Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  While Wolfsburg was revolutionizing the automobile world in the 1970s, Stuttgart was resting on its laurels. Second-hand Mercedes 200s2 had conquered the global taxi market, while 600s were still popular with film stars and totalitarian rulers alike. But Mercedes had no answer to Jaguar’s excellent XJ6 large executive saloon of 1968, which made Mercedes’ highly confusing model range (still classified by engine size, a byzantine numerical system which Daimler-Benz only dropped in the mid-1990s) seem staid and dull. Even more worryingly, only in 1982 did Mercedes belatedly launch an answer to BMW’s 3 Series – a compact four-door saloon sold under the old 190 label. While undoubtedly a fine car, which sold respectably in Europe, the new 190 reached the market later than its rivals, while its dull styling and average performance failed to ignite the US market. It was withdrawn after only eleven years.

  In sharp contrast, BMW, like Volkswagen, got it absolutely right in the 1970s. BMW had been a minor player in the motor industry until the 1960s, when it was unexpectedly revived by white knight Dr Herbert Quandt, who bought up lots of cheap BMW stock to emerge as the firm’s largest shareholder. Quandt, who had already bought 10 per cent of Daimler-Benz,1 was on the point of agreeing to BMW’s sale to its Stuttgart rival when, noting the strong union opposition to the deal, he changed his mind and, against the advice of his cautious bankers, increased his share in BMW to 50 per cent. Quandt was right and the bankers wrong, and BMW never looked back.

  Herbert Quandt was born in 1910 in Pritzwalk, near Berlin. His ancestors were Dutch rope makers who had diversified into other textiles and relocated to Germany. During the First World War, the family firm supplied the German army with uniforms, amassing a fortune it would use after the war to acquire battery manufacturer Accumulatorenfabrik AG (AFA), a potash mine and various metal fabricators. Young Herbert was nearly blind from the age of nine, and was educated at home – both in academic subjects and, most importantly, in the Quandt business. After extensive training at Quandt companies at home and abroad, he became a member of the executive board of AFA in 1940. He was never tried or questioned after the war (although his father, Günther, was interned until 1948), yet a TV documentary made by the German public broadcaster ARD in October 2007, examining the role of the Quandt businesses before 1945,2 did belatedly prompt a muted apology from what had become a notoriously reclusive family, which now announced that it would fund academic research into AFA’s wartime activities.

  From 1945, Herbert was effectively in charge of AFA, and by the time of Günther’s death in 1954 he had built the Quandt group into a conglomerate of about two hundred businesses. In sharp contrast to the class-ridden attitudes of many British car executives, and the greed and suspicion displayed by many of their American equivalents, Quandt happily involved the workforce in the day-to-day management of his empire, decentralizing the organization, giving his executives considerable autonomy, and allowing all employees to participate in company decisions. BMW’s biographer later attributed to Quandt ‘the gift of always putting the right men in the right place’. Thus, when many other European car makers were paralysed by industrial action during the 1970s, BMW’s apparently contented workforce was building a new generation of executive saloons.

  Quandt astutely avoided the mistakes of his fellow automotive magnates. He ensured that his private life did not become a major corporate issue, as Henry Ford II’s had done. His first two marriages lasted seven and nine years, respectively, and in 1960 he married his personal assistant, Johanna Bruhn. But there he stopped, and BMW was never riven by the dynastic squabbles that characterized Ford’s board in the 1960s and 1970s. Quandt also ensured that the shares in his companies were not thinly spread, avoiding the sort of intra-family disputes that wrecked Henry Ford II’s last years in charge.

  Quandt’s vision for BMW was of a range of solid, dependable family and executive saloons based on traditional German qualities, cars that were engineered to a high standard, were built well, and that boasted the high performance and reliability that had made Mercedes and Auto Union famous before the war. He began with the 1962 launch of the boxy but unapologetically modern ‘new generation’ 1500, the first of what became known as BMW’s New Class (Neue Klasse). A decade later Quandt’s resurgent BMW launched the first model range aimed squarely at the executive market, the 5 Series. Designed by Frenchman Paul Bracq, who had already designed the fabulous, high-speed TGV trains for the SNCF, the 5 Series established the design characteristics that BMW has followed ever since: purposeful, compact lines; a squared body; quadruple headlamps, between which still lay the familiar double-kidney grille;1 and a tidy and understated rear. The equally impressive 3 Series of compact executive cars followed in 1975, after Quandt had completed an impressive new corporate headquarters outside Munich, in the form of Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer’s cloverleaf-shaped FourCylinder Building. The 3 Series became one of the iconic cars of the age. Its trim size appealed to customers dealing with the legacy of the oil crisis and mindful of the need to limit fuel consumption and restrict emissions, while its performance could compete with the best from Jaguar and Mercedes. Its success encouraged BMW to take Mercedes head-on; accordingly, in 1977 it launched the hefty 7 Series as the firm’s full-size executive flagship. The Bavarians had taken on the world – and they appeared to be winning.

  While Quandt successfully restructured BMW into a world-beating concern, governments and manufacturers in Britain and the US were desperately flailing around for solutions in an age of rising oil prices and growing environmental concerns, losing vast sums of taxpayers’ money in pursuit of the golden fleece of automotive success. Perhaps the most notorious and colourful of these car-making disasters revolved around the controversial figure of Lee Iacocca’s former protégé John DeLorean.

  John Zachary DeLorean had risen meteorically through the ranks of GM. In 1965, when he was promoted to the post of general manager at Pontiac, he became the youngest-ever vice president at the company, aged only forty. By then, though, GM was losing its way. Frederic G. Donner, chairman of the giant conglomerate from 1958 to 1967, was not a car man and preferred to promote solid, cautious financial heads rather than individuals with engineering or marketing expertise. After 1967 the GM chairmanship passed to two of Donner’s financial protégés: James M. Roche (1967–71) and Richard C. Gerstenberg (1971–4). Numbers was the only game in town, creating an environment in which maverick creatives such as DeLorean were looked upon with benevolent, if mystified, indulgence.

  By 1974 DeLorean was already showing signs of megalomania. The hard-working young executive had turned into a corporate glutton, devouring all possible perks and options. Scores of cars were given away free to friends and associates (a practice that only came to light after DeLorean’s departure). Never a comfortable socializer, DeLorean scandalized audiences with his unfunny, off-colour jokes and inveterate name-dropping. His management style was chaotic; he centralized all responsibility within a tight-knit coterie whose principal qualifications were an avid enthusiasm for racing cars and bedding women, rather than any noted ability at making autos. DeLorean coloured his hair, lost weight and hired a plastic surgeon to elongate his chin. He bought stakes in the New York Yankees baseball team and the San Diego Chargers football club, and spent much of his time lavishly entertaining his friends at games. He also changed his wife for a younger model, the gorgeous Kelly Harmon – a marriage that appalled Harmon’s conservative relatives. To the media, though, he still appeared the incarnation of the bright, youthful future of the car industry, a refreshingly sharp contrast to grey old men like James Roche or Henry Ford II. Unfortunately, DeLorean came to believe the hype.

  DeLorean’s father-figure and original patron, Semon ‘Bunkie’ Knudsen, had expected to go all the way to the top at GM – and DeLorean had expected to follow him up the ladder. But in 1968 Knudsen found himself elbowed out, and a week later he joined Ford as its new president. Delorean’s sure touch suddenly appeared to be fallible. Promoted to Chevrolet, and tout
ed as a future company president, he announced that Chevrolet’s headquarters would be relocating to suburban Detroit from its current downtown site – only to have his message flatly repudiated by GM’s exasperated public relations staff a few hours later. DeLorean also found that his neglect of administration was beginning to erode his mystique. In 1970 he publicly had to cancel the relaunch of the Camaro and Corvette, having ordered too many lastminute design changes. He also began spending much of his time in California rather than Detroit, and diverting funds to pet projects – or simply to his own bank accounts. (Investigative journalists Ivan Fallon and James Srodes estimate that, during his years at the helm of the DeLorean Motor Company, John DeLorean siphoned off $17.8 million of taxpayers’ and investors’ money for his own private use, and a further £7 million for business, art and property investments.) Meanwhile, he kept the gossip columnists busy by trading in his young wife Kelly for movie starlet Cristina Ferrare.

  The great white hope of the car industry seemed to be self-destructing. When, in 1973, senior GM executives saw a draft speech by DeLorean alleging that the company was deliberately selling mediocre models and possessed little design talent, and learned that he was responsible for a number of embarrassing leaks to the media, their patience with the maverick engineer finally ran out. On 18 April GM announced that DeLorean was leaving the company to ‘pursue his dream’. ‘I want to do things in the social area,’ he told reporters, unconvincingly.

  DeLorean’s self-belief carried him serenely through the next nine turbulent years. He set up his own company to build an ‘ethical’ sports car, and hired world-renowned designer Giorgetto Giugiaro to shape it. By February 1975 Giugiaro had produced the wedge-shaped body that was to characterize the production model. It was three years, however, before DeLorean was able to persuade the British government to part with £55 million to produce his cars at Dunmurry, in strife-torn Northern Ireland. Unemployment was high in the province and DeLorean’s factory would, the government hoped, provide badly needed new jobs. Unfortunately, none of the Dunmurry workers had any previous experience in car manufacture, let alone in the assembly of an incredibly complex, high-performance sports car like the gull-winged DMC-12. The launch date kept being put back, while DeLorean threatened the British government that he would pull out of Dunmurry if there were no additional investment. As a result, the new British premier, Margaret Thatcher, gave DeLorean another £30 million.

  The DMC-12 finally appeared in April 1981. The car, though, was a disaster. Appallingly built and far too heavy, it was certainly not the supercar that had been promised. The windows leaked and often fell out of their tracks. The cumbersome gull-winged doors frequently jammed. (A man who climbed into a DMC-12 at a Cleveland museum found he couldn’t open the doors again and was only extricated by mechanics many hours later.) The underpowered batteries failed, and the unpainted steel body was far from ‘stainless’. Those few customers who did buy examples quickly demanded refunds. The DMC-12 owned by TV chat-show host Johnny Carson (an investor in DeLorean’s enterprise) broke down after only a few miles on the road; when a replacement distributor was rushed out to the stranded Carson, that failed, too. On top of all this, in November 1981 DeLorean was forced to recall all 2,200 DMC-12s to rebuild the front suspension.

  Despite DeLorean’s crude attempts at blackmail, such as ham-fistedly attempting to enlist the support of the IRA and insisting that the British government owed him millions in unpaid subsidies, Thatcher’s administration finally decided enough was enough and refused to proffer him any more money. His company was put into the hands of administrators, who soon discovered that a sizeable chunk of the government’s investment had found its way into DeLorean’s private bank accounts in Switzerland and Panama.1 The Dunmurry workforce of 2,400, who had entertained such high hopes of long-term employment, were laid off, and DeLorean was arrested on charges of drug-trafficking (which he ducked by using a defence of entrapment).

  The DMC-12 did enjoy a brief moment in the sun. The unlikely star of Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future trilogy of 1985–90 thankfully did not have to rely on its atrocious visibility and abysmal reliability in order to travel the few hundred yards required for filming. Thanks to the popularity of Spielberg’s engaging franchise, today the DMC-12 is remembered not as the failed centrepiece of a fraudulent industrial scam but as a central character in one of cinema’s most enduringly successful film series. Thus one of the biggest disasters in automotive history passed from tragedy, to farce, to movie stardom. Few of its failed successors were given a similar reprieve.

  1 In truth, the Ryton factory just assembled French-made kits, while the Alpine itself was merely a rebadging of a model from Chrysler’s Simca subsidiary – the successful but mundane Simca 1307, a large, lumpish, four-door hatchback which bore no relation whatsoever to the illustrious Alpine sports cars of the 1960s.

  1 The NEB was designed to be a ‘catalyst for British industry’ and eventually acquired stakes in up to seventy British companies.

  1 This strategy would be mimicked by Iacocca in 1984.

  1 At the time of writing, the MG name is the only element to have resurfaced from the wreck of British Leyland.

  1 In 1968 Ford replaced the old Anglia with the Anglo-German Escort; touted as ‘the small car that isn’t’, it was built in both Britain and Germany, and sold well across Europe for thirty-five years.

  1 The Mustang was adapted (and made 19 inches shorter) for the British and German markets as the Capri in 1969. The lean, taut styling of the Capri’s Mark II version of 1974–8 echoed Iacocca’s Mustang Mark I, and the car was available with engines up to 3.3 litres. Britain’s strike-prone factories, however, encouraged Ford to pull production out of Halewood in 1976 and concentrate production of the Capri in Köln.

  1 In 1976 Renault added a powerful Alpine version – sold in Britain as the Gordini, since Chrysler still owned the rights to Sunbeam’s old Alpine name.

  2 Further north, though, strike-prone British Leyland could only manage four.

  1 Umberto was to have his revenge, albeit over twenty years later. On Gianni Agnelli’s retirement in 1996, Romiti’s power base evaporated, and in 2002 Umberto was elected chairman of Fiat. Sadly, he was able to enjoy his success for only two years before his death from lung cancer in 2004.

  1 In 2009 Fiat even made a bid for GM’s Opel division.

  2 Early Golfs were also, it has to be said, spartan and uncomfortable; however, customers were less interested in luxury and more sensitive about performance and economy in the years after the oil crisis.

  3 Developed from the short-lived Audi 50.

  1 Unsurprisingly, ItalDesign’s peripheral involvement in the forlorn attempt to update the Morris Marina, the Ital of 1980, to which British Leyland was desperate lend Italian chic, does not appear on Giugiaro’s CV.

  2 In 1993 the 200 series became the E-Class.

  1 A stake astutely sold in 1974 to the oil-rich Kuwaiti government.

  2 The documentary uncovered evidence showing that female slave labourers, transferred from Auschwitz, had been used at many of the Quandt factories during the Second World War, and that conditions at some of the Quandt plants were brutally harsh.

  1 Introduced on the BMW 303 of 1933.

  1 Not all the losses were the British government’s; private investors who had counted themselves among DeLorean’s intimate friends lost heavily, too. Celebrity singer Sammy Davis junior invested $150,000, as did Johnny Carson; both lost their entire stake, while the Texan oil tycoon Gary Laughlin lost $500,000.

  13

  Eastern Promise

  Few visiting Japan in 1960 would have guessed that the nation’s leading car makers would, in as little as twenty years, be challenging the world’s established automotive giants, and that in thirty years they would have conquered almost every global market. The Japanese had, after all, never seemed that interested in cars. The first automobile had only been imported into Japan (from France) in 1904; seven year
s later there were just eighty-two cars in Tokyo – alongside 22,403 rickshaws, 12,547 bicycles and 156 horse-drawn carriages.

  It was not until the postwar American occupation of 1945–52 that the Japanese seemed to take the motor car seriously. Even then, Japan spent most of the postwar era building poor-quality copies of Austins, Hillmans and Renaults. (Between 1953 and 1959 Nissan produced 20,855 Austins, and it continued to use Austin and Rootes models as the basis of its own range well into the 1960s.) In 1956 the Japanese auto industry produced a mere thirty-two thousand cars, mostly pallid parodies of European originals – many of which were no great shakes themselves. Grandly named products such as the Prince Skyline Deluxe and the Toyopet Crown Deluxe were, in the words of auto historian Jonathan Mantle, ‘a perplexing amalgam of the worst in Western styling, in a size the Japanese government allowed’. In 1952 Nissan’s Datsun brand began assembling the British Austin A40 Somerset, a lacklustre, ‘Transatlantic’-styled model, powered by a feeble pre-war engine; while the 1957 Isuzu Minx was even heavier and slower than Rootes’ bland original. In 1960 Nissan began production of its own, even heavier version of Austin’s oversized and underpowered A60 Cambridge, improbably called the Cedric. The model lingered on until the early 1970s, but the Cedric brand, presumably intended as a backhanded tribute to British tradition, is still – incredibly – in use today. (Mitsubishi’s rival to the Cedric, incidentally, rejoiced in the name of the Debonair Exceed.)