Topic: Decline and Fall

[FrontMan]

Industrial historians, when pondering upon the demise of the British motor industry, rightly target the 1970s onwards. We mechanics were witnesses, and profiteers......
I struggle to think of good cars from that period. Many, otherwise good machines, were let down simply by Lucas electrical equipment. Condensers (capacitors), points (contacts), starters, etc.
And then there was poor design fed by useless management, and betrayed by abysmal production engineering, and a dissolute, dissillusioned workforce.

Vauxhall: Once the inferior steel used on the Victor had been forgotten, things improved. Until the HC series Viva, and Firenza. Though perfectly acceptable to drive, these wretched things amassed an impressive list of service failures, such as
weedy gearboxes; ignition ballast resistors igniting oil-soaked sound insulation on the bonnet (hood); collapsed pressed-steel valve rocker arms; porous inlet manifolds; brake-drum centre sections that flexed, but somehow never actually fractured (thanks to the wheels being bolted on!). Of less concern was the fact that it was anyone's guess as to which combination of brake equipment would be discovered when an HC came in. Some had all Lockheed hardware, some had all Girling. Girling master cylinder and front brakes, Lockheed rear. Or,Lockheed master, Girling everywhere else. At least the spares service was cheap and cheerful.....

Morris Marina: The later 1.3 litre could be fun to hustle along (yes, really!, far more so than the awful Allegro). The lower front suspension wore out rapidly. If the driver was constructed from anything heavier that polystyrene, the rear mountings of the driver's seat would punch ragged holes through the floor. The high-tech remedy was to apply nice big washers to the damaged areas! The 1.8, even in twin-carburettor form, was a lousy drive.

Morris Minor: Again, the lower front suspension wear problem, usually exacerbated by lack of greasing. Everyone in Britain at some time probably saw a collapsed Minor waitng for the breakdown wagon. The brake master cylinder sat neatly in a floor channel. The production line geniuses had arranged the retaining bolts with heads adjacent to the front suspension torsion bar, so one was obliged to "bend" the obstruction. Naturally, the weary mechanic would replace these bolts in the opposite direction!

Austin A40 Farina: Hydraulic brakes forard, mechanical aft. Stupid. (But it used to be good enough for Rolls-Royce.). Horrible Austin steering system, much inferior to the Minor's rack and pinion. No fun at all,...but many were RACED.

Mini: A little darling of a car to drive. Nonetheless, terribly uncomfortable for a long journey with its solid suspension, and a list of design faults too long for the space on this page.

Lost opportunities leading to the deadest of dead ends, and then the Delorean. 

[sichel]

Yes, yes, the "duke of darkness"!
Through the Leyland / Hotchkiss-puzzle by Bill d isere I am once again stumbled by the misery (German = Elend) of the British vehicle industry. What a mess in the model policy by Leyland. We called them "Britisch Elend".
I have less experience with british Technology. Only about a year and a half with Alvis stalwart, Bedford RL and MK as a civilian worker at a REME-workshop. Be that as it may: the stalwart had a brilliant sound! In-line  i.o.e. 8-cylinder Rolls-Royce engine!!
Where did you get your experience? Where did you get your experience? Repair work? Customer Sercive?

[FrontMan]

Sadly, there are periods in history when ackowledgement must be made that one's country has not always lived-up to its advertising campaigns. The R.A.C. Horsepower Rating for road licences was still in force for a while after W.W.2, and this single piece of legistlation resulted in the U.K. being the last country in the World to abandon long-stroke engines. I could ramble on.
My limited experience comes from sixteen years as a self-employed mechanic starting around 1968, and buying all sorts of silly old cars to play about with. Great fun!! Then an inglorious disaster when I decided to try and start an old car magazine. Fortunately, no-one lost money on it, except me. So, for a very short period, I worked for two Ford dealers. Neither of them bothered to check my formal qualifications;...excellent, as I had none!! The first of these, Quick's of Manchester, had a tiny service facility in an ancient building which still sported a fire-distorted roof beam from a rarely-mentioned "incident". The body shop was on the third floor, and only gas-welding was performed, even on high-strength steel. This process was widely known to embrittle such material and compromise the "crashability". The Fire Brigade were obliged to inspect the premises at regular intervals. Stupidly, they would pre-warn the Service Manager. This charlatan would then arrange for the gas-welding kit to be shoved into the works van and driven round the city until such time as the inspection had finished.
The second Ford outlet was Gordon's of Stockport. Back in the 1950s they used to manufacture a bloody awful three-wheeled contraption called the Gordon. It failed to compete against the slightly more civilised Reliant, but I digress.
Gordon's service area consisted of a large shed with a couple of very long workbenches against which the cars were aligned in herringbone fashion. When each car was ready for "out", the mechanic would dump it anywhere outside, and collect the next vehicle. Invariably, one's original gap at the bench would have been taken by another mechanic and car. The evicted one was then obliged to find another slot somewhere. His tool-kit then needed to be transferred to the new home, this being facilitated by means of one of several shopping-trollies which management had stolen from the neighbouring Morrison's Supermarket. I could go on!      

[FrontMan]

And here is the GORDON. I sincerely hope that there are none left.......

[Wendax]

There still is at least one left:

[FrontMan]

I am dismayed!...but until its engine is re-fitted, it does not pose a health hazard!

[nicanary]

Vernons ? The same people who ran the football pools ?

[FrontMan]

....the very same!

[Carnut]

Yes, yes, the "duke of darkness"!

Actually it was the Prince of Darkness!
I think despite the awful workforce practices the blame for the debacle of the collapse of the British Motor Industry lies fairly and squarely with management, none of whom knew anything or had any interest whatsoever in cars! They might have been producing white goods for all they cared, apart from a very small handful of them.
There was nothing wrong with British ingenuity or engineering, but it never got to the production stage at the major manufacturers. Many was the time that wonderful (and great looking) cars were proposed but were rejected as either being too expensive to produce or else 'not to British tastes'; in other words, not stodgy enough!

[FrontMan]

All so very true! But what became of the Wartime profits that fell into the purses of numerous auto industry moguls? Sadly, our biggest player had become  stale and poisonous. William Morris. Britain's Henry Ford, and just as loopy in his old age. Our best bet was Leonard Lord, but even he stirred the "badge-engineering" soup, and ensured doom by making Harriman the Younger his successor. Dear old Billy Shakespeare forsaw it all: "The evil that men do lives after them;..the good is oft interred with their bones."

Meanwhile, Germany, France and Italy were able to make startling recoveries due to America's fear of Communism and the consequent aid thrown at those three as a hedge to mass unrest. It took us until 2011 to settle our financial debt with the U.S.A. to whom we remain subservient even now. Our continental neighbours got the brand new machine tools, and, it has to be conceded, made excellent use of them.

I think it was Sir Miles Thomas who succeeded in persuading a dozy government to abandon the archaic R.A.C. rating upon which vehicle excise duty had been determined. Too little, and too late.

The most astute, far-seeing Englishman of the period was an Army chap by the name of Major Ivan Hirst. But he batted for Volkswagen! "Don't suppose he'll sell many of THEM, old chum!".............

[Carnut]

Exactly; it sums up the management of the British car industry that when the Rootes Group were offered the VW factory project they declined, saying "it had no future".
Sums up the almost total lack of vision!

And the lack of vision continued until well into the 1970s and 80s.
Even as a boy I used to look at the latest offerings and think "Who on earth is going to buy those?".
For example, when the Americans wanted brawny sports cars in the 1970s and 80s what did we offer them? A Triumph TR7 with tiddly little wheels adorned with plastic hub caps and a pea-shooter of a single exhaust sticking out the rear! What an absolute joke; and no doubt the management thought that's exactly what the Americans wanted.
Small wonder it failed so dismally.

[FrontMan]

Oh dear! The TR7.....a customer had one. Cylinder-head warped  . Fitted a second-hand head from Rimmer Brothers of Newark, and drove the thing to see if all was well. One of the most boring contraptions I have ever driven. It reminded me of one of the smaller Volvos. Neither did its strange "styling" appeal. Harris Mann! Where did they find him, and why?

I have heard of one Triumph Stag that was unfairly slagged-off because of its family reputation. A friend bought one, dirt cheap, thirty years ago. In recent years he was able to complete the mecanical rebuild. He is highly experienced on all kinds of exotica including 250Fs, Hispanos and so on. He had managed to cure cooling and carburation conumdrums. He's very, very good. But first test drives showed poor oil pressure when hot. Eventually the engine was removed so that every clearance could be double-checked with the sort of high-tech gadjets that one will not find in my garage! Everything looked fine. But Stag engines, as we know, are not "fine". The thing was slowly re-assembled in meticulous manner, and fitted to a test stand. The oil pressure problem persisted ......

It was about to be disected for the third time. The oil was drained off;.....but not a great deal of oil emerged . Light dawned. As bought, all those years ago, the car had been partially dismantled, and some bits had been stored randomly on various shelves in the vendor's garage. And when it came to retrieving the dipstick, my long-suffering friend had simply picked up....the wrong one.