Running on empty
Alan Judd on the state of the once-mighty British motor industry
Did Bertrand Russell drive? His elder brother, Frank, certainly did; described by the police as a ‘hooligan driver’, he stayed up all one night in 1903 to secure A1, the first British registration number. Since those days of idiosyncratic and aristocratic Edwardian ‘motorism’, the British motor industry has been on something of a rollercoaster ride. You could argue that today must be its nadir, just a few revs above stalling. After all, that A1 registration is probably worth more than the capital value of most of our remaining British-owned manufacturers.
We used to be one of the big players. For a time after the second world war we were the largest vehicle exporter in the world, while before it Austin Sevens were built under licence in France and Germany and Wolseleys in Japan. America still has its national icons, Ford and General Motors, Japan its Toyotas, Nissans, Hondas and so on, France its Renault and Peugeot-Citröen, Germany its VW, BMW, Porsche and Daimler-Chrysler, Italy its Fiat (just). But where now are Austin, Morris, Hillman, MG and Rover et al.? Since the demise of the last, we are left with London Taxis International as our largest native-owned manufacturer, producing about 2,500 a year (warranted for 100,000 miles, healthy order book, selling well in America).
Yet you could also argue that the British motor industry — redefined as the motor industry in Britain — is robust and healthy. In 1955, 897,560 cars were built here; half a century on, the figure will be over 1.7 million, with Nissan’s Sunderland plant the most productive in Europe (331,294 in 2004). Car production is declining in America, Japan and almost every European country but growing here. If it continues last year’s growth for two more years, it will break the 1972 record. How did we get here and where are we going?
Victoria’s workshop supplied the world with ships, bicycles, steam engines, printing presses and railways, but were slow starters with the new internal combustion vehicles. A combination of restrictive legislation, patent problems, social and financial structures and an excellent rail network all but stifled the struggling infant. Even after the repeal of the Red Flag Act in 1896 — the act under which ‘road locomotives’ had to be preceded by a man with a flag — there was still a 12mph speed limit. Anti-car hysteria was rampant: letters to newspapers urged pedestrians to use their pistols against the crews of the iron monsters, and Scotland Yard’s first Flying Squad was issued with egg-bombs of green and white paint to throw at fugitive vehicles. Many resented the noisy intrusion into what Thomas Hardy called the ‘tomblike stillness’ of rural highways, deserted since the decline of the coach. The young Charles Rolls described how the approach of a car caused ‘every other man to climb up a tree or telegraph pole — every woman ran away across the fields, every horse jumped over the garden wall, every butcher’s cart bolted, scattering spare parts of animals about the road’. We talk about our love affair with the car, but we have often done as much to punish as to encourage it. We still do.
By the time of the first world war Henry Ford’s introduction of American mass-production techniques to his Old Trafford factory meant that cars were becoming cheaper and better. By no means were there yet cars for the people in Britain, as there were in America and as Adolf Hitler planned for there to be in Germany, but during the 1920s and 1930s middle-class ownership grew strongly. Protected by high tariffs introduced during the first world war (lasting — unhelpfully, as it turned out — until 1956), shoals of manufacturers spawned and died during that period. There were 88 in 1922, 31 in 1929. Despite the fact that engine development was inhibited by horsepower-based taxation, by 1939 the British car industry had overtaken the French and German to become the largest in the world after the American.
The industrial compromise of the second world war extended collective bargaining, shop steward power and piecework (i.e., you’re paid per widget produced, not per hour worked) throughout the industry. Post-war export quotas created an export boom that concealed what was happening closer to home: in 1947 19 US manufacturers, with 42 basic models, produced 4 million cars a year for their huge domestic market; 20 British manufacturers, with 51 basic models, produced less than 10 per cent of that for a modest market that was still middle-class rather than mass. In German industry, and much of the French, post-war reconstruction meant starting again. In Japan, Toyota introduced their flexible ‘lean production’ methods which produced cars faster, cheaper and better than their competitors (they still do). In Britain, the industry tried to carry on from where it left off in 1939.
Austin and Morris, potentially our only serious mass-market producers, merged in 1952 to form the British Motor Corporation (BMC). But it never worked as well as it should have and there followed decades of decline and further botched mergers. Anyone of a certain age can recall the union demagoguery and myopia of those years, with managements either incompetent or prevented by governments from taking politically unpopular decisions. Innovative designs were spoiled by shoddiness and complacency in manufacture. Too many of the workers weren’t bothered, too many of the managers weren’t particular; in the end, neither were the customers. At the same time, growing competition in Commonwealth markets and our exclusion from the early Common Market meant that the industry was denied the benefits of blossoming intraEuropean trade. When that came later, it was mostly one-way and the British industry was in no state to cope.
It sounds inevitable but it wasn’t. In 1972, a non-executive director of British Leyland, Lewin Whyte, pushed hard for investment to follow the good, well-thought-of products and not the bad, but he was ignored. We were not the only country with car problems: the mighty VW nearly went under and survived largely because the German government wisely resisted state intervention. By the mid-1970s, however, with the effective nationalisation of British Leyland and spiralling import penetration, the rot was probably unstoppable; there was simply no longer any space for a Britishowned mass-market producer. We’d lost it.
And that was long before BMW decided that even they couldn’t keep Rover going. The government’s desire to keep it in the mass market and to back the Phoenix Four was understandable but wrong. Those parts of the British motor industry that were rescuable — the parts that made cars other people wanted — were already in foreign ownership. Jaguar, Land-Rover, the Mini, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce and Bentley are success stories, producing better cars than they ever did. Small, British-owned firms making bespoke products — Ariel, Morgan, Bristol, Noble, Caterham, Vanwall and so on — appear to be flourishing. It’s almost as if the once-mighty native British car industry has returned to its cottage industry roots. Meanwhile, the mass of cars made in Britain — by Nissan, Honda, Toyota, Ford, Vauxhall — are made efficiently and well.
But we must do it better still. In Warranty Direct’s table of repair costs and frequencies for fourto six-year-old cars, the top eight are Far Eastern, mostly Japanese (headed by Honda). Many of those cars are made here, of course, but why is Ford not up there and why is Land-Rover bottom? We’ve been watching how the Japanese do it for 50 years, and we can do it ourselves with their cars. Why not our own?
As for the future, it’s hard to imagine a truly British-owned mass-market producer emerging, particularly given the industrial rise of China and India. It may be that the future here — and in Europe generally — is increasingly bespoke, in which case you create your own markets, as Ariel et al. are doing, but they’ll stay small. If we want foreign-owned mass producers to continue to invest here, we’ve got to make sure that the costs are in our favour. That, in the end, is what it’s all about.
And our contemporary red-flaggers, eggthrowers and pedestrian gun-slingers should learn not to resent the car but to manage it and tame it. It’s our creature: most of us want it, all of us depend on it our own or other people’s. I suspect Frank Russell knew this better than his brother.
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