When the Japanese motorcycle invasion began, the Villiers experimental dept bought a Honda and stripped it for examination; the two engineers looked at each other and said: "We're f****d." When BL introduced the award-winning Metro they fitted the ancient asthmatic Mini engine and shot themselves in the foot. My boss bought a Datsun Cherry, and when he showed me under the bonnet I was gobsmacked - the engine was all-alloy, clean, oil tight, quiet and mounted on rubber-bushed cross-tie rods. Our industry destroyed itself by lack of investment.

Interesting you point out the health and safety in U.K Car plant. My Dad worked as a spray painter in Linwood BMC Pressed Steel Div, painting Hillman Imp's. He said the bodies were hung on a constantly moving belt which passed by a team of painters who sprayed hot paint as they passed. Management, sped the line up, without notifying the workers which caused real problems. Someone stuck a large metal rod into the line, stopping all production. Management reset the line speed. My dad was given "Martindale Masks" to prevent the inhalation of paint. These were essentially, large sanitary towels that you would press against your mouth and nose with a soft metal "frame" which attached round your head. One was never enough so my Dad used three or four pads but would still finish the shift coughing up phlegm which was the colour applied that day. The Imp had a big asbestos mattress, colloquially called a "Tottie Scone", which was place in the engine compartment for sound and heat insulation. People who did this job weren't subject to the 1931 Asbestos Industry Regulations, so didn't get masks or routine x rays. Oh aye! Linwood went on strike due to someones lunch being cold..

I worked in parts for a BL dealer from '74 to '78 - the busiest job known to mankind. I saw one of the launch Princesses come off the transporter. It started and ran, but was utterly gutless. The lads pulled the head off it to find the 2.0l engine was fitted with a 1700 crank. Imagine ...! Then there was the new mini that came off the transporter running on 3. One of the inlet valves was trapped open by a 5/16 UNF nut. The thickness of the nut was greater than the throw of the cam, so it didn't drop in there, it was put there deliberately. Foreign manufacturers didn't kill the UK car manufacturers alone. We had a pretty good hand in it ourselves ... 😢

Back in 1969/70 I worked at Triumph's Gearbox Plant in Radford, Coventry, where we made gearbox components and back axles. The air quality was so bad inside the shop that, on a warm day, we couldn't see the opposite wall. In the heat-treat area, there were open drums of cyanide (used to case-harden components) everywhere. How we never killed half the workforce, God alone knows! We were turning out the same components (and on the same machine tools) for the Herald/Spitfire that we had for the Standard 8's and 10's in 1953. Engineering tolerances were +/- 10 thou', meaning that there was a potential 20 thou' slop on every component in the gearbox. One presumes it was the same on all of the driveline components. Four years later I later worked for Nissan, where the tolerance was +1/-0... I also worked for Rover at Solihull, where we had a rectification yard, in which new vehicles with defective parts were held, waiting to be fixed. Chalked on the back of one Series IIA 109" LWB Wagon with Safari Roof were the words, 'Wrong Chassis'. That would have kept the lads busy for quite a while!

Commonwealth here. Had a Hillman, a Wolseley, two Vanguards, an Austin 7, a Ford Anglia and an Austin Mini. Then came the Japanese vehicles and it did not take people long to realize that they offered more by way of performance, comfort, affordability, reliability, etc. It has been that way ever since, but now we see more and more Chinese vehicles on our roads

I never expected that BMC was already a dysfunctional mess, even before the establishment of British Leyland. The BMC era seemed like an appetizer before things got much worse with the main course.

I’d love to see you give a similar treatment to the history of British Airways. Going from The World’s Favourite Airline, to an industrial relations nightmare with staff shortages, strikes and regular IT failures now commonplace.

Owned an MG in 1971. Tore it down and found the valve stems sucking oil. Miked them found them .005 undersize.. Went to the dealer with my micrometer, told him I needed ones with the correct size. He sighed and brought an entire crate of valves to the counter, telling me to go through them until I found 8 that were correctly ground. He said that the factory unions demanded beer in the lunch room. By the end of the day, all the machinists were in the bag and turning out garbage. He said they were dropping their MG franchise because customers were bringing back every car they sold for quality complaints.

Good video and learned some new-to-me tidbits, though I feel a couple clarifications are in order: 1) Of the American brands you listed, Mercury was not an existing marque that was hoovered up like Buick, Oldsmobile, Lincoln and Cadillac were, but was created whole-cloth by Ford to plug the rather mammoth price gap that existed between Ford and Lincoln in the immediate pre-WW2 years. 2) While GM's five American car divisions did have their own management structures, it's worth remembering that there also wasn't a massive amount of parts sharing, either. Yes, things like inner body structures/stampings, transmissions, axles and other components had commonality, but things like exterior panels, engines (At one point, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick all made their own unique 350 cubic inch V8s.), interiors, chassis and chassis tuning were devised separately, a practice that only really began to go away in the mid- to late-1970s. And there were a good many multi-brand GM dealers back in the day, often tandems that were one or two rungs apart on Alfred Sloan's prestige ladder; for example, my hometown had a combination Chevrolet and Oldsmobile dealer in the 1950s, but it also had a standalone Pontiac store a couple blocks to the west during that same period. Looking forward to the next three installments of the series.

Excellent video - lived through a lot of this. My father was on the line at Leyland Motors for quite a few years, building trucks and later Atlantean bus engines. The original mini - plastic wire internal door handles, a bent nail as an accelerator, rubber on the clutch pedal for de luxe models, and mechanics hating to work on the engines. It could and should have been so much better. Ernest Bevin ensured W German car plants got the union issue sorted post war - one union. Not several bodies managed by wazzocks! It could have happened here. The narrow vision and single expertise of management, at the time, is so striking (no pun intended) today.

I worked at Carbodies in Coventry in 1966 we converted the Triumph 2000 saloon into the estate they came as a shell minus the boot lid and rear doors we did 12 a day. At that time we also made the Austin taxi the Standard Atlas van the Daimler limousine body and we sprayed the Singer VOGUE ESTATE. The work ethic of men in Carbodies was very good. In 1973 I worked at Chrysler in Coventry for 3 months on the Avenger we had plenty of strikes and the workforce had a couldn't care less attitude to quality.

A very good overview of a complex knotty subject. One thing often overlooked is how the Macmillan government assured Lord and Harriman that the UK's entry to the EEC in 1963 was a 'done deal'. As you lay out, BMC did little effective long-term planning but one of the bits it did do was to aim for huge increases in sales in Europe once Britain was in the EEC. That was a large factor behind the '1 million cars per year' target, with a lot of that increase coming from expansion in Europe. That was a factor in BMC's prioritisation of technically and stylistically advanced front-wheel drive product lines, which it was expected would be more to European tastes than British ones. Of course, the UK's entry to the EEC was blocked, leaving BMC reliant on the domestic market and its shrinking and high-cost North American and Commonwealth markets, to make up much of the slack. The Corporation had bet on a long-term high volume/low margin business model and then didn't have the market to sell enough cars to get that volume, while production was hobbled by labour disputes and warranty costs ate into the thin profit margins (where profit existed at all).

Can’t wait for part 2!

Michael Edwards book about BL is well worth a read. Sloppy, idle incompetent management and marketing destroyed the industry. It is significant that ex BL engineers helped the Korean industry to develop....in the words of one such person that I spoke with "we only did in Korea what British management would not let us do"!

Macmillan's econonic mirage you mean. It caused overmanning helped, along with the militant trade unions and lack of investment into the business, lead to falling productivity and the devaluation of the Pound in 1967.

The seeds of the demise of the British vehicle industry were in it's birth; Britain was "the workshop of the world". A workshop isn't a factory, it's a small scale producer of handmade products by skilled artisans. Much of the British vehicle industry struggled with the idea of scale and - as illustrated here - tended to scale up in ways that were antiquated. Compare the british vehicle industry with Honda of Japan who, when they designed the C50 Cub, designed the machine tools to build it, allowing production to be as effiecient as possible. The UK was still more or less hand building into the seventies and this lack of automation wnet hand in hand with poor management and a lack of understanding of what customers wanted to create poor products which were poorly built by companies which were poorly run.

I think we can say that, if Britain had an equivalent to the US Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, permission for the Pressed Steel merger would have been refused.

I thnk BMC launced the mini as the Morris Mini Minor or Austin 7, not an Austin Mini. There was also , later, a Riley Elf and Wolesley Hornet too

The early years were plagued with the British class system mentality which was never going to work when your business relies on cooperation between management and producers. Making vehicles then by hand with basic tech requires everyone in the process to be efficient and reliable to have good productivity with a predictable outcome which is why in later years the industry became more automated. It’s easy to look back now and see that the car industry in its earliest form was doomed to failure in the uk. We still have some of these problems from the past today which might explain why anything British is either a disaster or overly expensive and ends up in foreign hands.

True. The current Rolls, Bentley, Aston Martin and McLaren ranges are brilliant (but none of them are completely UK owned). The modern Mini is brilliant. The Ford and Vauxhall ranges are brilliant, but they are looking like they might be sacrificed on the altar of 'Net Zero.' Jaguar and Lotus are looking very shaky. So, the problem aren't over yet...

My Mother drove an A55 before buying a Mini in the early 1960s. One time the fan belt broke on the Mini so we got out the complimentary tool kit that came with the car only to find none of the 'spanners' would fit as they were metric but the bolts etc. used were imperial (or maybe it was the other way around).

Thanks for this. A lot I didn’t know. There’s a lot of Clarksonesque mythology out there about the British motor industry. Glad to see someone take a more balanced approach. The lack of market research and over focus of production volume in BMC is quite astonishing. While they were concentrated on cut price badge engineering, most other car builders were off designing cars people actually wanted rather than an appliance to get from A to B. But this is the story across much of post-war British industry who never seemed to get over the idea of the singular ‘big boss’ version of management which seemed more suited to the gentlemen’s clubs of London that the cut and thrust of a rapidly modernizing industry.

Wow, an excellent video! I've been curious about this subject for ages; as an American, I never knew much about the UK auto industry until recently. Getting a whole multi-part series about it is fantastic! Such a shame to hear ego and rivalry getting in the face of progress. I'm not pro-progress all the time, but, in this case, I find it lamentable that more was not achieved.

It's interesting to hear how destructive the egotistical drives of the wrong man at the top can be. The more I learn the more I realise it wasn't just workers strking that was the problem, there was a serious absence of quality management throughout the company in its various forms.

The Austin 1100 was introduced in October 1963, fully 10 months after the Morris 1100. You forgot to mention that William Morris hired Leonard Lord, then declined to remunerate him properly for his work, so he left to join Austin, whom he succeeded. So it is not surprising that Lord disliked Morris.

Its worse than a horror movie. You know there is a 80 foot Megladon called British Leyland out there, but you just don't where it is yet.

The inefficiency of the British car industry is typical of the entire British industry.

Very nicely documented. I worked in a car spares shop in the 80`s and you could get parts for most things. As well as learning a lot about cars myself, most BL and Austin cars needed a Haynes manual. Then so did Fords. To own a car on 70`s 80`s you had to be a self taught mechanic, because things would go wrong. Not big things but small things. Changing the brushes in an alternator became a standard job, so did changing the clutch etc. You could tinker with a car because they were not complicated at all and the Haynes books were written very simply and gave you the confidence to have a go yourself. The truth is that foreign cars are better made, last longer and better value for money. Even though I did enjoy doing a service on my daughters 03 VW Polo. UK car brands are still sort after but maybe better investment would have helped. Also the lack of solidarity between within the manufacturers and then within the unions. They all wanted to be top dog, both manufactures and unions. In this case, competition from within forced a demise to the industry after Maggie would later advocate that competition made things cheaper.

A perfect insight into a once great fully local motor industry, who self harmed itself out of existence.

Looking forward to the rest of the series. So many nuances to the story. Nice transition at 12:13 btw.

great presentation. it fills in the gaps of my own personal knowledge of how the British car industry was destroyed.

Thank you from New Zealand. My Grandfather got a Job at a Triumph/Leyland at 15 years old and retired at 65.

Spot on and some interesting perspectives. Might have been worth pointing out that BMC also made trucks, buses and tractors, even Prestcold refrigerators and Bendix washing machines. Nevertheless, it's great to point out how poor/political the management was and how badly treated/ignored the workforce was (leaving them to reply on union influence) - something that Rover Group fixed with the help of Honda, etc.

Being born and bred in Coventry, growing up in the street at the top of Rootes Hall, Canterbury Street, where Roots base of operations grew from and having family that all worked in the car industry. I cry at watching this. From being very young in the local school next to the GEC plant, we were groomed to become car workers upon leaving school. From the point of starting my schooling we had, Austin Morris, Leyland, Talbot, Triumph, Jaguar, Alvis, Standard, Massey Ferguson, Damlier, Car Bodies, Peugeot, BMW, Lucas Aerospace, Hillman and Chrysler. Today, only Jaguar and the successor to Car Bodies, LTC, WMG and NAIC remain in the city. Oh the days!

Excellent programme! Great research.

Excellent, subbed. Bring on part 2

Super video, cannot wait for the next! I won't presume that my question to you 2 weeks ago, in your "Rover R30 - The Car That Killed Rover" video, played any part in your decision to take a very deep dive in this fascinating subject matter, but still: Thank you so much for your excellent work! :) Some of my favorite youtube content, bar none!

The Japanese car industry had a fair bit to do with the demise of the British car industry too, especially in the export markets by producing reliable, well-engineered, mass-market cars at an affordable price for the former colonies. Here in New Zealand, British cars became renowned for their poor quality. A sad state of affairs for the UK. Of course, joining the EEC put the final nail in the coffin of trade in manufactured goods with the rest of the world. You could also throw in the drive to become a financialised and service economy too.

Wonderful video and great research. I followed BMC and the end of Leyland Australia closely and I hope you cover this in part of your story. The P76 was a last grab from the local management and I was there when the last Force 7 V (the P76 Coupe) were auctioned off for very little money.

This is a story also told in the book 'Wheels of Misfortune' (The rise and fall of the British motor industri) But more detailed. I recomend this book.

As a former owner for 4 years of a, bought from new, 1966 BMC Morris Mini, it was an absurdly miserable/lousy built car and even the front screen leaked in water in the corners! Plus all the other places water came in! The doorframes I had to bend in with a knee in between, to meet the body + the paint peeled off round the hinges from the lousy cleaning process, before the paint being applied. Its mechanical function was also lousy. The heater had two positions, on and off! First gear had no synchromesh, and the wipers had to be stopped manually, when finishing operating, as they just stopped anywhere on the screen if not. It soon became a habit to do it, of course.

Fascinating video, some things in there that I was not aware of. Being 64 I lived through much of this period and remember the endless disputes well. Pity the English don’t learn from history, we are about to go through massive changes in the car industry, opportunity abounds and where are we, nowhere, everything’s foreign owned we get the scraps. All the money is flowing to Asia and China, I predict prices will continue to rise probably to a point where we can’t afford to have cars, we are there now but for PCP’s…..

Thank you for the high-quality Contant, keep up the good work.

I know little of the UK auto industry, and it's sad to see how it ended up, my favorite car is the Aston Martin DB5 that James Bond drove in Goldfinger (1964)

Great video. British population and industry learned their lesson the hard way. The post-war afterglow of empire and the advantages it conferred squandered by petty territorial and personal disputes in the boardroom and later this behaviour was echoed on the shop floor. Same issues occured right across British Industry at that time. Its was the era of the "Great growing-up" . Whereas, the nations defeated in WW2 went on to prosper during this period possibly through a combination of their backs being really being against the wall. If their countries were to be re-built from the devastation of WW2 they had to co-operate. The whole process of restoring the defeated countries was bolstered by massive investment from the USA through Marshall Aid, something which UK industry didn't really embrace during this period. No way back now !

absolute amazing work

11:52 Wow, that beetle dwarfs the mini!

Very interesting, indeed. Seen many Austin cars in my youth and everybody hated their quality and problems.

Excellent piece - summarises a messy complex story nicely. And is the best example of the poor middle and higher business management that destroyed many Britiosh industries postwar. Maybe a better stockmarket in Britain to at least be comparable to Wall Street would have made business leadership a bit more commercially motivated rather than the top men being decent engineers over their head leading companies.

Top quality research and a very even handed explanation. The visuals are great too! Can’t wait for part 2.

that was really interesting - looking forward to Pt 2!

Wow - I learned a LOT from this video. Thank you. ☮

Thaank you for an excellent work.

A good potted history, thanks for that, particularly the rivalry between lod and others. After a 1st watch I have some observations. 1) In common with many British owned companies, the investment in R&D was pathetic (you mentioned Marketing only in this respect). This was evidenced particularly in the Austin Gypsy, MGA Twin cam & austin 1800 (later the Triump Stag, Range Rover, Austin Alegro .....). This meant that well thought out products were released to the public in effectively pre-production status with the attendant unreliability. The 3 models stated first achieved such a poor image that no one wanted thenm so that, when the properly developed Mark 2 was released buyers had shopped elsewhere. I took a gamble (& lost) to buy a quasi secondhand MG2.0i in 1990, a potentially very good car except.... This illustrated the lack of R&D combined with lack of market analysis. i will leave my detailed observations for another time. 2) Under capitalisation. The famous story of the Jaguar paint shop that could never deliver a metallic painted car with all the panels the same shade ! 3) Availability on day 1: When Ford released the mark 1 Capri with the brilliant advertising slogan "The Car you've always promised yourself" it was possible to walk into a showroom on day 1 and purchase one of the 30,000 already built. in contrast, when the Austin 1800 was released there were just 500 available. When the Range Rover was released there were so few available that there was a black market for well over a year as Rover had not realised that people other than wealthy farmers might want one in order to look like a wealthy farmer. 4) As a note to the strikes, the most common stated reason was "parity with the midlands" meaning the wages that the piece work employees were able to make due to the manipulation of the system to their advantage, the famous Tally Clerks. This also extended to Rootes Group strikes in Coventry. One of Ford's biggest strikes "The Orange juice strike" was considered to have been created by management to half production. 4) Both Citroën & Renault had assembly plants in the UK that did not count as imports but in 1967 car imports to the UK passed the 50% level. The 1st effective Japanese imports to the UK being Toyota, Daihatsu in 1965 & Honda S800 in 1967. 5) The poor build quality, design & unreliability lost most overseas sales to German, French then Japanese manufacturers. It is therefore ironic that the Japanese imported the Austin A60 somerset in CKD form due to their quality and reliability; how the wheel turned !

I can only add to what others have said - A brilliant and detailed series, well done and thank you!

Brilliant, thank you. The first analysis that delves deeply into the issues from the start of the industry I’m seeing on KZfaq.

Great content. Thank you

What a sad story, I visited their plants in1975 as a dealer delegate and could see the downward trend that was taking place.

I had a friend that owned a jaguar in the early seventies, it was so bad he left the car in NYC with the keys in the ignition hoping someone would steal it. To his shock and surprise, the car was still there after a month on the street!

Very informative, thanks for the detailed research and video. Cheers

The EEC did not include 'Scandinavia' when set up it was just Six, the BeNeLux trio plus Italy, Germany and France. Denmark did not join until the UK did so in 1973 with RoIreland. That made just nine members. The Swedes and Finns joined much later than that, mid 90s. Norway never joined. The UK had already set up EFTA with the Scandinavians and Swiss. Spain, Portugal and Greece were like the Eastern Bloc totalitarian/ military dictatorships and could not join until well into the 1980s.

Cars in the UK came out of the factory, rusty and falling to bits, two cars I bought in the 70's had to be treated for rust less than 1 year old & the quality of parts were shoddy with rip off spares prices...I remember repairing parts with strips of Meccano that were a lot cheaper & lasted...

The Austin/Moris cars ended up being absolute crap. My father bought an Austin A40 in about 1957, it was made in the UK and had what was called a sunshine roof. The only advantage the A40 had was that the engine was accessible, which to needed to be. The sunshine roof leaked every time it rained, and the Australian local distributor tried vainly to stop the leaking roof. In 1964, when I visited England i bought a Morris Mini Van which was to be my mobile home for some seven plus months. It too was a heap of poorly made crap, I travelled approximately 18,000 miles around the UK and Europe. During this time the gearbox had to be replaced FIVE times!!!! The last time it failed it was locked in reverse gear. I had to drive ten miles in reverse gear to Acton Motors, London's largest Morris dealer. The time they told me it would take to replace the gearbox was three weeks!!! So, I was without accommodation for three weeks. Fortunately, I found an el cheapo tour to Morocco that cost less than accommodation in London. The Morris Mini Van when crossing across the Grossglockner Pass between Austria and Yugoslavia, could not travel for more than 500 yards without boiling so the trip over the mountain range was a very slow and frustrating one. In 1967 I was married to a lass that had an Austin 1800, it too was a bomb., twice the radiator dropped onto the fan blades and three times the air support "springs" collapsed leaving a long drive home with the three people sitting in the back, on one occasion, sitting on each other's laps for some 80 miles until we reached home. My then wife like the comfort of the 1800 and the local dealer assured us that about 130 faults had been removed from the new models, this may have been true but the new model had another batch of faults that made it a dangerous car to drive and, always driven, with the fear we would be stranded on lonely country roads where we liived. This happened several times causing us to get rid of the 1800 at a huge loss to buy VW passenger van that ran like a dream for years without any trouble. The German product was streets ahead of the crap made in the UK

The later merger with Leyland was the death sentence of BMC. The failure of management to recognize the importance of exporting cars like the 1800 to the United States, where the market for compacts was steadily growing was another shortfall of management that was too focused on the domestic and Commonwealth markets. This missed opportunity opened the door to Japanese auto makers who flooded the markets with smaller cars from 1968 until the 1973 Energy Crisis came around and really made them a force to be reckoned with.

Superb Video Thank you looking forward to the next Thank you. The UK car industry story is a metaphor for modern Britain am afraid!

Excellent, thank you. My early driving years where with BMC cars, amazing how long they kept the "A and B" series engines in use. The engines were very poor, you would only get 30-4000 miles before a rebore and crankshaft regrind, and a quick spray of gold paint to make it look like a gold seal engine. Remember "running in, please pass". I had thought the main industrial relations were in the Red Robbo era, but it appears there were many faults much earlier in the management side as well.

Great informative and interesting video , regards mark

Absolutely cannot wait for more parts to this. It’s an excellent subject. Any idea of when it will be uploaded?

What an incredible amount of information.

I was brought up in the 80s so im far too young to offer much insight but i do remember circa 1988 a neighbour owned an X reg Austin Allegro that attracted much curiosity simply by still being on the road! OMG build quality must have been truly dreadful!

Very interesting upload as always. One point the Morris Mini Minor and 1100 were launched before the Austin '7' (later known as the Austin Mini) and 1100.

Outstanding video!

great vid roll on part 2

You mean assembly line workers got paid based on how many widgets they produced or attached??? Thats nuts! Someone would have to keep track of all those workers' individual outputs! Youd have whole buildings dedicated to holding those file folders. And what possible benefit could it have? An assembly line moves at a fixed speed, theyll pretty much all do the same amount of work.

Outstanding series…👍👍👍

Hope we see you at 100k very soon!

I can remember an old advert for a Malaysian car manufacturer. The headline was: “Built by intelligent robots that never go on strike.” The British workers were hurt and greatly offended.

@2:10 worth noting a small error: Mercury wasn’t an acquisition. It was an entirely new division of Ford, started by Edsel Ford, and part of a comprehensive ladder-step marketing plan that included the Deluxe Ford of 1938 and the Lincoln-Zephyr of 1936

Can't wait for part 2 of this.

This narration albeit a very interesting film is far too rushed unlike the production of BMC during the 1970s. I'm glad that you also showed the awful turning circle of a Series 1 Morris Minor. My Dad had one and it was impossible to accomplish a three point turn in most suburban streets.

Seems like the perfect combo of government, management, and labor, almost all mooches, while the innovators were kept pressed under their collective thumbs. Ayn Rand, more or less, described this perfectly.

Congratulations on your upcoming 100k subs, well deserved! 👏

It seems like Leonard Lord is a really terrible person, he's appeared to have both intentionally and accidentally started the decline of the British Motor industry with his decisions, even from the very beginning.

I believe at one time BMC lost £40-00 on every Mini they sold, once average warranty cost per unit was entered into the equation...

Early congrats on 100,000 subs

Congrats on 100k subs!

Great video. Tories were the government through the 1950's, and almost all car workers voted Labour. Full stop... 😐

I just sat and listened to this guy talk for 30 minutes. As someone who studied the history of cars all of this is desperately interesting to me

Nash Metropolitan! The car my folks ditched after I was born - too tiny! Wow, never thought I would hear that name again. Thanks as always for this great series of vids.🎉

Very interesting video. One comment at 5.44 ish you have narrative of the Morris minor but most of the accompanying visuals are for the Morris Oxford. They are visually similar at first glance but the heavy cast grille is instantly recognisable and a substantially larger car.

I always thought the downfall of the British car industry was due to the whole British Leyland creation. Seems it started before that with BMC.

A great video and wonderful period footage! However I did read once that the Riley 1.5/ Wolseley 1500 was intended to be the replacement for the Minor but was launched separately as the latter was still selling well. Furthermore simple mechanics were used by Ford (well into the 70s) and this ethos is generally been praised. It still seems to me that foreign companies can do no wrong and British ones can do little right, somehow.

Saturday morning, crumpets and coffee and a good video for breakfast.😃

The green with black fender car (@5:13) has Volkswagen Beatle front head-lights!

The only Living UK / British car companies: • Jaguar, Land Rover _(Bought by TATA)_ • Rolls-Royce, Mini _(Bought by BMW)_ • Aston Martin • Vauxhall _(partner of Opel since 1980, Bought by GM, later sold to Stellantis)_ • MG cars _(Bought by SAIC)_ • Lotus _(Bought by Geely)_ • Bentley _(Bought by VW)_ • McLaren

Very interesting!

Great document

Looks like De Gaulle was right in his sentiments about Britain 😆 it has come to pass..

I grew up with the Indian Amby. Hindustan Ambassador. Even after Suzuki came in 1984 the same model with little chage was produced as mark 1 2 3,4. There was no innovation for more than 50 years. And Amby died in 2014. Only a few yellow cabs remain in Calcuta.

Excellent video 👍👍👍