BL’s other, much-vaunted, new products of the early seventies fared little better. The Triumph Stag of 1970 certainly looked the part. It was designed by Giovanni Michelotti, author of the Stag’s handsome cousin, the Triumph 2000. But the stylish Stag turned out to be badly built, unreliably powered and hugely rust-prone. Instead of using Rover’s trusty, lightweight V-8 engine, Triumph’s management refused to employ their erstwhile rival’s power train and instead bolted together two fourcylinder Dolomite engines to create their own 3 litre V-8. Unsurprisingly, this engine proved far too heavy and unreliable. The Stag’s bodywork leaked and its ‘removable’ hard top took at least two people to manhandle it. As journalist Tony Davis commented: ‘When an owner stands by his Triumph Stag, it’s usually because he can’t get the door open’.1
The Stag did nothing to help sustain Triumph’s reputation. Nor did Triumph’s other sporty offering, the latest in the famed TR series. When in 1974 Motor magazine reviewed the new Triumph TR7 – a good-looking sports car of the sort at which British manufacturers in general, and Triumph in particular, had excelled during the sixties – its journalists were sadly unimpressed. By the end of the test they had had to rebuild the engine, and noted ‘disfiguring rust’, ‘unbearable’ noise and ‘a sluggish power train’. Unsurprisingly, Motor judged the car to be ‘a particularly nasty lemon’. The car’s scallop-sided styling and tartan upholstery looked plain daft, while visibility from both front and rear windows was appalling. The TR7 successfully garrotted the international market for Triumph sports cars, wiping fond memories of the TR4 and the Spitfire from its erstwhile customers’ minds.
When different parts of British Leyland did actually try to work together, the result was often farcical. In 1968 Stokes lamely agreed that the firm’s quality marques of Jaguar, Rover and Triumph would not share plans or designs with the volume car division, Austin Morris, and that the two corporate halves would maintain entirely separate dealer networks. But when, in 1970, some daring souls at Austin Morris dared to challenge this ukase and lent their Cowley-made gearbox to Canley for its Triumph Toledo, it was found that it did not fit.
There was one occasion for modified rapture at BL. The new Range Rover of 1970, an upmarket, David Bache-designed, V-8 engined version of that hardy perennial, the Land Rover, was a qualified success. The concept had been suggested as far back as 1954, but Rover had lacked the financial backing to develop both this and the P6. Now BL finally realized Rover’s vision. But while the car was excellent in theory, its execution was predictably flawed. The initial build quality, like most British Leyland products of the 1970s, was abysmal. And BL was slow to respond to the model’s popularity, only investing in new plant for the Range Rover at Solihull in 1978.1
British Leyland, however, was not the only floundering British automotive giant of the early 1970s. Most British-based manufacturers preferred to milk established successes well past their sell-by dates rather respond to consumers who now demanded fuel efficiency, reliability and technological advance. Top of the list was Chrysler Europe, which tried to sell in the US the lacklustre model range it had inherited from Rootes2 as the Chrysler Hunter and Dodge Husky.
By 1966 the Sunbeam marque had been so devalued that it was used to badge the upmarket version of the dismal Hillman Imp, the car that was to break the fragile Rootes empire. The Sunbeam name was given a last hurrah by Rootes with the Arrow range’s Sunbeam Rapier coupé of 1968, a car whose sloping, fastback rear made it look more like a Plymouth Barracuda than the Hillman it really was. Having seemingly perished along with Rootes, the Sunbeam name was exhumed as a meaningless designation by Chrysler and Peugeot in the late 1970s.
Rootes’ multi-brand policy had proved that badge engineering could seriously devalue prestigious marques. Once these brands had been cheapened, it was almost impossible to upgrade them again – something that Alfred Sloan and Walter Chrysler had clearly recognized, but which Billy Rootes had failed to grasp. This was a lesson that BMC (in the 1960s), British Leyland and Rover (after 1968) and even the mighty GM (after 1981) also subsequently ignored, to the detriment of their businesses. The collapse of Rover at the turn of the twenty-first century, and the near ruin of GM in 2009, can be partly attributed to the careless squandering of their once-valuable brand heritages.
Chrysler’s odd-looking and mechanically conventional new British model, the ungainly Hillman Avenger of 1970,1 sold tolerably well in the UK – or at least, well enough to compensate for the lack of investment in any other new models. But Chrysler Europe’s American management was paralysed by indecision and seemed unable to do anything to prevent the strikes that were increasingly crippling factory production. To many observers, the only thing keeping the company afloat appeared to be the income from the 1967 agreement with the Iranian government, whereby Rootes had agreed to supply Hillman Hunters in kit form to be assembled in Iran under the name ‘Paykan’. This lucrative deal ultimately lasted for twenty years.
Even GM seemed to have lost the plot in Britain. Vauxhall’s performance in the 1970s was little better than Chrysler’s as it continued to rely on an outdated model range based on the uninspiring, American-looking Victor FD/FE and its smaller sister, the mediocre Viva. Ominously for Britain, the Vauxhall Victor was the last car to be developed in the UK independently of GM’s larger, German subsidiary, Opel. From 1979 Britain’s Vauxhalls were little more than rebadged Opels.
While the British public were not unduly distressed by the troubles of British Leyland, Chrysler Europe and Vauxhall in the early 1970s, one automotive failure, at the ultra-premium end of the market, caused many to realize just how precarious the nation’s industrial base had become. The collapse of Rolls-Royce in 1971 was biggest shock yet to those who still believed in the global superiority of the British car industry. In truth, Rolls-Royce’s downfall was not due to any serious problems with the car division but was caused by the bankruptcy of the much larger aircraft engine business, following the enormous cost of developing the advanced RB211 jet engine.1 However, the ruin of a car maker that most Britons regarded as the best in the world came as an unpleasant awakening. If Rolls-Royce could fail, what might be next?
1 Two years later its provisions were stiffened by the tougher Air Quality Act, and in 1970 by the Federal Clean Air Act. Concern about urban car emissions and excessive consumption also prompted New York and California’s Clean Air Acts of 1968 and 1970.
2 The car was the Honda Civic.
1 In 1975 the Collective followed this up with Media Burn, a video showing a classic 1959 Cadillac being driven through a wall of forty-two blazing television sets.
2 Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia, vast ZiL limousines (made by Zavod imeni Likhacheva, named after the plant’s director, Ivan Likhachev) plied up and down Moscow’s boulevards carrying senior communist officials in a style reminiscent of 1940s America. The ZiL 41047, which was still being made as late as 2001, weighed an astronomical 4.2 tonnes and was powered by a 7.7 litre V-8 engine.
1 The technical term for the inability to cope with corners: the car prefers to head straight on rather than follow the curve.
1 This was the Vega’s third total recall.
1 Following appeals this sum was massively reduced, but Grimshaw still eventually received well over $6 million.
1 Which, since its incorporation of Jaguar and Pressed Steel the previous year, was officially known by the unimaginative title of British Motor Holdings.
1 He was knighted in 1969.
1 Or Lord Stokes, as he became in 1969.
1 BMC had, of course, pioneered the hatchback with the Farinastyled Austin A40 of 1958, but this valuable legacy appeared to have been forgotten by the brave new British Leyland of the mid-1970s.
1 In 1977 the British guide Making Money from Collectable Cars declared that ‘if you are a mechanical masochist, this is your car’.
1 The widening gap between the basic Land Rover and the increasingly luxurious Range Rover later encouraged the Rover Group (as BL
had by then become) to launch the Land Rover Discovery in 1989 and the more downmarket Freelander in 1997.
2 The boxy Arrow range of cars: the Hillman Minx, Hillman Hunter and Singer Vogue.
1 Which Chrysler also attempted to sell in America, as the Plymouth Cricket.
1 Edward Heath’s Conservative government saved the company by immediately nationalizing it. In 1973 the car division was sold separately as Rolls-Royce Motors.
12
Crisis? What Crisis?
On 6 October 1973, the Jewish public holiday of Yom Kippur, cheap oil and cheap motoring suddenly became a thing of the past as 222 Egyptian jets and three thousand guns attacked Israeli positions in the Sinai and on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, while Syrian aircraft, artillery and tanks stormed across Israel’s northern border. Egypt and Syria were seeking retribution for the territory they had lost in the Six Day War, which Israel had unleashed on its unsuspecting neighbours six years before. And for a time it seemed as if they would succeed; the Israeli army initially fell back as American intelligence dismissed Arab military activity as seasonal manoeuvres. By 15 October, however, Israeli counter-offensives had forced Egyptian units in the Sinai to retreat. By the 25th, when Israeli forces were only thirty miles from Damascus and seventy miles from Cairo, all parties agreed to a UN-brokered ceasefire.
The Arab states’ previous attempt to use the ‘oil weapon’ against Israel’s Western supporters, in 1967, had failed. This time, however, the Arab-dominated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was better prepared, and more ruthless. In the midst of the fighting of 16 October, and two days after US planes had been spotted bringing military supplies into Israel in broad daylight, OPEC announced that the price of oil was rising by 70 per cent, with immediate effect. OPEC’s Arab members then both cut oil production and simultaneously announced that they would halt all oil exports to those countries that had not supported UN resolution 242, which demanded that Israel be forced to return to its 1967 borders. That meant those countries that were actively supporting Israel, and America in particular. President Richard Nixon, already mired in the Watergate scandal which was to end in his ignominious resignation, retaliated by brazenly proposing a $2.2 billion military aid package for Israel. This unhelpful gesture merely served to harden OPEC’s resolve to impose an oil embargo on America and other prominent friends of Israel, notably the Netherlands, Portugal and South Africa. The rest of the world would have to endure the aftereffects of the draconian rise in oil prices.
In 1973 world economies were enormously dependent on oil and consequently very vulnerable to any sharp rise in the value of this essential commodity. The Japanese were especially reliant on imported oil, with 77 per cent of their energy was created from oil, compared with 46 per cent in the US. Accordingly, in 1974 Japanese GNP fell for the first time since the Second World War. Many Japanese now began to think the unthinkable: that their postwar economic miracle was over. As a result, the government rushed into energy diversification, investigating alternative fuel sources for industry, homes and automobiles. Japan was also the first country to introduce catalytic converters into car engines in order to reduce emissions, leading to a noticeable improvement in air quality (air pollutants dropped by one third in Japan in the decade after 1972). Toyota initially dragged its corporate feet, but the car maker was ultimately forced to apologize to the Japanese parliament for its recalcitrance and was soon joining its competitors in fitting converters to its vehicles.
Across the Pacific, the fundamental tenet of American consumerism, that resources were endless and abundant, was shaken to its core. Alfred Sloan had built GM on the principle of planned obsolescence; now GM’s customers wanted durability and fuel economy, not stylistic or technological novelty. Western pump prices quickly rose by 40 per cent and kept rising – often daily. Service stations across the globe were beset by vast queues of impatient and exasperated drivers. In the US emergency measures, such as a blanket national speed limit of 55 mph and tougher standards for fuel consumption for new cars, (including the compulsory fitting of catalytic converters to reduce toxic emissions) were formalized in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. The act also set quixotic new fuel-efficiency standards, designed to double the fuel efficiency of an average new car from 13 mpg, as it currently stood, to 27.5 mpg. (Even in the mid-1950s the vast, befinned Cadillacs and Lincolns had managed a vaguely respectable 20 mpg.) Yet progress in this direction was still painfully slow.
An uneasy peace came to the Middle East in 1974. But this did not see the end of the crisis; prices may have initially calmed after the panics of 1973–4, but American support for the beleaguered Shah of Iran during the country’s Islamic Revolution of December 1978–January 1979 led to a second oil shock’ in 1979, instigated by the nationalization of Iran’s oil extraction and a consequent steep rise in the price of petrol. Oil prices were increased still further when two of the world’s biggest oil producers, Iran and Iraq, engaged in all-out war in September 1980. The age of cheap gasoline was emphatically over.
With the seemingly unending rises in the cost of fuel during the 1970s, the gas-guzzling behemoths manufactured by American car makers since the Second World War – vehicles previously regarded as the embodiment of automotive ambition – suddenly started to be viewed not as powerful, handsome beasts but as lumbering dinosaurs whose fuel consumption was placing an intolerable burden on the planet. The world now belonged to small mammals such as the Honda Civic, the Renault 5 and the VW Golf, and America’s Big Three were wrong-footed. The introduction of new subcompact models at the beginning of the decade had not, as we have seen, proved a great success, and US producers found themselves making the wrong kinds of cars when consumers were looking for small, frugal models. And as America’s automotive giants stumbled, European and Japanese car makers were happy to fill the gap.
One of the Big Three, indeed, seemed to have reached the end of the road. In 1975 free-market champions Chrysler, unable to compete with the European and Japanese onslaught, let alone the products of Ford and GM, shut five of its six US plants. Chrysler Europe collapsed and its UK factories were sold in 1978 to the protectionist French. When, in November 1978, Lee Iacocca joined Chrysler as president, he found few financial controls and no consistent planning.
Since the late 1950s, Chrysler had expanded globally as well as domestically. But the foreign companies it bought – Simca in France, Rootes in Britain and Barrieros in Spain, together with a bewildering range of components factories from Turkey to Brazil – were all too small or too troubled to enhance Chrysler’s worldwide status. Chrysler president Lynn Townsend, an accountant by training, was suspicious of automotive experts and preferred to promote men like his protégé, former Touche Ross accountant John Riccardo, who ultimately succeeded him as company president. The conglomerate accordingly lacked vision and drive. By the mid-1970s the firm had virtually given up on its European investment; even promising cars like Roy Axe’s classy Sunbeam Rapier were given paltry marketing support and then inexplicably discontinued. In America, Chrysler was faced with an avalanche of complaints about poor build. In 1977 Ralph Nader’s Center for Auto Safety publicly named the Dodge Aspen luxury compact its ‘Lemon of the Year’.
Lacking inspiring new models for the US market, the desperate Chrysler management attempted to foist Mitsubishi Colts and mediocre Hillmans on an unsuspecting American public, rebranding them unconvincingly as Plymouths and Dodges. Chrysler persevered with its dull Plymouth Valiant compact for far too long and did not introduce a post-oil crisis subcompact, the Simca-derived Dodge Omni/Plymouth Horizon, until 1978; even then, the Omni’s engine was borrowed from Volkswagen. Despite initial optimism, Consumer Reports was soon labelling the subcompact ‘unpredictable and dangerous’. Meanwhile, the company discontinued production of its Dodge Charger ‘muscle car’, despite the fact that management was fully aware that the Charger was to be featured prominently (as ‘General Lee’) in an upcoming CBS TV series, The D
ukes of Hazzard. Chrysler thus failed to take advantage of a potentially lucrative TV tie-in. Instead, the series’ producers were forced to raid Chrysler showrooms for hundreds of the last Chargers; by series six of the show they were reduced to using scale models for some shots because all of their original stock of Chargers had been destroyed or damaged during shooting.
In 1975, as Lynn Townsend stepped down from the global presidency, Chrysler’s American market share fell to a dismal 12 per cent and the firm announced a record $259 million loss. Simultaneously, Chrysler Europe announced that it was bankrupt. Chrysler subsequently received over £30 million to bail out its British factories from Harold Wilson’s Labour government, provided that the firm lost eight thousand workers and that production of the new Alpine was moved from France to Ryton in Coventry.1 Chrysler also closed its loss-making Linwood plant in Scotland, where the Hillman Imp was born and died, making thirteen thousand workers redundant and giving the Renfrewshire area one of the UK’s highest unemployment rates.
Three years later Chrysler – to the understandable chagrin of the British government – sold the former Rootes plants it still owned to Peugeot for $1. Peugeot also agreed to shoulder £400 million of accumulated debt, and sold the Barrieros truck and bus operation in Spain to Renault. Chrysler went back to being just another American car maker.
America’s fourth-largest auto manufacturer, AMC, which had only been created twenty years earlier, was also in serious financial trouble by the mid-1970s. Like Chrysler, it also found its ultimate salvation in French ownership. AMC had begun the decade by buying the Jeep marque from Kaiser, a venerable firm that had decided to quit the motor industry. (Jeep was to prove an enduringly successful brand for both AMC and Chrysler.) Yet while AMC’s reaction to the oil crisis, the Pacer subcompact of 1975, may have been radically designed – its massive glasshouse led Car and Driver magazine to dub it ‘the flying fishbowl’, while others likened it to a frog – it was also poorly built, overweight and underpowered. It was a curious response from a car maker that, unlike the Big Three, had long been accustomed to building small autos for the US market and had done well with the Pacer’s predecessor, the Gremlin. It came as no surprise when, in February 1977, Time magazine reported not only that AMC’s stockholders had received no dividends since 1974 but also that Pacer sales had fallen well below expectations.
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