Once there were Singers, and Jowetts and Rileys, then came the Mini--from the AutoWeek archives

Editor's note: As Mini celebrates its 50th birthday, it's the perfect time to revisit Kevin A. Wilson's insightful look at the fall of the British auto industry. This article was first published on March 8, 1993.

We are here in the Midlands for the trade and press preview of the 1992 Birmingham exhibition, the British International Motor Show.

In the very prominent background, a Monty Python voice crackles in the high-ceilinged steel-and-concrete expanses of the National Exhibition Centre: "Now . . . Meet the Shape of Things to Come . . . Our New . . . Nissan . . . MICRA!"

The crowd jostles for viewing sites as a green car glides to the front of the stage and begins to dance.

Dance?

It rotates, its doors open, its hatch lifts, its lights and blinkers flicker to the beat.

This Micra is a Be-1 of a car and yet a thoroughly modern machine: 1.0- or 1.3-liter twin-cam, 16-valve engines, the option of a continuously variable transmission. The Brit press adores it for its exceptional packaging--wheels pushed out to the corners, roomy interior, ample cargo hold--for its ease of parking in crowded city centers, for its big-car ride.

Let's see: a small, rounded, space-efficient urban car, destined to be exported in large numbers from the U.K.

Haven't we been here before?

The truth no one speaks

Ask around in Birmingham, once England's own Motor City, about the homegrown British industry's diminished role on the world stage and instead of answers, you get another cup of tea. Britain is making a great many good cars nowadays, they tell you. There are fine British Fords and Vauxhalls and Peugeots and Nissans, and by the way, Toyota and Honda have set up shop.

The reality is that this is ritual obfuscation of what they call in New Guinea a mokita: the truth everyone knows but no one speaks.

For the indigenous motor industry has fallen far and from a great height. In the years immediately after World War II, the right-hand-driving island nation that dominated the world automotive export scene was not the one in the Pacific; it was Great Britain, a country so desperate to export manufactured goods that "Export or Die" was far more than mere sloganeering.

The postwar Labor government's pursuit of a "planned economy" and "industrial policy" saw it nationalize the railroads and coal mines. But, like the steel industry, leaders of Britain's biggest native auto companies successfully resisted nationalization. They did not, however, resist the government's pressure to export because resistance would have been futile: In order to obtain strictly rationed steel, industrial operations had to demonstrate that the resulting products would be exported--as late as 1952, nuts and bolts were strictly rationed to exporting companies. Where better to export than to the one victorious WWII nation that had actually undergone economic expansion--not devastation--during the war?

So in 1947, Austin chose the New York Auto Salon to introduce its first true postwar model, the A40. In just three months it sold 7,000 of the little sedans (Dorset two-door and Devon four-door) to an American market simply starving for cars. Of the 35,000 Austin A40s built in that first year, 11,000 came to America; only 1,000 stayed in Great Britain.

Hard on the A40's heels came others--the Morris Minor (1948), the Triumph Mayflower (1950), the Hillman Minx.

It was a good time to be in the British car business in America, especially for a lean, athletic, ambitious businessman named Kjell Qvale ("Shell Ka-volley"). In 1946, Qvale was an Alameda County, Calif., Willys-Overland dealer who had a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus experience while vacationing in New Orleans. One of three sons of a Norwegian fisherman, Qvale had come to America as a child; he knew a lot about the immigrant work ethic, but nothing about European cars. But while standing on a corner waiting to cross a street in New Orleans, Qvale was rocked back on his heels when he laid his cold blue eyes on a passing car.

He wasn't alone. The MG-TC was having a similar effect on many Americans, some of whom had met its predecessors while serving in England during the war.

Once Qvale had flagged him down, he learned the driver represented Hambro Trading Co., which had somehow persuaded the Nuffield Organization (parent firm to Morris, M.G., Wolsely and SU carbs) to accept the quaint notion that MGs should be distributed through the "soft underbelly" of the U.S. market--New Orleans. Qvale talked the man into a ride, and promptly abandoned any idea of a future with Willys-Overland in favor of life with MG.

He got the first six TCs in the San Francisco area in January 1947, and he was on his way to becoming a very special sort of postwar automotive legend. Enthusiasts will remember Qvale for a lot of things: for the key role he played in the creation of the Laguna Seca racetrack, for a keen sporting sense that saw him establish a competitions department headed by Joe Huffaker whose ambitious plans included construction and entry of cars at Indianapolis, for leadership in establishment of the San Francisco Imported Auto Show.

But most of all, Qvale was as important as anyone else in putting the British car on the map in that most significant American market of all: California.

Qvale was a keen businessman. Soon after he made a market in MGs, he added Nuffield's Morris sedans, and then picked up other marques: Austin, (when it merged with Morris in 1952, creating the British Motor Company), Austin-Healey, Jaguar, Rover, Jowett, Singer and many others.

However successful he was becoming, he was also growing more and more frustrated with the products.

"Some of the [British] cars I sold 40 years ago were awful," senior statesman Qvale recalls today.

For example, the A90 Atlantic. There it sat at its 1948 Earls Court Motor Show debut--alongside the Jaguar XK120 and the Morris Minor--bulbous, three-headlight caricature designed to exploit the American market. It was everything that was wrong with British cars of its era but most of all it was wrongheaded. It was the first Austin to abandon the upright radiator grille in favor of what someone thought was Detroit-like styling complete with a wide stripe of chrome up the center of the hood and a chrome flying letter "A" atop each fender. That was bad enough, but Austin had to go it one worse: With a sidelong glance at American convertibles, the company also made a power top available. Trouble was when the top went up and down, it sounded like a flotilla of garbage trucks had invaded the neighborhood.

"When you raised the [optional] hydraulic top they were so proud of, you could hear it a half a mile away!" Qvale laughs.

Recently, Hemmings Motor News carried an ad for a restored A90 that called it "the perfect Elmer Fudd car."

And yet . . .

Locked out of the mass market

While it was everything wrong with British cars it was also everything right, although it took the genius of Donald Healey to figure that one out. Healey borrowed the A90's powertrain and many Austin pieces for his "Healey Hundred" displayed at the Earl Court show in London in 1952, and the world fell in love. First to propose and first to be accepted was BMC chieftain Leonard Lord, who signed a deal and had the car renamed before the show closed. By 1954 in America, the Austin-Healey 100-4 outsold BMC's Austin and Morris family sedan lines combined.

A portent of the future. For beginning with the Healey 100-4, the British would be ghettoized in the sports-car business and locked out of the mass market.

This failure of mass-market understanding had its price. By 1958, the anti-Detroit rebellion that the MG-TC had begun 12 years earlier was in full swing. That year, America imported more cars than it exported for the first time in history, signifying a trend that has yet to reverse itself, and in '59, sales of foreign cars peaked (temporarily) at what was then thought to be an "alarming" 10 percent of the U.S. car market.

The import boom of '59 was led by VW, the distinctive exhaust note of more than 120,000 Beetles sounding a counter-cultural raspberry to what was known as Detroit iron. Close on VW's heels, with 90,000 sales, was Renault, which with its Dauphine had shot past all the British carmakers.

Qvale, never slow on the uptake, was perfectly situated: He was dealing British sports cars with one hand, and distributing VW's in the Pacific Northwest with the other. He was also perfectly situated to observe the difference in export zeal, export expertise, export understanding.

The biggest contrast between the British and Germans, Qvale recalls, was the Brits stubbornly refused to believe there was good reason for dealers and owners to complain.

They simply declined to accept that the cars were unsuited to the U.S. with their erratic electrical systems, feeble heaters and lack of creature comforts.

Qvale recalls one devastating moment in the real life drama of the Morris Minor, a lovely if weak-kneed car. In a desperate attempt to convince the factory rep that the early flathead-engined Minor was so grossly underpowered it was simply unsuited for a place whose terrain pitched and rolled as much as San Francisco's. Qvale invited him to try and drive the car to the top of Nob Hill.

"Why?" asked the factory man.

"Just try it," answered Qvale.

"I don't understand your point," said the factory man, "are you trying to tell me it won't climb the hill?"

"Exactly," answered Qvale.

"Don't be absurd," said the factory man. "The car is suitable for lands far more challenging than this place."

"Drive it up the hill," said Qvale.

So the factory man, a smirk on his face, climbed into a demonstrator, aimed it up Nob Hill and halfway up, ran out of steam. The car coughed, bucked a few times and came to a dead stop in the middle of the steeply pitched street, sending its driver into a panic. The factory man screamed to Qvale for help. "What am I supposed to do?" he shrieked. "Roll back down," said Qvale in what must have been a reasonably smug tone.

You would expect things like that to have had effect on the people who made and sold the car. It didn't.

At the same time, VW had a team at work in America studying and addressing problems as they came up. This philosophy of continuous improvement--inaccurately of late attributed to the Japanese--led to the breakthrough of hydraulic brakes (1951) and syncromesh transmission ('52), after which the Beetle gained continued popularity as VW made many further improvements. West Germany soon would supplant Britain as the world's leading automotive exporter--largely on the strength of a car built in Wolfsburg at a factory that only 10 years earlier was in the possession of the British occupation forces.

Trotman's lessons

There isn't much time these days for the compact, brown-haired, soft-spoken president of Ford's worldwide automotive operations to reminisce; the future and the present are much too pressing. But Alex Trotman carries with him daily the lessons he learned playing the car game in his native Britain in the 1950s and '60s; lessons he recalls clearly over a cholesterol-watcher's lunch of fish and salad in the executive dining room at Ford's North American Automotive Operations headquarters.

It was 1955 when Trotman, just out of the Royal Air Force, saw an ad in the newspaper and soon after went to work as a management trainee at Dagenham, near where the Thames empties into the North Sea in Essex, east of London. When completed in October 1931, Dagenham had been the second largest automotive factory in the world, behind only Ford's own legendary Rouge Plant after which the Dagenham facility was patterned. Trotman's first job was purchasing supplies and parts for the manufacture of the first total replacement for Ford of Britain's Model Y, the side-valve, (i.e., flathead) Popular of 1932: the 105E Anglia to which Trotman was assigned was a clean sheet of paper car.

It had an all-new body, a new 997-cc overhead-valve engine, new four-speed transmission (Ford of Britain's first) and new suspension parts. And it was to be built in an all-new assembly plant and paint shop, connected by overhead "tunnel" to the stamping plant.

"It was an heroic thing, or maybe an idiotic thing to have taken on," he recalls, the Scottish burr still unmistakable in his voice.

The Anglia was first shown at the London Motor Show at Earls Court that October, where it shared billing with the Triumph Herald and a radical new competitor from BMC, the new Austin Seven/Morris Mini-Minor, soon to be known to one and all simply as "The Mini."

As they launched their respective new cars Ford and Morris swapped copies of their early production models. Young Trotman, by now working at a new discipline called "product planning," was one of four men who climbed into this early Mini.

They were about to meet an automotive legend, the car that Road & Track was moved to call, on the eve of its departure from the U.S. market in 1968, "the single most outstanding production car design executed since WWII."

If you could have walked up to a Mini for the first time with Trotman that day, you might be forgiven low expectations. While its sliding windows and exposed door hinges suggested a Spartan approach to motoring, the Mini's interior proclaimed one. To start the 850-cc engine, the driver pressed his foot down on a starter button on the floor; key start was a couple of years away yet. Selecting among the four forward gears with the long, dead-straight stick that emerged from the union of floorboard and firewall, you'd shift by ear and feel; no tachometer. The only gauge was a large speedometer situated in the center of the dashboard, itself simply a full-width tray across the front of the cabin. To open the door from inside, you pulled on a shoestring-like device; the door was prevented from opening too far by a leather strap.

"Off we went in this tiny little Mini," Trotman recalls, "and we were only round the block a short way when we all concluded we had serious problems. This was going to be a very competitive car for us; it was going to give us a lot of trouble."

The design, it was obvious, was clever and original, the product of one bright mind with a single goal. That mind belonged to a man named Alec Issigonis, who'd been born British to a German mother in Izmir in 1906. He first viewed his "native" England at age 15, and had had no formal schooling before then. He would become a great designer, but also a famous eccentric even by British standards.

His intense desire was to design practical cars to serve the common man like the Model T or VW. In the late 1940s, he'd designed the Morris Minor, the first British car ever to sell a million copies. In 1956, BMC, to which Issigonis had migrated, gave him free rein to turn out an economical vehicle. His Mini Minor laid down a basic configuration that was still decades from mass acceptance: transversely mounted engine atop a transaxle driving the front wheels. Wheels pushed out to the corners to maximize interior volume, the design laid exactly 10 feet of car atop 80 inches of wheelbase.

The Mini proved itself to be a landmark people's car. In the process, and not entirely coincidentally, it also became an extraordinary race car, racking up an impressive run of race and rally wins that will endear it to enthusiasts forever.

So why has the president of Ford's automotive operations so changed his mind about this remarkable automobile in the three plus decades since he first drove it that today he says you can date the demise of the native British industry to August 26, 1959--the day the Mini went on sale simultaneously in BMC dealerships around the world?

Weak points: Quality and suitability

Among those dealerships, of course, were Qvale's and we have already had more than a hint from him of Trotman's reasons. Today, Qvale, ever the enthusiast, concedes the critical praise for the car while at the same time pointing straight to its two Achilles' heels. Quality in the home market. Suitability for the places where it was sold abroad.

The Mini fell flat in America, the world's biggest market, because it didn't work here--too small, too city-oriented in a land of cross-country travel--and even if it could be made to, it wouldn't stay nailed together.

Even so, if it had appeared only five years earlier, before the Beetle established itself, the Mini might have become a cult object in America. But it didn't. It came here as a 1960 model. Serviceability and build quality expectations had been raised by the VW. Detroit's early compacts (Falcon, Corvair, Valiant) were offering alternatives. And after the initial ground-swell of enthusiasm, foreign cars were beginning to fade in a market that had finally become saturated and was casting off the first wave of odd shaped cars it had so recently welcomed: Lloyd, Borgward, Messerschmitt, Deutsch-Bonnet, Armstrong Siddeley among others.

And there was another point, probably the critical one: As brilliant as Issigonis was as an engineer, he was also the very embodiment of intransigence, a prime example of how not to devise a car for export.

"I begged him to come to America and see what went on here and how we drove," Qvale remembers. "He said: 'I hate America, I refuse, I will never go.' Those are his exact words."

Qvale still sounds astonished. You sense that he is as surprised today as he was then, and even more disappointed. For what he could not then, and cannot now seem to fully comprehend is how a seafaring nation, so brilliantly successful at exploring and conquering distant lands could not sufficiently distinguish between colonization and exportation to be able to abandon one and adopt the other. His confusion is understandable.

While the Hudson's Bay Company or the British East India Company were putatively trade entities, they were really stalking horses for imperial interests. From the dawn of the industrial revolution--or earlier--the overseas customers for British-made goods were, by and large, British. Rather than exporting goods to foreign buyers, Britain had spent centuries colonizing--spreading its own domestic buyers around the globe.

California was never a British colony; the people driving cars there were not the same as the people in Britain who made the cars. This was true not only of San Francisco, but all across the country. For with the U.S. interstate highway defense act of 1956 had come a burgeoning number of superhighways, places where Americans drove much faster, over much longer distances and periods of time, than could even be accomplished in the U.K. And they did so in extremes of hot and cold unknown in England.

And Americans were much less given to doting on their cars--they'd been "spoiled" perhaps by the ability of Detroit's cars to suffer abuse and keep running, so were unlikely to check the oil and coolant levels daily as many British drivers knew to do. The tachometer-less Mini was often over-revved.

British car cooling systems failed. Axle bearings, and when the Mini arrived, its CV joints, overheated and failed. Electrical systems overheated and failed.

To both Qvale and Trotman, Issigonis' story tells it all. Issigonis, the imperious British colonist, never listened to the radio, and didn't think anyone else needed to, and so the Mini had no provision for its installation. Similarly, there was great difficulty in attaching seatbelts because Issigonis refused to wear them himself.

So, today when the Norwegian-American entrepreneur and the Scottish-American executive reflect on the glorious Mini, they see in its introduction both the success and the failure of the automotive industry in the nation of shopkeepers.

That the Mini failed in America was sad enough, but it also failed at home; which was even more of a tragedy because the reasons behind the failure speak volumes about why you can get tea but no answers these days in Birmingham.

It was built poorly, by a company so inefficient in its operation, and so woefully poor at marketing (the first true plan for marketing the car was devised in 1977), that BMC and its successors, a later study showed, made little or no profit on the Mini until 1982. And without sufficient profit, its manufacturer never again had the funds to develop truly competitive new products. Far from being a Model T analog for the masses, the Mini made its mark primarily among his urban consumers in what Time magazine dubbed "Swinging London," and only slowly gained wider public acceptance, hitting its sales peak as a product of British Leyland in 1971. In the interim, its manufacturer had fallen from a pre-eminent position, eaten up by imports and what we would today call "transplants."

Ford share of the U.K. domestic market, Trotman recalls, stood at 19 percent in 1959. It rose during the '60s to dominate the U.K. market with 28 percent.

"And it wasn't only Ford, imports (from France, Germany and Italy) started to rise. Japan was never their problem. Their problem was Ford, GM, VW, Fiat, Renault."

And the Mini that was expected to give Ford so much trouble?

"As it turned out, it didn't. I suppose, looking back on it that our (Ford's) confidence grew over the next few years that we could really just keep eating their share lunch."

Door opened to competition

Colonization instead of exportation, marketing and manufacturing inefficiencies that opened the door to competition in the home market from better, tougher car companies from other lands; both critical contributors to the Decline and Fall. But there is another cause for the demise of the indigenous industry you won't hear discussed over tea in Birmingham.

In the early 1970s, Kjell Qvale got tired of trying to get the British to make a car that would work well in America and set out to do it himself. What was needed, he decided, was a resurrection of the big Austin-Healey, with which he'd had much success in the 1950s and 1960s.

Coincidentally, the founders of the Jensen Company, Allan and Richard, retired in 1967; the firm was in deep financial trouble and available. So looking to satisfy a market he understood well, Qvale bought the Jensen factory in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, installed both Donald Healey and his son Geoffrey on the board of directors, bought a little ranch house in England, and embarked on a new phase of his career: sports car manufacture.

Leave to another context the Jensen-Healey itself--it was neither the best sports car ever, nor the worst. After brief flirtations with a Vauxhall engine and a Ford V6, Qvale and Healey settled on a 2.0-liter twin-cam Lotus engine. It went into the Jensen-Healey before it went into any Lotus, and still had teething problems when the car went to market in 1972. But neither that flaw nor the fact that the car's styling was considered lackluster was the worst of Qvale's worries.

He'd started out with 500 employees, all producing Jensen Interceptors, a large GT using a Chrysler engine. Then he hired 700 more to make the Jensen-Healey. They were, at the insistence of unions, mostly workers who'd been laid off elsewhere.

Qvale remains convinced that he got the dregs of British autoworkers. That is probably true. But it is also the memory of an ambitious American entrepreneur of his first encounter with the obstinacy and sheer cussedness of British labor in the 1970s, a period during which class warfare was being waged on every factory floor in the nation; most fiercely of all at British Leyland.

Unlike Detroit, which was having labor problems of its own (General Motors Assembly Division, Lordstown, Chevrolet Vega), British automakers had to deal with multiple unions at each plant. Trotman remembers having to negotiate with no fewer than 18 at Dagenham. A legacy of the industrial revolution and the way unions evolved from the craft guilds that preceded them, the system had evolved with separate and distinct negotiating bodies for, say, those who made windshields and those who installed bumpers.

The combination of class-based hostility, the generally contentious atmosphere of the times and the multiplicity of unions left Qvale with a "company that had union activity--work stoppages, wildcat actions, work-to-rule actions--in every corner of every shop every hour of the day."

All of it cut desperately into productivity.

It was 1974, year of the OPEC oil embargo, when unions and government joined forces to heighten the economic crisis. Oil, when available, was hideously expensive and the coal miners, sensing an opportunity, went on strike. In Britain, the government is the employer of the nationalized coal mines, so, to conserve energy while both oil and coal were in short supply, the Labor government ordered industry to operate on a three-day week. At full pay.

That was about all Qvale needed. The energy crisis was already cutting into the profitable sales in the U.S. of Hemi-powered Jensen Interceptors which got only 9 mpg. While the Jensen-Healey's mileage was better, and the engine problems had been pretty much resolved, the Jensen image had suffered in the hysterical atmosphere of the time.

"(The three-day week) had to be the worst decision ever made by any government. Ever," Qvale says today, his cool voice heating up even now. "We couldn't be efficient in three days and our suppliers couldn't be efficient." Particularly when big customers took priority in time and consideration. For small-volume Jensen, such things as door handles and gauges doubled in price overnight.

By now, it was costing Qvale more to make Jensen-Healeys than he could sell them for and so he told his work force he might have to shut down.

They not only refused to believe him, they accused him of using his troubles as a negotiating ploy. They had heard this kind of things before, union leaders told him.

"I'd warned everybody that we had to close and the answer from our employees was, 'We don't believe you, everybody tells us that, nobody ever does.'"

It was August of 1975 and he was losing $100,000 a day; in his career as a carmaker, he'd made 18,000 or so cars, and had lost about 1 million pounds of his own and investors' money. Enough was enough. One morning before work began, he went to the plant, stood behind the big wrought-iron gates, and slammed a padlock shut. Click--closed down.

They believed him then, all right.

Lutz the automotive nomad

Chrysler Motors president Bob Lutz is half-Swiss, so like Qvale and Trotman, his perceptions are perfectly centered somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. He has also been an automotive nomad. You can track his travels by the artifacts on display in his office.

Beside the full-size cast foam replica of a Lamborghini V12 is a wood-and-glass cabinet filled with certificates and models, mementos of a career that includes stints in the employ of all of the The Big Three, many years of it spent overseas with Vauxhall, Opel, and Ford of Europe, interspersed with a good run at BMW. Even before that, cars were Lutz's avocation.

In his vocabulary and intonation, Lutz talks as if reading aloud from a story he himself might have written for a car magazine. He is an enthusiast, and like many of his kind, he seems to know both the legends and the facts as well or better than the historians.

He was trying to export American-made cars (GMs) to Europe from an office in New York when Britain's place on the automotive globe still seemed firm.

In 1964, Britain again elected a Labor Government, headed this time by Harold Wilson. Proclaiming as a theme that "To resist change is to spur decline," Wilson embarked on a socialist program, beginning by nationalizing the biggest firms in the country's steel industry. Soon, he would have his say on the auto industry. His task was made easier through the '60s by the industry's own amalgamation. Within months, it seemed, all the fine old nameplates had coalesced into two soggy companies: British Motor Holdings (BMC plus Rover and Alvis) and Leyland Standard Triumph.

Working through "planned economy" mechanism such as a National Enterprise Board, Wilson articulated a vision for a single combine to "preserve" the faltering industry.

The government-forced merger came in 1967, and Leyland's more compliant managers were given the upper hand. One of their first moves was to cancel the Mini-replacement Issigonis had devised--the car was supposed to be replaced in '69. That in 1992 you can still buy brand new Minis almost identical to the cars manufactured a quarter century earlier is indicative of how government's priorities--economic development for impoverished areas, jobs for political constituents, foreign trade negotiations--are simply antithetical to development of new products; the clear mission of any good carmaker.

In 1975 the relationship was fully consummated when British Leyland was completely nationalized. More government control proved not to be the cure, and four years later the newly elected Thatcher government installed fresh management with instructions to make the company efficient enough to privatize it, or just shut it down before it bled the taxpayers dry. Jaguar was spun off and sold to Ford, leaving the Rover Group as heir to the BL amalgam. Today, owned by British Aerospace and Honda, Rover makes fewer vehicles than does Isuzu and sends only its Land Rover trucks to the United States.

A different result in Detroit

Why didn't the British disease spread across the Atlantic? Lutz and Trotman will both admit it's obvious Detroit suffered from the same susceptibilities as Britain: insular mentality, the seeming premium on inefficiency, short-sighted labor relations, and a sheer stubborn refusal to understand the market.

Moreover, in Lutz's own analysis we begin with a reminder that he is the president of a company that, in 1980 and on the brink of collapse, went hat in hand to the government. But the differences begin there, for first of all--in contrast to the lurid manner in which government and industry fell into each others arms in England--Chrysler not only had to fight to get the government to agree to help; but the entire extent of that help was what Lee Iacocca would later call "co-signing a loan."

Moreover, unlike the U.K. government, Washington had no hidden political agenda. There was no deflecting Chrysler's purpose to make and sell cars. There was no mistrust of the wisdom of the marketplace. The government did not draw the company into its embrace. The further difference, Lutz makes clear, is that the loans were paid off and if ever a space was cleared in Highland Park for a government representative, the seat was never even warmed.

There was one more difference and it was enormous; the crisis that brought the industry down in England and found echo here shared two characteristics. American build quality, like British build quality, became bad enough to alienate the marketplace, while at the same time a powerful competitive industry headquartered overseas was offering an alternative of far greater merit. But in England, crisis was no more than an almost unnoticed interruption in the day's routine; ("There was this whole absolute lack of a sense of urgency, no sense at all that the house was burning down," says Lutz today). In America it was a sufficient shock to the system that it changed the molecular composition of not only Chrysler but also Ford.

Among all the ironies of the story of the British industry, almost none is so poignant as the pattern it set for the Japanese.

For in the 1950s, when Toyota and Datsun (today's Nissan) began the Japanese onslaught of the North American market, their exemplar was Britain. When the import boomlet of 1959 was repeated, with increasing amplitude, in the '70s and '80s, it was, of course, the Japanese whose devastating invasion of the U.S. market ultimately mobilized Detroit's battle back.

Said Lutz: "We were seeing a steep rise in Japanese penetration, and we finally told ourselves, 'Hey, if we don't change big time ... we are going to go out of business."

"That crystallized the American industry wonderfully."

At Ford things crystallized in the shape of Taurus; at Chrysler there were K-cars and then minivans, and of late the LH line--the team concept of design coupled with a re-evaluated attitude about the relationship of managers and workers.

Crisis, the seemingly necessary catalyst for change, has finally come to GM. Where Corvair failed to reinvent the American car, and Vega failed to reinvent the American factory, Saturn is now assigned the essential task of reinventing GM itself.

Eliminate a real and recognized urgency, and instead of LH, Saturn and Taurus, the American industry might have reiterated the

British example and tried to survive on a diet of repackaged Bel Airs, Polaras and Galaxie 500s. More to the point, the Big Three would have gone about it the same old way, making the same mistake over and over, just as the Austin Atlantic story was echoed in the Austin America story and the Sterling story.

"Americans are able to look themselves in the mirror and say: I don't like what I see and I'm going to do something about it," Lutz says. "Europeans by and large find that very difficult . . . "

Which brings up one more interesting difference. Lutz is convinced that an upper class management smugly accustomed to its own privileges is not inclined to preach continuous improvement or make other changes that would disrupt its own comfort.

For instance the comfort of tea.

By 3:30 p.m., Lutz recalls from his days overseas, having finished a long lunch only 90 minutes or so earlier, "the whole senior management would go to this little room and there'd be these girls in ruffled uniforms and tea trolleys and 'Would you like a bit of cake?'

"About an hour later everybody would say: 'Roight, s'pose we'd better get back to work.' Forty-five minutes after that it was time to go home for the day."

When Chrysler took over the Rootes Group (Hillman, Humber, Sunbeam and Singer) in 1967 it found a champagne cesspool of comfort and privilege. Lord Rootes was an ex-military officer who had hired former field officer as managers. "So everybody was a major or a colonel or a brigadier and of course these guys were all used to having servants and shoeshine boys and everything. The top management floors were run like a senior officers club in the military in the heyday of the empire."

When these same people represented the best and the brightest of the officer corps and the empire disappeared they were the last to know. Is it any wonder that when they manned the British auto industry and it went away too, they were the last to find out?

The new era

Nissan will export 80 percent of 130,000 Micras it builds at its plant in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. Its employees are the most productive autoworkers in all of Europe--maybe the world. It takes them 10.5 hours to crank off a Nissan Micra. The world moves faster than statisticians can measure, but in 1989 the average hours of labor per car was 16 in Japan, 25 in America and 36 in Europe as a whole.

The U.K. labor also makes up a good portion of the Micra's 80 percent local (e.g. European) content, a fact influential in its selection--by 59 notoriously nationalistic journalists in 18 countries--as the first car from a Japanese company to win the European Car of the Year award.

Of course, that's not how the British press wrote it.

Trumpeted Autocar & Motor in the 5,000th issue of the world's first and oldest motoring magazine: "Britain's Nissan Micra: Car of the Year."

Thirty-three years after the debut of the Mini, the United Kingdom has at last produced its successful mass-market car.

By Kevin A. Wilson