Turnbull was a large, bluff Midlander, with little formal education, an individual who cut a bizarre figure in Ulsan. Born in Coventry, the son of a works manager at Standard Motors’ Canley factory, he joined Standard at the age of just fourteen. Remaining at the firm throughout the 1950s and 60s, in 1968 he found himself in charge of the Austin-Morris division at British Leyland and, at forty-one, the youngest member of the new BL board. Translated to South Korea, Turnbull, a former Coventry Rugby Club forward and Warwickshire county cricketer, found himself several sizes bigger than most of his Korean staff. He also encountered a workplace ethos markedly at odds with the environment at Canley, Cowley or Longbridge, plants that were still mired in myriad outdated working practices. On his first day at the Hyundai factory, in the midst of a bitterly cold Korean winter, Turnbull is supposed to have asked what had happened to the factory’s heating. ‘When we make profits’, replied Chung, ‘they get heating.’ As Chung had hoped, Turnbull immediately put his years of experience in British mass car making to excellent use. He hired five top British car engineers, imported British Leyland and Ford cars as his benchmarks, consulted world-famous auto stylist Giorgetto Giugiaro, bought an excellent engine from Mitsubishi – and within a year of his arrival launched the first truly Korean car, the four-door Hyundai Pony saloon. The Pony was available in Britain as early as 1976, and by 1978 was selling across Europe. The Korean invasion had begun.
Meanwhile, the restless Turnbull himself had moved on – to equally exotic pastures. In 1977 he left Hyundai for Iran National, where he supervised the transformation of Chrysler’s mundane British workhorse, the Hillman Hunter, into the evergreen, Iranian-built Paykan, which continued to be produced until 2005. George Turnbull (Sir George, as he later became) was thus responsible for establishing a native car industry for two of the worlds’ most strategically important emerging nations.
One major East Asian country, however, did not rush to join the automotive world in the 1970s. The largest potential market in the world stood idly by, its political masters preferring to promote the bicycle over the automobile and communist doctrine over car ownership.
The first motor car did not appear on China’s streets until 1901, when a French model was imported into Shanghai by a wealthy foreign doctor; but by 1912 there were 1,400 motor cars registered in the city of Shanghai alone. Following the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1911, the new president, Yuan Shikai, created a new road (the Avenue of Eternal Peace) simply in order to allow his personal limousine a smooth passage into the city. The first car factory on Chinese soil was built by the Japanese in Changchun (then called Hsinking), which they had established as the capital of Manchukuo following their invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In 1945 this plant fell into the hands of the invading Soviet army, and after Mao’s communist victory it was renamed the Number One Automobile Plant. From 1953 Number One began to make copies of Soviet trucks and, after 1958 (the year in which Mao Zedong imposed his disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’ on an unsuspecting nation), passenger cars under the Red Flag (‘Hong Qi’) label. Senior party cadres, however, continued to be provided with Soviet ZiLs or Volgas until China’s rift with Russia of 1965, after which they had to make do with whatever ‘limousines’ Red Flag could devise.
The rest of the Chinese population had to wait for the car to arrive. When it did, in the 1990s, the effect would be astonishing.
1 John DeLorean later recalled that the Chevrolet parts manual was 1½ feet thick and contained 165,000 different specifications.
2 The Datsun brand survived until 1986.
1 And over which the ‘Last Emperor’, Pu Yi, notionally presided.
1 Sold in Japan as the bizarrely named Fairlady Z.
1 In France this was called merely the MR, as the French pronunciation of MR2 sounded uncannily like the French noun merde.
2 Known as the Roadster, or miata, in Japan.
1 Honda was also, interestingly, the first car maker to comply with America’s Clean Air Act of 1975.
1 Although Toyota later retook the top spot.
2 The erection of the Burnaston plant controversially involved the demolition of the listed Regency mansion of Burnaston House.
3 A ‘compact minivan’ in America, a ‘small MPV’ (multi-purpose vehicle) in Europe.
4 From 2002 Asimo officially spoke English as well as Japanese.
14
Big Beasts
The ‘me’ decade of the 1980s was a time of conspicuous consumption and brazen display. It was an era when bigger was invariably better. And it was an age of careless contradiction: what was ostensibly a time of growing ecological concern simultaneously spawned a motoring revolution which dismissed increasing unease about the pillaging of the planet’s resources and instead positively gloried in the size and unsustainability of a wholly new species of large, fuel-hungry vehicles.
From the early 1980s, oversized, gas-guzzling, high-riding, ‘offroad’, four-wheel-drive 4×4s – or, as they were known in America, sports utility vehicles (SUVs)1 – began to populate the world’s highways. The offroad experience of the majority of these vehicles was confined to occasionally mounting the pavement. But consumers were attracted by their roomy interiors and the high ride height, which gave their occupants the illusion of greater safety. (Ironically, the exaggerated ride height of SUVs actually caused more accidents, because drivers failed to see what was happening at ground level.) SUVs could also tow all manner of objects, from caravans to boats, and were expedient in colder climates where their high ground clearance helped carry them over banks of snow. Women loved them, finding their luxury, space, strength and security (partly because they were so remote from the everyday dramas of the road) highly appealing; in the US in 2011 over 50 per cent of SUV drivers were women. And while car makers could extract far more profit from an SUV than from a regular saloon, buyers also found them a good investment; classified in America as ‘light trucks’, which helped them circumvent emission and consumption regulations, their gluttony for fuel seemed less of an issue as oil prices continued to fall during the 1990s.
Technically, the world’s first luxury 4×4s were Kaiser’s Jeep Wagoneer of 1963 (which never won the popularity it deserved, owing to Kaiser’s slender resources) and the Range Rover of 1970. These bold, far-sighted initiatives were, by the mid-1970s, being widely imitated by Chevrolet, Nissan and Toyota. However, the modern SUV market was effectively created in 1980 by a far more affordable product, Toyota’s Land Cruiser – a luxury, yet compact, offroader which made the august Land Rover look like a spartan dinosaur and the Range Rover seem brusquely utilitarian. The Land Cruiser actually dated back to 1951 and was derived from the classic US Jeep.1 By the 1970s it had evolved into a rugged station wagon – a market sector soon to be almost obliterated by the all-conquering SUVs. However, the 60 Series Land Cruiser of 1980, which borrowed many elements from the Range Rover (but not its high price), introduced far more cabin refinements, together with a higher driving position. The result was a success, particularly in America. Today, its successors, the bulky 200 Series Land Cruiser and its more lavish Lexus sibling, the LX570, still sell very well in the US – although, revealingly, it is the more luxurious Lexus that commands most of the range’s sales.
The success of the Land Cruiser stung American car makers into action.2 The Jeep Cherokee,3 which AMC and Renault had been working on since 1978, finally appeared in 1984 as the first American-made SUV, and was enthusiastically promoted by Chrysler after its purchase of AMC in 1987. Made both in Toledo, Ohio, and in China, the Cherokee proved a genuine world-beater. GM and Ford were slower off the mark, and initially preferred just to adapt existing light trucks1 into twodoor SUVs. By the end of the 1980s, however, everyone was getting in on the act, and manufacturers across the globe were producing four-door SUVs2 of varying shapes and sizes. Indeed, so marked was the enthusiasm for SUVs that saloons began to be forgotten. Thus, while GM converted its Arlington, Texas, plant from the manufacture of Chevrolets, Buicks and Cadillac
sedans to the production of SUVs, it forgot to update existing more conventional models such as the Buick Century and the Pontiac Grand Prix, which as a consequence began to fall behind their Japanese and German competitors in terms of specification and styling.
Back in the world of everyday saloons, it was the Germans who now set the standard for family and executive cars. The Audi 80 of 1978 was the first distinctive Audi that Volkswagen had produced since it had bought the car maker in 1965, while the Audi 100 of 1982 set new benchmarks for comfort and performance. Created by Audi boss Ferdinand Piëch (the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche) and designed by Giugiaro, the 80 was based on the same platform as the VW Passat but, for the first time in Audi’s history, it was a car that did not look like a Volkswagen. Trim, streamlined and tight, it looked fast – and it was. When it was updated in 1986, Audi’s anglophone advertising agency, BBH, ingeniously harnessed perceived German brand values, using the same ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ tag line it had already coined for Germany. American and British manufacturers found they had little with which to challenge either the new Audis or even the revamped and improved VW Passat.
BMW also went from strength to strength. During the 1980s the 3, 5 and 7 Series were all updated, yet the BMW family resemblance, which traced its ancestry back to the 1500 of 1962, always remained very apparent. The 3 Series became the symbol of Western capitalism in the 1980s, the transport of choice for the newly enriched ‘yuppie’ who had profited from the laissez-faire economies of the Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl years. A 6 Series (coupé versions of the 5s) and an 8 Series (a rather heavy coupé development of the 7s) were subsequently added, and in 1986 BMW introduced a sports version of the bestselling 3 Series, the M3, a more aggressively designed and highly tuned version of the basic saloon. Meanwhile, the civilian 3 Series became ever larger, prompting the Bavarian car maker to issue a truncated, ‘compact’ version in 1994.
Like BMW, Mercedes was in 1980 widely regarded as one of the world’s principal automotive beasts. Yet the company’s apparent strength, confidence and success belied numerous internal corporate tensions. These finally surfaced in 1986 when the televised celebration of Daimler-Benz’s centennial was ruined by avoidable technical problems, prompting Europe’s TV stations to pull the plug on the event halfway through. Daimler-Benz executives were horrified, forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and CEO, Werner Breitschwerdt, and indulged in an orgy of soul-searching.
The centennial debacle was a watershed for Daimler-Benz. The company realized it could not continue to prosper by complacently relying on the legacy of the 1960s while Audi and BMW surged further ahead. It started by abandoning the unfathomable classification system traditionally used for Mercedes cars. Accordingly, in 1993 the midsize Mercedes 220 range became known as the E-Class; the label S-Class began to be used more prominently for top of the range Sonderklasse (‘special class’) luxury saloons; and Mercedes extended its range downwards with a new C-Class, effectively a replacement for the discontinued 190 series.
The repackaged S-Class was designed to challenge the supremacy of the BMW 7 Series and, while it only achieved moderate success in this regard, it sold tolerably well and acquired an enviable reputation for build, reliability and safety.1 Nevertheless, while the S-Class cars still recognizably resembled the Mercedes of old, they also looked overweight, oversized and oldfashioned when compared with the latest products emerging from their Munich-based rivals. The S-Class had, BMW’s Wolfgang Reitzle cheerfully told reporters, ‘not one innovative thing about it’.
While the British and the Americans can be said to have invented the offroad SUV, and the Germans perfected the executive saloon during the 1980s, it was the French who pioneered one of the era’s signature vehicles. In 1984 France’s state-owned auto manufacturer launched the world’s first full-sizepersonnel carrier – also known as a people carrier, multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) or, in the US, minivan.2
The Renault Espace was a car that, like the Jeep Cherokee and the BMW 5 Series, flagrantly disregarded contemporary anxieties about fuel economy. But it changed the face of family motoring forever. To the chagrin of the French, the concept of the Espace actually originated in the imagination of a Briton. In the mid-1970s British designer Fergus Pollock drafted a design for a large family transport for Chrysler UK at their design centre at Whitley in Coventry.3 Thereafter, his idea was passed from pillar to post; with Chrysler’s British subsidiary in meltdown, the design was swiftly forwarded to Chrysler’s French division, Simca, which in turn presented it to its affiliate Matra. This seemed to be an eccentric choice, given that Matra was then best known for its niche sports models. However, it proved the right decision. Matra designer Antonis Volanis (who later helped create Citroën’s popular compact MPV of 1999, the Xsara Picasso) successfully adapted Pollock’s concept for assembly as an Anglo-French Talbot product. Then, in 1978, Simca found itself sold to Peugeot-Citroën, which recoiled from the novelty of Pollock and Volanis’s concept. Instead, Matra took the idea to Renault, which recognized it as the key to a whole new market sector, and renamed it the Espace. With its fibreglass body and vast, single-floor cabin, Renault’s roomy MPV was a dramatic new departure in auto design. Too extreme for some at first, it would seem: only nine Espaces were sold in the car’s first sales month. But the vehicle soon caught on with families and taxi operators alike, and by 1986 was selling in impressive numbers across the world.
While Renault broke new ground with the Espace, its principal French rival faced some difficult years. Citroën’s characterful and unmistakably French BX family car of 1982 used the same pneumatic suspension as the classic, and much larger, DS. But after launching the BX, Citroën appeared to retreat from its reputation for innovation and instead took refuge in a series of bland, unremarkable cars. In addition, Peugeot-Citroën’s factories, with their highly unionized and restive workforces, also endured crippling stoppages; as a result, the combine descended ever deeper into the red. In 1983, facing bankruptcy due to the huge losses incurred by Chrysler Europe’s toxic legacy, Peugeot-Citroën announced a 10 per cent cut in the workforce at Poissy and announced that its new supermini, the 205 (later hailed by Europe’s motoring journalists as the Car of the Decade) was to be built not at Poissy but at Sochaux. The unions naturally objected, and demanded that the whole company be nationalized, as Renault had been in 1945. Peugeot-Citroën simply retaliated by threatening to close the whole plant. Talks broke down and rioting broke out; the violence became so serious that even the unions asked Peugeot-Citroën to call in the feared CRS riot police. Poissy was shut, and then reopened with a drastically pruned workforce. At the same time, Citroën’s old, cramped factory at Levallois, now surrounded by prime middle-class real estate, was permanently closed. With it died one of the world’s most famous cars, the Citroën 2CV.
Even Renault found it was not immune from violence. In 1985 the new chairman, Georges Besse, followed in the footsteps of his rivals at Peugeot-Citroën and initiated a dramatic cost-cutting programme. A few months later, however, Besse was assassinated by terrorists from the revolutionary group Action Directe. Stoically, Renault’s management persevered with Besse’s restructuring plans, and in 1989 shut the venerable Billancourt factory for good. The unions protested vociferously, but after Besse’s murder the initiative passed to the management. Five years later Renault was privatized with barely a whimper.
Privatization was also the name of the game in Margaret Thatcher’s free-market Britain. At British Leyland, however, Michael Edwardes’s initial replacement could by no stretch of the imagination have been called a Thatcherite sword-bearer. In an astonishingly myopic attempt to turn the clock back several decades (and to present the departing and little-loved Edwardes with a public raspberry), right under the noses of Thatcher’s struggling government1 BL promoted a long-serving motor executive, with no proven track record of leadership or decision-making, to become the auto giant’s new CEO. Harold Musgrove was a former Austin apprentice who had risen
to become chief of the Longbridge factory, but his tenure at the summit of BL definitely proved a bridge too far. Musgrove’s unguarded and inappropriate comments alienated the workforce, while his senior staff were exasperated by mistakes such as his secretive attempts to kill off the Mini, his supine accession to the government’s privatization of Jaguar in 1984, and his termination of the contract of the gifted designer David Bache, who had been responsible for the Rover P6 and the Range Rover. Under Musgrove’s tenure, BL’s export market dissolved. In 1978 foreign exports had stood at around 40 per cent of BL’s output; by 1984 (admittedly now without Jaguar) they were down to 20 per cent. The American market, in particular, had vaporized; as critic James Ruppert has recorded, ‘from a buoyant 75,291 cars in 1976, BL cars in America managed to export just the one in 1984’.
In 1986, with BL’s market share in the UK down to a dismal 17 per cent, Musgrove was finally shunted aside to make way for a completely different animal, the disciplined Canadian business lawyer Graham Day. A man who had made his name in the shipbuilding industry, Day began by publicly admitting he had no idea how to make cars. But he did recognize that BL needed to concentrate on profits rather than on market share – a sound philosophy, albeit one that was applied thirty years too late. He also created a proper marketing department for the automotive giant, almost twenty years after British Leyland had been formed and almost forty since the creation of BMC. Knighted in 1989 (an honour ostentatiously denied to Musgrove), Day sought to take his new charge upmarket by renaming British Leyland the Rover Group and remodelling it as a serious rival to BMW. The problem was, Day had neither the right models nor the requisite finance to realize this plucky ambition. The tired and still notoriously unreliable Rover SD1 was the only premium model available to pit against BMW’s effortlessly superior 5 and 7 Series, and the SD1 was due for the axe without any replacement having being developed. In response to this dilemma, Day resorted to the same gambit Edwardes had adopted a few years earlier, selling off bits of the auto group piecemeal with no thought for the long-term future. Unipart was sold to its management, as was Leyland Buses, while Freight Rover went to the Dutch firm Daf. Just two marques were left standing, Rover and MG (and no true MG sports cars had been made since Abingdon closed in 1980). Day felt he had no choice but to settle into an ever-closer relationship with Honda – hardly the way, perhaps, to take on BMW. Since the new Rover Group seemed as bereft of ideas as British Leyland had been, that meant pretending that Honda products were as British as the Spitfire fighter and Stilton cheese.
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