From my view as a German 🇩🇪 a piece is missing: It is not the Unions fault only this is to simple. At VW for example about 90 % of the workers are in the Union. It is even mandatory to have a member of the Unions as a member at the board of VW. Management and Unions in UK did not find a way together. Don't blame the unions alone. GB is not very good at compromising.
YES ! , That's an incredibly important point. In the U.K. and U.S. the relationship between management and workers is adversarial if not downright hostile and disrespectful. Not only in the auto industry but nearly everything. An exception in the U.S. is Southwest airlines which from the beginning been partially owned by employees. They have had far fewer problems than the other airlines. The German system is better.
Listen to Ruairidh MacVeigh's The Death of the UK car industry (also here on VouTube) and you find the reasons why the unions were upset, working under abysmal conditions in old factories never renovated. Add to that thousands were randomly sacked, production moved from one end of UK to another for the Minis, and infighting between the ex-bosses of Austin and Morris, plus their ability to sack talented guys, one being bought up by Hundai, as CEO, creating the most profitable car company in the world! Massive amounts of Minis were sold, but all at a loss, for years and years as the sales figures looked good, is there any better way of running down a company?! The Labour government created Leyland, and run the entire shebang into the ground, as they didn't dare to fire the surplus employees after the big sellers started to stop selling.
Its still sad that cars and motorcycles in England was built with really poor quality by workers who also could strike for years. No one buys products like that for a longer time.
The bike factories rarely had strikes. Their problems were more lack of investment and bad design. BSA had tired machinery over 20 years old, Honda custom built machinery so that each bike was built faster and more reliably (they made 4 to BSA's 1). Umberslade hall, BSA's design centre managed to design a frame that needed something like a 36 inch inside leg, by the time they found out, it was too late to get the redesigned bikes to the USA for that sales season. Most of the engines were old fashioned, either dating back to just after (or before) the war, with cosmetic updates, or a redesign that didn't improve on the earlier version. Leyland had more problems than just industrial relations. I counted the number of engine families they made in the early 1970s, from A series to Jaguar V12, I think there were 12 , several competing with each other, and all made in different production lines and factories.Austin A,B,E series, 5 from Triumph, 2 Rover, 2 Jag. I may have missed some. Madness.
@@American-Motors-Corporation there was no government funding for the bike industry until the 1970s, after they had gone bankrupt. Except for during the wars, when they sold guns and bikes to the forces. In fact, in the early years the BSA gun division was in competition with the Royal Small Arms Factory, who cheated. RSAF were allowed to supply foreign contracts from government stocks of guns, then replace them at leisure. BSA couldn't compete with that, they actually had to make them to order. They did make unreliable bikes compered to the Japanese though, old fashioned, still with drum brakes, no electric start etc. Sorry, thought you meant the bike industry. Not BL
My dad bought a brand new Hillman Avenger in Poole Dorset with the hockey stick rear lights, he ordered it White with white upholstery that had green piping🤩. But the factory let him down for some reason and for less money and a better car radio he got one in “Prairie Wind 😂” which was basically Beige. Aaaah nothing like sitting in shorts on vinyl seats on a hot summers day. Straight away he found anything above sixty and the whole car would vibrate, so after several trips to the dealer with no success at sorting the problem out, he wrote a letter to the company (no email of course back then) they did reply quickly and arrange to investigate at a Bournemouth dealers and would send a factory chief mechanic to😲. This they did, according to my dad the guy lifted the car removed the long drive shaft, placed it on the floor and rolled it along with his foot and it was pretty obvious it was bent. So he fitted a brand new one he had brought along and all was fine after that, god the number of trip to Butlins we did in that motor….happy days. He then traded in for a Morris Marina White with Blue Vinyl roof and Blue Velvet seats Mmm luxury 😄 Then not my favourite a Morris Ital🤮 also in Beigey type of colour, sadly all of them sounded like tinny boxes when you shut the boot or doors the Marina was my favourite of all, After that he went foreign and the quality just shot up 1) Mazda 626 (power steering much quieter drive solid build and feel very reliable) 2) Volvo 740. (Ditto above) 3) Citroen Xantia x 2 off 4) Honda Accords x 4 off till present never goes wrong.
1 minute 46 seconds. $1395 was exactly £500 in 1954. £500 is equal to £20,000 in 2022 (US$26,200). The cheapest car in the IS currently is $14,200 - Chevrolet Spark, so cars were relatively expensive at the time.
A genuine accounting of a disaster as unnecessary as The Titanic. A decline that takes decades is most certainly recognizable and preventable. From a distance (the U.S. and in the 21st century), British sports cars were incredibly popular in the U.S. in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and even early 80’s. But the sedans didn’t have any success. The basic “primitiveness” of British cars was fun in Austin-Healey’s, MG’s, etc. but not so much in a family sedan. The British car industry appears to have been complacent with only minor, incremental changes and no vision of what was required to keep ahead of the world competition. It seems every recollection leans heavily on factory strikes. How long did the strikes last? Weeks? Months? It seems each side was short sighted and intractable. Neither side should have ignored the realities that cost the industry and their jobs. I wish I knew more about the strikes. I enjoyed my brother’s MGA, Spitfire several friends MGB’s and my TR6, but in reality they were relics of a design philosophy that in the past. Too bad the TR7’s and 8’s didn’t have better build quality because the design was more modern. No matter what your view, it is a sad, preventable demise.
If we want to solve the problems in the world then we first must know the truth, this requires research, lots of it, I've done fourteen years research, I haven't researched the British car industry except for a mainstream reporting as is given here, but if you do the research on the alternative media you'll see who controls the banking system, who control the Bank of England, actually it was made private after the Battle of Waterloo. By the way the Titanic ship never sank, it was the Olympic wearing the Titanic logo that sank.
"But the sedans didn’t have any success." We sold a lot of Jaguar cars in the US, I seem to recall far more went there than were sold in the UK (where we could not afford the gas). Oddly it was not a demise. UK makes as many cars as it did back then, however mostly automated plants means far fewer workers.
@@grolfe3210 , I respect your comments, but I worked at a dealership that sold Volvos and British Leyland cars, even a few Rover 3500’s. We sold every MG and Triumph we could get, not many Jaguars. I also worked at a at a imported parts store. It was surprising that there were Austin-Healeys, Triumphs and MGs in many smaller towns. I shipped out parts daily for many of them. The British roadster had a charm that nothing else had.
@@markw208 It is probably not much of a market share but I seem to recall Jaguar profits kept BL alive for many years as they were the only profit making sector. The XJ6 was basically a car made for the US market. Not sure on numbers. Yes I had a Spitfire way back, great fun. Would seem very small on the roads today! Im in UK but my step brother is in US and has one of the last black MGBs he bought in 1980. He ran it for years and then put it in his basement. He got it restored and back on the road a few years ago.
Honda has closed their Swindon factory. Won’t be long until other companies follow suit, since y’all want to be “iNdEpEnDeNt” Nationalist Isolationist. 😂
@@minimax9452 Ford always has been a foreign company, Vauxhall has been owned by GM also American. Chrysler bought Hillman and then it was sold to the French. The only British volume maker was BL who made rubbish cars. That was sold to the Germans in 1994, which was 27 years ago. We really have not had a British owned brand since then. No sign of our healthy foreign owned car industry being destroyed.
Thanks for mini-documentary. It is very susprising how the British Industry fell apart. Here at Colombia, we had some samples of them like few models from Vaxhuall, Morris, the Minor model to be exact, Hillman, some Britain made Land Rover, with the Embassy, and very few Ford models, as well. The lack of good spare parts supply, and dealers service, was the key fact for not surviving. So sad to accept the true mentioned in the video.
Actually quality was often quite high in the early 50's: the big problem was complacency and the British suspicion of 'modern'. This produced frumpy cars that often had 30's mechanicals, which killed sales overseas. Politicians/management/workers somehow conspired to cause this disaster. How the hell did these same people win WW2? Answer....with lots of help.
Honestly, with the level of management it didn't matter how much workers we're on strike. They had Mini, that they couldn't get profitable while selling millions of them for 25 years! Most of their attempts at modernizing their lineup was just disastrous. They kept throwing money at constantly devising brilliant prototypes that could have saved the company, axed most them, and spend years and years of time to develop and water down those ideas. Until finally producing unfinished, unreliable and boring cars that we're 5-10 years behind the competition. When they did actually got something right, like Triumph Dolomite or Metro they just couldn't sell them anymore at a reasonable profit.
A key component in UKs auto makers' demise is that while its industrial base was relatively untouched during the war, Germany and Japan's were not. So while those countries started the 60s with brand new factories, Britain was stuck with old worn out factories and no money to invest in new ones. They were at a great disadvantage.
@@christianlibertarian5488 While US and Britain were dominating the car market in the 50s, Germany and Japan were rebuilding their industrial infrastructure with lots of outside help. The US kept up but Britain did not. By the end of the 60s, British factories, mostly, were old and inefficient. Therefore, one can conclude that it was a disadvantage to Britain that the Germans never succeeded in destroying British industrial infrastructure.
@@astolatpere11 I sort of agree, but I am of the opinion that it was the destruction of the old attitude, rather than the physical destruction, that mattered. Germany and Japan *knew* they had to rebuild better, unlike the US and Britain. This is exemplified, IMHO, by the behavior of labor. Lots of strikes in Britain, multiple strikes in the US, very few in Germany and Japan.
From this Documentary I understand that if there was no other healthy competition from other countries and if British people were other people ,it might possibly go well for British car industry now.
You make a passing reference to "union issues" and no reference to abysmal British car reliability. It was these two issues that killed of the British car industry. Quality of British cars was so bad (from the late 60s to the early 90s) it was beyond a joke. At a British car company, it wasn't possible to fire anyone for even the grossest acts of negligence or dereliction of duty. Most cars came off the line with a mass of defects. Buyers soon realised that a Japanese or German car was usually defect free. UK buyers deserted British cars the moment foreign car prices became feasible - which they did with the "Common Market" - ie after 1974. The only surprise was that the British car industry limped on as long as it did. UK cars were well designed but so unreliable, we had to rent a Japanese or German car for a motoring holiday, because there was f*** all chance that a British car would make a trip without a breakdown. A good friend of mine has a garage. He told me "when a Land Rover or Jaguar came in for a service, they all go down to the pub to celebrate". I don't know of a single Land Rover owner who has been happy to keep their car after the warranty has expired. Quality and reliability makes happy customers. Happy customers are repeat customers - and people who will pay a little extra for the privilege of trouble free motoring. Reliable cars hold their value. Did anyone ever fancy buying a three year old Morris Marina? - I very much doubt it.
Red Robbo had so much to answer for, the build quality of the SD1 was awful, and my Triumh TR6 was a constant battle due the original build quality, basically they deserved to go for the crap they were building.
Chrysler Neon 1998 My brother purchased this model in the UK when new. Speedo failure & cutting out on motorways (freeways?) Constant body leaks.No spare parts in dealership parts department The American dream of service & reliability? I don’t think so!🤔
my grandfather would be very disappointed if he was alive to hear Rover is no more making cars as he has owneD the P3,P4 and P6 and also got a chance to drive the SD1 and Rover 800
As a teen in 70s New Zealand you could by late 50s / 60s cars very cheap..Japanese were import taxed still ,then Britain joined the EEC We only briefly saw the last of British made..badge engineering and amalgemation...Between japanese and British/American..you really didnt know where half your car was made. BMC/HONDA ..IZUZU FORD/MAZDA.....ROOTES/CHYSLER MITSUBISHI. ..mostly japanese drive trains..bodies were non survivers..into the eighties...complete rust buckets
Okay so the union issues are a contributing factor however when they were their building cars they were building the nonsense that this old guy was engineering they made crap!
No British documentary about anything is complete without a Hitler refernce complete with picture. Typical Brit, of course, conveniently „forgot“ to mention that the ever so admirable British did not want the VW plant and design as war reparation as they saw no chance for this car to make them a profit on the car market, and besides, British is better (like, e.g., in football). Well, that worked out marvellously, didn‘t it, old chap? A diddlydo squat ho-hum doodah, for the private schoolers.
So many great cars build by the British Motor Industry. The Morris Minor, Mini, BMC 1100/1300, MG A / B , Triumph TR series Rover P5, P6 and SD1, Range Rover, Jaguar MK2 and XJ. And at the end all screwed up by BL. With also many thnx to the unions, management and goverment.
The rot had set in long before the second war. Lanchester, Triumph Riley and Lea Francis were on their knees in 1936. Armstrong Siddeley were pre occupied with aircraft and others had long since fallen : Bean Clyno Cluely British Salmson Crossley AJS Bayliss Thomas Squire Rhode Windsor Stoneleigh CAR Trojan (cars) and many many more. Why you may ask? No simple answer. Economics.... Yes. Politics... Yes. Unions.... Yes. Bad design..... Yes Look at the Sunbeam Talbot Darraque debacle
A long sad story, to minor part due to the unions, but mainly due to a total lack of forward planning, and infighting between different executives (the end result that one of them moved to South Korea and helped making Hyundai a fantastic brand, with a better profit margin than any other car company).
I like the Rover P5, SD1, Landrovers, Minis, Metro's, Morris Marina Coupe, Austin Maxi, Princess, best of all Triumph Dolomite Sprint in yellow with black roof. British cars were the best, a car for everyone, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Jaguar, Landrover, Rovers through to working man's Austin, used to be all British cars on the roads.
The cheap ones can't compete with Japanese cars globally and failed to compete with French and German ones in Euro. The luxury and exotics of UK didn't stand a chance against German cars. As simple as that.
There was one single reason for the demise of the British motor industry back then - trade unions. Not only were they losing thousands of man working days, they were causing management to spend more of their working time on industrial relations than on running the company. If it hadn't been for the likes of Red Robbo and his gang we'd probably still have a home grown motor industry. I'm 69, and I knew a lot of Longbridge workers back then, some of whom would go out of their way to sabotage quality just to get back at the management, having been roused to it by the rabble. The conscientious ones hated it but were too scared to speak out against the union bully-boys.
This is a very rightwing, old fart, view of the death of the British car industry, listen to Ruairidh MacVeigh's The Death of the UK Car Industry that square puts the blame on the Labour government, and various selfinterested guys leading British car manufacturing over the years, blaming the workers working in factories that had run for 30-40 years without renovations or upgrades and the massive productions of Minis at a loss over decades (much due to bad production quality), while the former Austin and Morris executives battled it out. And no plans ahead for anything! My dad had a number of BMC cars, the last being a Morris 1800 (a very nice car to drive), that drank a couple of gallons of oil for each filled tank of fuel. He switched to an early SAAB 900, another mistake if you are technically inept like him. It had numerous issues, like lacking any kind of steering assistance, and a Borg-Warner gearbox that eventually failed, leaving you without reverse gears.
From my view as a German 🇩🇪 a piece is missing: It is not the Unions fault only this is to simple. At VW for example about 90 % of the workers are in the Union. It is even mandatory to have a member of the Unions as a member at the board of VW. Management and Unions in UK did not find a way together. Don't blame the unions alone. GB is not very good at compromising.
YES ! , That's an incredibly important point. In the U.K. and U.S. the relationship between management and workers is adversarial if not downright hostile and disrespectful. Not only in the auto industry but nearly everything. An exception in the U.S. is Southwest airlines which from the beginning been partially owned by employees. They have had far fewer problems than the other airlines. The German system is better.
Bad management, idle workers and not keeping up with the competition sums it up.
Listen to Ruairidh MacVeigh's The Death of the UK car industry (also here on VouTube) and you find the reasons why the unions were upset, working under abysmal conditions in old factories never renovated. Add to that thousands were randomly sacked, production moved from one end of UK to another for the Minis, and infighting between the ex-bosses of Austin and Morris, plus their ability to sack talented guys, one being bought up by Hundai, as CEO, creating the most profitable car company in the world!
Massive amounts of Minis were sold, but all at a loss, for years and years as the sales figures looked good, is there any better way of running down a company?! The Labour government created Leyland, and run the entire shebang into the ground, as they didn't dare to fire the surplus employees after the big sellers started to stop selling.
Its still sad that cars and motorcycles in England was built with really poor quality by workers who also could strike for years. No one buys products like that for a longer time.
The bike factories rarely had strikes. Their problems were more lack of investment and bad design. BSA had tired machinery over 20 years old, Honda custom built machinery so that each bike was built faster and more reliably (they made 4 to BSA's 1). Umberslade hall, BSA's design centre managed to design a frame that needed something like a 36 inch inside leg, by the time they found out, it was too late to get the redesigned bikes to the USA for that sales season. Most of the engines were old fashioned, either dating back to just after (or before) the war, with cosmetic updates, or a redesign that didn't improve on the earlier version.
Leyland had more problems than just industrial relations. I counted the number of engine families they made in the early 1970s, from A series to Jaguar V12, I think there were 12 , several competing with each other, and all made in different production lines and factories.Austin A,B,E series, 5 from Triumph, 2 Rover, 2 Jag. I may have missed some. Madness.
@@paulqueripel3493 in short they made government funded shit!
@@American-Motors-Corporation there was no government funding for the bike industry until the 1970s, after they had gone bankrupt. Except for during the wars, when they sold guns and bikes to the forces.
In fact, in the early years the BSA gun division was in competition with the Royal Small Arms Factory, who cheated. RSAF were allowed to supply foreign contracts from government stocks of guns, then replace them at leisure. BSA couldn't compete with that, they actually had to make them to order.
They did make unreliable bikes compered to the Japanese though, old fashioned, still with drum brakes, no electric start etc.
Sorry, thought you meant the bike industry. Not BL
@@paulqueripel3493 nope just BL
Fonzie Bulldog.......Typically misguided comment.
My dad bought a brand new Hillman Avenger in Poole Dorset with the hockey stick rear lights, he ordered it White with white upholstery that had green piping🤩.
But the factory let him down for some reason and for less money and a better car radio he got one in “Prairie Wind 😂” which was basically Beige. Aaaah nothing like sitting in shorts on vinyl seats on a hot summers day.
Straight away he found anything above sixty and the whole car would vibrate, so after several trips to the dealer with no success at sorting the problem out, he wrote a letter to the company (no email of course back then) they did reply quickly and arrange to investigate at a Bournemouth dealers and would send a factory chief mechanic to😲. This they did, according to my dad the guy lifted the car removed the long drive shaft, placed it on the floor and rolled it along with his foot and it was pretty obvious it was bent.
So he fitted a brand new one he had brought along and all was fine after that, god the number of trip to Butlins we did in that motor….happy days.
He then traded in for a Morris Marina White with Blue Vinyl roof and Blue Velvet seats Mmm luxury 😄
Then not my favourite a Morris Ital🤮 also in Beigey type of colour, sadly all of them sounded like tinny boxes when you shut the boot or doors the Marina was my favourite of all,
After that he went foreign and the quality just shot up
1) Mazda 626 (power steering much quieter drive solid build and feel very reliable)
2) Volvo 740. (Ditto above)
3) Citroen Xantia x 2 off
4) Honda Accords x 4 off till present never goes wrong.
Clarkson told pretty much the same story, but alot more colorfully.
1 minute 46 seconds. $1395 was exactly £500 in 1954. £500 is equal to £20,000 in 2022 (US$26,200). The cheapest car in the IS currently is $14,200 - Chevrolet Spark, so cars were relatively expensive at the time.
A genuine accounting of a disaster as unnecessary as The Titanic. A decline that takes decades is most certainly recognizable and preventable. From a distance (the U.S. and in the 21st century), British sports cars were incredibly popular in the U.S. in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and even early 80’s. But the sedans didn’t have any success. The basic “primitiveness” of British cars was fun in Austin-Healey’s, MG’s, etc. but not so much in a family sedan. The British car industry appears to have been complacent with only minor, incremental changes and no vision of what was required to keep ahead of the world competition. It seems every recollection leans heavily on factory strikes. How long did the strikes last? Weeks? Months? It seems each side was short sighted and intractable. Neither side should have ignored the realities that cost the industry and their jobs. I wish I knew more about the strikes. I enjoyed my brother’s MGA, Spitfire several friends MGB’s and my TR6, but in reality they were relics of a design philosophy that in the past. Too bad the TR7’s and 8’s didn’t have better build quality because the design was more modern. No matter what your view, it is a sad, preventable demise.
If we want to solve the problems in the world then we first must know the truth, this requires research, lots of it, I've done fourteen years research, I haven't researched the British car industry except for a mainstream reporting as is given here, but if you do the research on the alternative media you'll see who controls the banking system, who control the Bank of England, actually it was made private after the Battle of Waterloo. By the way the Titanic ship never sank, it was the Olympic wearing the Titanic logo that sank.
"But the sedans didn’t have any success." We sold a lot of Jaguar cars in the US, I seem to recall far more went there than were sold in the UK (where we could not afford the gas).
Oddly it was not a demise. UK makes as many cars as it did back then, however mostly automated plants means far fewer workers.
@@grolfe3210 , I respect your comments, but I worked at a dealership that sold Volvos and British Leyland cars, even a few Rover 3500’s. We sold every MG and Triumph we could get, not many Jaguars. I also worked at a at a imported parts store. It was surprising that there were Austin-Healeys, Triumphs and MGs in many smaller towns. I shipped out parts daily for many of them. The British roadster had a charm that nothing else had.
@@markw208 It is probably not much of a market share but I seem to recall Jaguar profits kept BL alive for many years as they were the only profit making sector. The XJ6 was basically a car made for the US market. Not sure on numbers.
Yes I had a Spitfire way back, great fun. Would seem very small on the roads today!
Im in UK but my step brother is in US and has one of the last black MGBs he bought in 1980. He ran it for years and then put it in his basement. He got it restored and back on the road a few years ago.
@@grolfe3210 👍
Short, but interesting, and well stated.
📻🙂
In Britain you can still have poor people skills no knowledge of your product and still be a manager.
This states that the disaster began in the 1950's. Really got going in the 1960's. That is amazing, as everyone else was booming in the 60's,
The Jaguar E-Type still looks gorgeous today.
The UK may not own companies (and most are multinational anyway) but the UK is still a huge car maker. We make as many cars as we did in the 70s.
Honda has closed their Swindon factory. Won’t be long until other companies follow suit, since y’all want to be “iNdEpEnDeNt” Nationalist Isolationist. 😂
under foreign management - but brexit will even destroy the rest
@@minimax9452 Ford always has been a foreign company, Vauxhall has been owned by GM also American. Chrysler bought Hillman and then it was sold to the French. The only British volume maker was BL who made rubbish cars. That was sold to the Germans in 1994, which was 27 years ago. We really have not had a British owned brand since then.
No sign of our healthy foreign owned car industry being destroyed.
So sad. So myopic and complacent. It had to fail. Thank you for making this succinct explanation.
Thanks for mini-documentary. It is very susprising how the British Industry fell apart. Here at Colombia, we had some samples of them like few models from Vaxhuall, Morris, the Minor model to be exact, Hillman, some Britain made Land Rover, with the Embassy, and very few Ford models, as well. The lack of good spare parts supply, and dealers service, was the key fact for not surviving. So sad to accept the true mentioned in the video.
Actually quality was often quite high in the early 50's: the big problem was complacency and the British suspicion of 'modern'. This produced frumpy cars that often had 30's mechanicals, which killed sales overseas. Politicians/management/workers somehow conspired to cause this disaster. How the hell did these same people win WW2? Answer....with lots of help.
Was the government that ended Uk car industry same thing happened in America.
Honestly, with the level of management it didn't matter how much workers we're on strike. They had Mini, that they couldn't get profitable while selling millions of them for 25 years! Most of their attempts at modernizing their lineup was just disastrous.
They kept throwing money at constantly devising brilliant prototypes that could have saved the company, axed most them, and spend years and years of time to develop and water down those ideas.
Until finally producing unfinished, unreliable and boring cars that we're 5-10 years behind the competition.
When they did actually got something right, like Triumph Dolomite or Metro they just couldn't sell them anymore at a reasonable profit.
A key component in UKs auto makers' demise is that while its industrial base was relatively untouched during the war, Germany and Japan's were not. So while those countries started the 60s with brand new factories, Britain was stuck with old worn out factories and no money to invest in new ones. They were at a great disadvantage.
Hmm. It is a hard point to make that not having your factories destroyed was a disadvantage.
@@christianlibertarian5488 While US and Britain were dominating the car market in the 50s, Germany and Japan were rebuilding their industrial infrastructure with lots of outside help. The US kept up but Britain did not. By the end of the 60s, British factories, mostly, were old and inefficient. Therefore, one can conclude that it was a disadvantage to Britain that the Germans never succeeded in destroying British industrial infrastructure.
@@astolatpere11 I sort of agree, but I am of the opinion that it was the destruction of the old attitude, rather than the physical destruction, that mattered. Germany and Japan *knew* they had to rebuild better, unlike the US and Britain. This is exemplified, IMHO, by the behavior of labor. Lots of strikes in Britain, multiple strikes in the US, very few in Germany and Japan.
@@astolatpere11 cynical and idiotic argument
@@christianlibertarian5488 VW had and still has about 90% of the workers in unions. no problem when you negotiate fair with them.
From this Documentary I understand that if there was no other healthy competition from other countries and if British people were other people ,it might possibly go well for British car industry now.
You make a passing reference to "union issues" and no reference to abysmal British car reliability. It was these two issues that killed of the British car industry. Quality of British cars was so bad (from the late 60s to the early 90s) it was beyond a joke. At a British car company, it wasn't possible to fire anyone for even the grossest acts of negligence or dereliction of duty. Most cars came off the line with a mass of defects. Buyers soon realised that a Japanese or German car was usually defect free. UK buyers deserted British cars the moment foreign car prices became feasible - which they did with the "Common Market" - ie after 1974. The only surprise was that the British car industry limped on as long as it did.
UK cars were well designed but so unreliable, we had to rent a Japanese or German car for a motoring holiday, because there was f*** all chance that a British car would make a trip without a breakdown. A good friend of mine has a garage. He told me "when a Land Rover or Jaguar came in for a service, they all go down to the pub to celebrate". I don't know of a single Land Rover owner who has been happy to keep their car after the warranty has expired. Quality and reliability makes happy customers. Happy customers are repeat customers - and people who will pay a little extra for the privilege of trouble free motoring. Reliable cars hold their value. Did anyone ever fancy buying a three year old Morris Marina? - I very much doubt it.
Red Robbo had so much to answer for, the build quality of the SD1 was awful, and my Triumh TR6 was a constant battle due the original build quality, basically they deserved to go for the crap they were building.
British Quality, or lack of it, is what destroyed the British auto industry. At least American cars were far more reliable.
Chrysler Neon 1998
My brother purchased this model in the UK when new.
Speedo failure & cutting out on motorways (freeways?)
Constant body leaks.No spare parts in dealership parts department
The American dream of service & reliability? I don’t think so!🤔
I think another reason was the high taxation current at the time.
it´s all about quality and the product. when you produce a bad product (in comparison to the competiton) consumers will stop to buy it. that all.
A hard lesson that the American car companies had to learn as well.
📻🙂
Oh really? That is a surprise. I though that was Poles fault.
😅
my grandfather would be very disappointed if he was alive to hear Rover is no more making cars as he has owneD the P3,P4 and P6 and also got a chance to drive the SD1 and Rover 800
Well what did anybody expect when a truck and bus company, British Leyland, were allowed to dictate to car manufacturers.
As a teen in 70s New Zealand you could by late 50s / 60s cars very cheap..Japanese were import taxed still ,then Britain joined the EEC
We only briefly saw the last of British made..badge engineering and amalgemation...Between japanese and British/American..you really didnt know where half your car was made. BMC/HONDA ..IZUZU FORD/MAZDA.....ROOTES/CHYSLER MITSUBISHI. ..mostly japanese drive trains..bodies were non survivers..into the eighties...complete rust buckets
The North American consumer found UK cars prone to breakdowns and awkward to repair compared to American made cars.
Okay so the union issues are a contributing factor however when they were their building cars they were building the nonsense that this old guy was engineering they made crap!
You forgot to mention the terrible reliability and difficulty to work on British cars.
No British documentary about anything is complete without a Hitler refernce complete with picture. Typical Brit, of course, conveniently „forgot“ to mention that the ever so admirable British did not want the VW plant and design as war reparation as they saw no chance for this car to make them a profit on the car market, and besides, British is better (like, e.g., in football). Well, that worked out marvellously, didn‘t it, old chap? A diddlydo squat ho-hum doodah, for the private schoolers.
So many great cars build by the British Motor Industry. The Morris Minor, Mini, BMC 1100/1300, MG A / B , Triumph TR series Rover P5, P6 and SD1, Range Rover, Jaguar MK2 and XJ. And at the end all screwed up by BL. With also many thnx to the unions, management and goverment.
The rot had set in long before the second war. Lanchester, Triumph Riley and Lea Francis were on their knees in 1936. Armstrong Siddeley were pre occupied with aircraft and others had long since fallen : Bean Clyno Cluely British Salmson Crossley AJS Bayliss Thomas Squire Rhode Windsor Stoneleigh CAR Trojan (cars) and many many more. Why you may ask? No simple answer. Economics.... Yes. Politics... Yes. Unions.... Yes. Bad design..... Yes
Look at the Sunbeam Talbot Darraque debacle
A long sad story, to minor part due to the unions, but mainly due to a total lack of forward planning, and infighting between different executives (the end result that one of them moved to South Korea and helped making Hyundai a fantastic brand, with a better profit margin than any other car company).
being German, i am okay with the failure of the Brit car industry...
As an Brit of Irish descent so am i there my German friend english cars notice the small e were JUNK!!!
4:32
After watching this talking head on an angle I found myself likewise sitting at a sideways lean.
I like the Rover P5, SD1, Landrovers, Minis, Metro's, Morris Marina Coupe, Austin Maxi, Princess, best of all Triumph Dolomite Sprint in yellow with black roof. British cars were the best, a car for everyone, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Jaguar, Landrover, Rovers through to working man's Austin, used to be all British cars on the roads.
The cheap ones can't compete with Japanese cars globally and failed to compete with French and German ones in Euro.
The luxury and exotics of UK didn't stand a chance against German cars.
As simple as that.
There was one single reason for the demise of the British motor industry back then - trade unions. Not only were they losing thousands of man working days, they were causing management to spend more of their working time on industrial relations than on running the company. If it hadn't been for the likes of Red Robbo and his gang we'd probably still have a home grown motor industry. I'm 69, and I knew a lot of Longbridge workers back then, some of whom would go out of their way to sabotage quality just to get back at the management, having been roused to it by the rabble. The conscientious ones hated it but were too scared to speak out against the union bully-boys.
This is a very rightwing, old fart, view of the death of the British car industry, listen to Ruairidh MacVeigh's The Death of the UK Car Industry that square puts the blame on the Labour government, and various selfinterested guys leading British car manufacturing over the years, blaming the workers working in factories that had run for 30-40 years without renovations or upgrades and the massive productions of Minis at a loss over decades (much due to bad production quality), while the former Austin and Morris executives battled it out. And no plans ahead for anything!
My dad had a number of BMC cars, the last being a Morris 1800 (a very nice car to drive), that drank a couple of gallons of oil for each filled tank of fuel. He switched to an early SAAB 900, another mistake if you are technically inept like him. It had numerous issues, like lacking any kind of steering assistance, and a Borg-Warner gearbox that eventually failed, leaving you without reverse gears.