate some of the crippling strikes that Fiat, along with most of the car makers of the Western world, had recently suffered. Subsequent devaluations of the Italian lira, while crippling the national economy, were greeted with private relief by Agnelli, who found his cars becoming even more competitive in foreign markets.

  In 1971 Agnelli’s Fiat again showed itself to be ahead of the game, launching the first of what would be called superminis – or, in America, subcompacts – the Fiat 127. This perky, square little car, effectively a replacement for the firm’s old 850, sold well across Europe and South America, and was additionally built in Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. But it failed to gain much of a foothold in North America; that market was instead conquered by the second of the modern superminis, the Renault 5, which was advertised in Canada and the US simply as ‘Le Car’. Michel Boué’s crisp styling, which masked the fact that most of its mechanical elements came from the venerable Renault 4, gave the 5 a distinct edge over the routine lines of the Fiat 127. As a result, the Renault 5 swiftly gained cult status comparable to the Mini and became one of Europe’s bestselling cars.1

  In the midst of these automotive successes, Agnelli still found time to maintain his reputation as one of the most elegantly clad men of his era. Milanese fashion designer Nino Cerruti cited Agnelli as one of his principal inspirations, alongside James Bond and John F. Kennedy, while Esquire magazine named Agnelli one of five best-dressed men in the history of the world. Agnelli’s personal fashion eccentricities, such as wearing his watch over his cuff, pulling his tie askew or sporting high brown hiking boots under a bespoke suit – were all carefully chosen in a spirit of sprezzatura, the Italian art of making the difficult look easy.

  By the end of the seventies, though, Fiat found itself at risk from an unexpected and very dangerous quarter. When Agnelli became head of Confindustria, he and his firm immediately became prime targets for the murderous activities of the Red Brigades, Italy’s communist terrorist organization. Agnelli himself was safe behind his barricade of security measures, but over the next five years the Brigate Rosse murdered four Fiat managers and seriously wounded twenty-seven others. Productivity plummeted as terrorist sympathizers sabotaged production lines and encouraged go-slows, and by 1975 Fiat was producing only eleven cars per worker per year, to Toyota’s forty-three.2 In 1978, in an atrocity that shocked the whole world, the Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Italy’s former prime minister, Aldo Moro, as he was seeking to reach a compromise with the country’s powerful communist party. Then, on 21 September 1979, a 51-year-old senior manager at Fiat, Carlo Ghiglieno, was shot dead in a Turin street as he went to buy his early morning espresso. This cowardly murder finally galvanized Agnelli into action. Resolving to take the terrorists and their fellow travellers head-on, he fired sixty-one workers suspected of connections to the Brigate Rosse. As trade unions turned firmly against the Red Brigades, a slew of arrests severely weakened the movement, which collapsed altogether in 1984.

  Preoccupied with the terrorist threat and with labour relations, forward planning at Fiat had suffered and by 1980 the company’s sales and market share were both falling. But Agnelli had an answer for that, too, ruthlessly replacing his brother, Umberto, as the firm’s day-to-day head with the brusque but highly efficient Cesare Romiti. (‘I believe the age of the family firm is over,’ Umberto Agnelli grimly told waiting reporters on 31 July 1980.1) Cesare Romiti had joined Fiat as finance director in 1974, having previously been managing director of the national airline, Alitalia. Arrogant and overbearing, he was nevertheless given absolute authority by Agnelli, who saw his Romiti’s harsh medicine as the only way to keep the company independent. It was Romiti who cut back the Fiat workforce in the early 1980s, making thirteen thousand workers redundant, and temporarily suspending another twenty-four thousand, in September 1980. The result was a vast and seemingly endless strike, ostentatiously supported by the veteran communist leader Enrico Berlinguer. But on the thirty-fourth day of the strike, forty thousand Fiat workers, including many from middle management, took to the streets of Turin demanding an end to the stoppage. The union was discredited and swiftly backed away – agreeing, just four days later, to the redundancy of a further 22,884 metalworkers. In the months that followed, union membership at Fiat fell dramatically. Romiti, and Fiat, had won.

  In 1981 Fiat successfully launched its new supermini replacement for the 127, the Uno, which the European media also hailed as the Car of the Year. In the ensuing years Fiat pioneered assembly-line robotics, and by 1984 was making very healthy profits. Today the firm created by Giovanni Agnelli and shaped by his grandson, Gianni, is one of the world’s leading car makers, one that not only owns most of Italy’s most prestigiou
s auto marques, from Ferrari to Maserati, but also controls Chrysler.1

  The most successful new small car of the 1970s did not come from Italy, however, but from Germany. The Volkswagen Golf of 1974 blended a revolutionary shape with a reliable build, strong residual values, fuel efficiency, impressive handling and striking performance.2 Giorgetto Giugiaro’s design was sharp, angular and compact – in short, nothing like Nordhoff’s cherished Beetle, let alone rivals such as Britain’s blobby Allegro.

  In 1967 a reluctant Heinz Nordhoff had been forced to retire from Volkswagen, ostensibly due to ill health, after a clumsy campaign by the West German government to force him to step down. (Parted from his cherished Wolfsburg office, Nordhoff deteriorated rapidly and died the following year.) With Nordhoff gone, Volkswagen found itself liberated from his obsessional one-model policy. From 1973 VW launched the Passat executive saloon, drastically reduced the range of Beetle options (something Nordhoff would never have allowed) and introduced a smaller version of the Golf, the Polo.3

  The Golf proved as successful as the Beetle; the first million Golfs sold in only thirty-one months. Innovative, witty advertising campaigns by DDB targeted the Golf successfully at younger consumers and small families, leaving their rivals looking staid or complacent. In 1975 the Golf was launched in the US as the Rabbit, and the following year production began at an American plant at Westmoreland, Pennsylvania. In 1987, as worldwide sales reached 15 million, the Golf overtook the Ford Model T to become the second bestselling car ever, after the Beetle.

  The Golf’s designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, had studied design in Turin in the 1950s, and by 1965 had become chief executive of Torinese coachbuilders Ghia. In 1968 he set up on his own, wisely baling out just before Ghia’s sale to Ford. His new company, ItalDesign, was asked to worked for Alfa, Ferrari, Daewoo, Fiat (for which Guigiaro created the Uno in 1983), BMW (for which he created the M1 sports car), Hyundai, Saab, SEAT (for which he created the Toledo and Ibiza in 1991 and 1993), Lancia, Maserati, Renault, Ford and Lotus.1 In 1999 the motoring press dubbed Giugiaro the Car Designer of the Century. His greatest achievements were surely the Volkswagen Golf and its VAG relatives of 1973–4: the Passat, the Scirocco and the Audi 80.