British car industry
I been reading a fascinating book by motoring hack and auto industry expert James Ruppert that explains, in grim detail, just what happened to an industry that used to comprise more than two dozen marques and which used to sell its wares all over the world.
There are, inin
Panthers White gongshow hockey apparel fact, several received wisdoms: The rightright
world hockey jerseys tends to blame the unions, the left inept management. Everyone agrees our cars were rubbish compared to those made by the Germans, the ItaliansItalians
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British cars may have been all right in the 1950, the thinking goes, but thosethose
Pittsburgh Penguins ak hockey jerseys dear old Wolseleys and MGs stood no chance against the Vorsprung durch Tecknikness of Volkswagen and Mighty Toyota.
There is a grain of truth in all of this, but only a grain and some of these assertions are plain wrong. For a start it is a myth that British cars were rubbish.
We all remember the Allegros and Morris Marinas (miserable machines)machines)
Florida Panthers White penguins hockey jerseys but what about the original Mini? The E Type Jaguar? The Morris Minor? World beaters, far superior to anything on offer from Germany, Italy or Japan.
It is a myth that British cars were
all badly made.
You still see the odd Allegro trundling around but whatwhat
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those Renault 16s and Citroen Visas? Iron oxide, each and every one ofReliable: You still see the odd Austin Allegro trundling around, but what happened to all those Renault 16s and Citroen Visas? Iron oxide that's what
It is a myth too that Britain could not make a car business work. Sadly, the most impressive example of a British motoring success story came not with a British firm but with a German one.
Until I read Ruppert's account, I didn fully appreciate that thethe
Penguins White new nhl jerseys existence of the VAG behemoth, which today encompasses the Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Bentley and Bugatti brands is entirely the result of the work of a single British Army major, Ivan Hirst, who single handedly restarted production at the Wolfsburg factory after the war.
By the end of 1945 Maj. Hirst Volkswagen plant was churning out Kubelwagens (a military version of the Beetle) for the British Army and several thousand civilian cars for general sale. He galvanised the demoralised workforce and had the bomb damaged factory repaired.
VW Beetle: By 1946 Volkswagen was well on the way to becoming the world success story it remains to this day and it was in entirely British hands
By 1946 Volkswagen was well on the way to becoming the world success story it remains to this day and it was in entirely British hands. So what happened? The plant was offered for sale to Ford, which rejected it apparently on the grounds that Wolfsburg was too near Communist East Germany.
The French didn want it either and Hirst the man actually responsible for the success of the VW Beetle, the best selling car in the world foiled an attempt to dismantle Volkswagen and ship the whole operation to Australia in lieu of war reparations.
Instead, another Brit, Sir William Rootes visited the factory on behalf of the Government he declared that the Beetle was ugly and noisy to sell.
He told Hirst: 'If you think you are going to build cars in this place, young man, you are a bloody fool For a while Hirst was able to ignore him and VW went from strength to strength. But in the end control was handed back to the Germans and the rest is history.
The villains of the piece tend to be the grandees of the British Motor Industry, who often took the most perverse decisions imaginable.