Quote:
Shows how badly the UK industry cocked up. From complete dominance (partly protected by import duties) to diddly squat in about 20 years.
Still, we all own a slice of history...
Yes and al that time we were "protected" by being members of the EU or whatever it was called at the time
The facts are though that in truth our home grown cars were not all that good unless they were upmarket ones. A Marina for instance should never have gone into production in the first place.
Don't forget that we had not been in the EU for that long in car lead times by 1980. There are a lot of reasons for the decline in the British car industry and I'm not going for the usual union route either but the mistakes of the Ryder report, the desire by Tony Benn for a single global manufacturer the size of Ford and GM by amalgamating existing companies, the forced merger of BMC and BL that was much to the detriment of the then profitable BL, the insistence on factories being built in unemployment blacksports e.g. Speke. Triumph in the late 60s and early 70s was profitable and forward looking, they knew that the European market was key to them hence the Malines factory, and that the commonwealth and US market was a falling market. And of course by 1980s British cars in the main lacked innovation due to the little cash for R&D, underinvestment in the right factories and new factories in the wrong place, poor build quality and the constant berating in the media. I could go on, and I really shouldn't!