Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Occasionally the embers of Rover’s funeral pyre stirred. In 2008 a man called William Riley, who claimed descent from the Riley motor dynasty (a claim that was challenged in the Financial Times in January 2010), announced that he would be making MG XPowers in Worcestershire. Before full-scale production could be started, Riley was arrested for theft, sued by two ex-employees for non-payment of wages, and, in February 2010, legally prevented by Nanjing from using the MG name.

  Meanwhile, in August 2008, SAIC, which had bought up Nanjing Automobile and restarted production of the MG TF, hired back two hundred and fifty workers to begin assembling TFs at the Longbridge plant – where they were to be made, mortifyingly, from Chinese kits. After a mere 550 TFs had been assembled, the recession intervened, and the experiment was terminated in October 2009. SAIC then unveiled an entirely new MG, made in China but assembled back at Longbridge and sold through a growing network of UK dealers. Yet neither the four-door MG6 nor its subsequent, twodoor sibling, the MG3 (known in China as the Roewe 150), looked anything like their sporty MG ancestors. Dull and anodyne externally, and cheaply appointed internally, neither seemed likely to make much of a dent in the crowded European marketplace. To its credit, SAIC persisted with the concept, and in 2011 launched a hatchback version, the MG6 GT, and a sportier saloon which exhumed the old MG name Magnette, last used in 1968. What had started as an attempt to conquer the European market had ended as a tawdry exercise in grave-robbing.

  In September 2009 the British government’s investigation into the collapse of MG Rover was finally published. The report sharply criticized the Phoenix Four, charging that they had taken £42 million in pay and pensions from the troubled firm as it collapsed, that Nick Stephenson had paid a friend more than £1.6 million to act as a consultant in 2005–6, that ‘evidence eliminator’ software installed by Peter Beale had deleted documents that would have provided useful evidence to the investigation, and that all four partners had been ‘untruthful’ to the report’s authors. The opposition’s veteran business spokesman, Kenneth Clarke, called the Phoenix Four’s behaviour ‘disgraceful’, while business secretary Lord Mandelson denounced them for failing to show even an ‘ounce of humility’ regarding the firm’s demise and the massive job losses that had ensued. Thanks to Beale’s software, the Serious Fraud Office declined to investigate further, but Mandelson instructed lawyers to prepare a case to disqualify the Phoenix Four from future company directorships.

  With the collapse of MG Rover, Britain, once the pioneer of vehicle mass manufacture in Europe, no longer boasted a British-owned mass-market car maker. In the same year as the production of Rovers at Longbridge ceased, Jaguar shut its Browns Lane plant in Coventry and sold its Formula 1 racing team. A year later, Peugeot finally closed its Ryton and Stoke factories, having moved all car production to Poland, Spain and France. Even before the onset of recession in 2008, Coventry’s unemployment rate was vastly in excess of the rest of the UK.

  Even the Americans were leaving. Ford had closed its Langley factory in 1997 and its vast Dagenham plant in 2002, while Vauxhall ended car production at Luton in 2002 and cut the workforce at Ellesmere Port. (The British operation only just managed to survive the near-death experience of its parent, General Motors, in 2009.) By 2010 Vauxhall and Ford’s British operations had both been reduced by their American masters to become mere assemblers of parts for cars designed and made in continental Europe.

  Large car factories did survive in Britain – but they were all owned by the Japanese or Germans: Nissan in Sunderland, Toyota in Derby, Honda in Swindon and BMW’s Mini plant in Oxford. The success of the Japanese seemed to disprove the charge that British workers were not suited to the rigours of large-scale mass production. Nissan’s Sunderland plant boasted that it had not lost a minute of production to industrial disputes since it opened in 1985. By 2000 it was making the Micra, Primera and Almera; and by 2006 it had, analysts agreed, become the most efficient car plant in Europe – being awarded Nissan’s new Qashqai SUV as a reward for this good behaviour. In 2010 the Sunderland factory, now the jewel in Nissan’s global crown, was also selected to produce the Qashqai’s smaller sibling, the frog-like crossover Juke; and in 2013 it became the European manufacturing centre for the all-electric Leaf and the Leaf’s bespoke lithium batteries.

  Under Indian ownership, the prospects for Jaguar Land Rover (as the combine was now called) improved considerably. Jaguar, in particular, shook off its Ford legacy like a dog emerging from a pond. When Ford bought Jaguar, it had used the chassis of the ubiquitous and highly successful Mondeo as the basis for a new ‘baby Jag’, the X-Type. While in many ways this was a very successful car, which garnered numerous awards, it could never shake off the Ford aura and the widespread belief that the X-Type was actually a descendant of the Cortina rather than of the E-Type. In 2008 it was declared that production of the X-Type and the S-Type, both of which had been derived from Ford platforms (from the Mondeo and the Lincoln LS, respectively), would end in 2008–9. In 2009 Jaguar launched its new executive car, the XF, which won plaudits and honours across the globe; and in 2010 it added both the XKR high-performance sports car and the top of the range XJ. The latter, designed as the heir to the classic XJs of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, was styled by Jaguar’s Ian Callum in a manner that looked more to its contemporary competitors than to its illustrious predecessors. Gone was the traditional veneered dashboard, the XJ6’s flat, horizontal emphasis, the slender nineties grille and the conventional, clustered rear lights; in their place came a shiny new dash with LCD displays, a swoopingly curved roof, a tapering body, a larger, squarer grille (actually borrowed from the original XJ6 of 1968), and swooping, boot-hugging ‘cat’s claws’ tail lights. By the beginning of 2010 Jaguar was back in the black, the wisdom of developing its own models seemingly vindicated. Underlining this success, on 11 May 2010 British prime minister David Cameron took delivery of a long-wheelbase armoured XJ as the nation’s official state car. Two years later, Jaguar announced it was building a factory in China.

  Jaguar’s German rival Mercedes had, like BMW and Volkswagen, steered a crafty course through the minefields of the late twentieth century. Mercedes limousines, like the larger BMWs, remained lighter, faster, safer and far more economical than their US counterparts from Cadillac and Lincoln. The build of Mercedes cars was exemplary and far outclassed products from America, Britain or France. Equally importantly, a Mercedes continued to look like a Mercedes, and nothing else. Mercedes, BMW and Porsche adhered firmly to the hereditary principle, evolving their new models organically rather than reinventing their brands every few years.

  As we have seen, in the early 1990s Mercedes resolved to shake off its staid, traditional image by relaunching and relabelling its various model ranges. Daimler-Benz simultaneously launched a series of spectacular sports cars – led by the coupé/convertible CLK and the smaller Roadster of 1996 – and began to expand into markets it had previously scorned. Thus in 1997 the firm unveiled its first mini MPV, the A-Class, and in 1998 introduced its first midsize SUV, the M-Class. (There was much Schadenfreude when a prototype of Mercedes A-class tipped over during an ‘elk’ evasion test staged by the Swedish motoring magazine Teknikens Värld in 1997. However, this well-publicized episode did not appear to dent subsequent sales of the new model.) In 2005 the A-Class in turn spawned a B-Class of more conventional, four-door compact sports tourers, aimed particularly at the young and at women. And in 2006 came Mercedes’ first full-size MPV, the R-Class.

  Mercedes, however, made the same fundamental mistake as its Bavarian rival. Four years after BMW had bought the stumbling Rover Group, Stuttgart emulated Munich by purchasing the ailing American giant Chrysler. What was initially billed as a merger was very evidently little more than a takeover, planned by Daimler-Benz’s ambitious, ruthless CEO, Jürgen Schrempp. In 1992, when Schremp was head of Daimler-Benz’s aerospace division, he had persuaded his fellow directors to buy the famous Dutch aircraft firm of Fokker – only to dump it in 199
6 when bankruptcy seemed imminent for the Dutch company. Now the assertive and aggressive Schrempp sought to get it absolutely right. Most senior American executives at Chrysler – even the everlasting survivor, Bob Lutz – were fired or retired; Germans were swiftly installed in all of the key posts at DaimlerChrysler, as the conglomerate was now known; and twenty-six thousand American job losses were announced.

  Schrempp’s newly installed president of DaimlerChrysler, Dieter Zetsche, was an oldfashioned automobile man. Having studied electrical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, he had joined Daimler-Benz in 1976 and gradually worked his way up the firm. A solid and dependable figure, his trademark large grey moustache inspired the firm’s advertising agencies to use his face, Iacocca-style, to advertise Mercedes in both Germany and the US. (Sadly, the campaign backfired in America, where many viewers had trouble deciphering Zetsche’s heavy German accent.) But even with Zetsche on board, the acquisition of a firm the prosperity of which had, since Walther Chrysler’s death, ebbed and flowed like the tide, was still fraught with risk. The staid, influential German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, labelled Daimler-Benz’s acquisition ‘an adventure with an uncertain outcome’. Chrysler appeared to be far too big – and, in the US, had far too high an employment profile – to be hastily unloaded at the first sign of trouble, as Fokker had been.

  Initially the auguries appeared to be propitious – as, indeed, they had originally been with BMW’s purchase of Rover. Chrysler added the German-built Crossfire to its line-up, and made encouraging noises about future investment. But soon the Germans realized that financing Chrysler’s return to health would be too much even for their deep pockets. Zetsche axed the historic Plymouth marque and began cutting production in the US. Soon most senior managers at Daimler-Benz realized that Schrempp had, once again, made a serious error of judgement. And, while he had successfully evaded blame for the Fokker debacle, this time he was unable to avoid the inevitable fallout. On 1 January 2006 Zetsche replaced Schrempp as CEO of Daimler-Benz, and in May 2007 DaimlerChrysler announced the sale of Chrysler to private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.1 What was left of the former American colossus collapsed in April 2009 as Cerberus itself declared bankruptcy, forcing the US government to bail out the insolvent car maker with $6.6 billion of taxpayers’ money. Federal negotiators subsequently sold Chrysler to Fiat, which was allowed to buy a 25 per cent stake in the new, slimmed-down company when it emerged from the legal protection of chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2010. When the government’s loans were paid off, in June 2011, Fiat was then able to buy a controlling stake of 53 per cent. Fiat installed Olivier Francois, Lancia’s CEO, as the new Chrysler boss. Francois rid the firm of most of its centrally owned dealerships and concentrated on just five areas of operation: Chrysler-badged cars and minivans, a brand that Fiat aimed to take upmarket (and now advertised, somewhat ironically, as ‘Imported from Detroit’); Dodge cars; Ram trucks (a division spun off in 2009 from the successful Dodge Ram light truck); Jeep; and Global Electric hybrid and electric projects. Fiat had originally intended to co-develop future Chrysler models alongside its planned Lancias; by 2011, however, Fiat appeared to have given up on the historic Lancia marque, and new Lancias, such as the impressive Delta of 2011, were hastily rebadged as Chryslers.

  Meanwhile, Mercedes itself enlarged its US operation by building a plant at Vance, outside Birmingham, Alabama, an area of the country by then known to motor journalists as ‘Detroit South’. Birmingham, formerly notorious as the capital of segregation and the epicentre of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, was on its knees by the 1970s as the steel industry that had created the state’s largest conurbation contracted and collapsed. By 2010, though, Birmingham had become home to a growing number of motor businesses: not just Mercedes, but also Honda (whose Lincoln, Alabama, plant was built only twenty miles from downtown Birmingham), Toyota (which based an engine plant in Huntsville, Alabama), and Hyundai (which built its principal American plant outside Alabama’s state capital, Montgomery).1 Alabama had pressed hard for these plants – and particularly for the Mercedes contract – in the face of stiff competition from thirty other, mainly Southern and Midwestern, states. The state’s governor, Jim Folsom, had personally led the campaign to entice the Germans. In return for Mercedes’ $300 million investment, Alabama pledged $253 million in tax breaks and subsidies, and agreed to buy 2,500 Mercedes vehicles for state agencies. It was highly generous, but other states were offering just as much, if not more. Folsom’s victory helped to pull Alabama out of its economic torpor and back into the front rank for the first time in over fifty years.

  A new American influence also began to be discernible back in Germany. For almost two decades, Chris Bangle, BMW’s eccentric, Ohio-born head of design, had shaped BMW’s distinctive cars. Bangle was the product of an odd assortment of influences: having considered becoming a Methodist minister, he instead studied fine art at Center College in Pasadena, California, and then earned a master’s degree in industrial design at the University of Wisconsin. Moving to Europe, he worked first at Opel and then at Fiat, where he married a Swiss woman. Then, in 1992, he was appointed as the Munich car maker’s first American chief of design – the first American head stylist of any German auto manufacturer. Bangle’s design ethos soon spread across the whole BMW range; his philosophy was evident not just in the existing 3, 5 and 7 Series but also in the compact 1 Series of 2004, the new X5, X3 and X6 (the latter a midsize luxury crossover of 2008) and, most famously, the ‘Boy’s Own’ Z4 sports car of 2002. He was able to exploit BMW’s new metal-pressing technology, which was able to create complex, compound curves in one action rather than by multiple pressings, to create a convoluted and at times bewildering interplay of creases and curves reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s architectural designs (which Bangle readily acknowledged as a key inspiration for his work). But Bangle’s swooping styling did not please everyone. Potential customers occasionally baulked at cars they considered to be over-designed, while Bangle’s fellow automotive designers criticized his cars as ‘origami’. Ford’s Martin Smith derided the ‘surface entertainment’ of Bangle’s BMWs, while Time magazine dubbed the new 7 Series of 2002 one of the fifty ‘Worst Cars of All Time’. However, during Bangle’s time at BMW, the Bavarian car maker overtook its Württemberger rivals, Daimler-Benz, to become the world’s biggest seller of premium cars. In 2009 Bangle, tired of the constant disparagement, left BMW to set up his own design consultancy.

  At the close of the century, Volkswagen was pursuing a corporate strategy that was almost as expansive as those adopted by BMW and Mercedes. Back in 1982, the Spanish state-owned car maker Seat (Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo) had agreed to act as VW’s agent in Spain. Four years later Seat was bought outright by Wolfsburg and its model range, while still retaining its autonomous identity, was adapted and revamped on the basis of VW platforms and, where appropriate, VW parts. In 1990 Volkswagen followed this purchase with an even more daring coup, buying the newly liberated Czech Republic’s flagship car maker, Škoda.

  When car production restarted again at Škoda after the war, only small numbers of pre-war Populars were made. Gradually the Russians allowed Škoda to increase car production and, from 1959, to return to the use of names, rather than numbers, to delineate its models. Yet there was little that was original or inspiring about these Škoda cars. The series of Octavia saloons of the 1960s were simply plainer versions of the Volvos and Standard Vanguards of the previous decade, while the Škoda 100/110 range of 1966 was a duller, four-door version of the Renault Dauphine. Škoda soon fell well behind its Western competitors in terms of innovation and quality; styling became unimaginative and boxy, and only the Rapid sporty saloon (tagged by some as ‘the poor man’s Porsche’) found many admirers in Western Europe. Škoda cars, along with the Soviet-built Ladas and East Germany’s smoke-spewing Wartburgs and Trabants, had become the laughing stock of Europe.

  The Velvet Revolution of 1989 bro
ught about the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, liberating the Czechs twenty-one years after the false dawn of the Prague Spring. But it also left Škoda, previously protected from the ravages of free-market capitalism and international competition, dangerously exposed to imports of far superior cars from Volkswagen, Fiat, Renault and Peugeot. Škoda, like its Eastern Bloc equivalents, was soon on the verge of bankruptcy. The new Czech government accordingly made the revitalization of the fortunes of the nation’s principal auto manufacturer one of its top priorities. In 1990 the government invited Volkswagen – which had previously won a beauty contest in competition with Renault – to take a controlling stake in Škoda, and by 2000 the Prague car maker was wholly owned by VAG. Nevertheless, Volkswagen took care to preserve Škoda’s autonomy, exactly as it had done with Spain’s Seat, merely ensuring that all new Škoda models used standard VW floor plans and were, in the best Volkswagen tradition, well built and well equipped. Soon Škoda cars boasted far more kit, and more room, than their VW equivalents.

  Volkswagen also invested much time, effort and money in giving back the Škoda marque some of the style and panache it had lost in 1939. VW assigned its star designer, the Belgian stylist Dirk van Braeckl,1 to design the handsome new Octavia saloon for Škoda. The results were stunningly successful; the Octavia helped Škoda shed its image as a maker of plain, oldfashioned bathtubs, and made Škoda cars desirable again. In Britain, Škoda’s advertising agency employed a high-risk marketing strategy, acknowledging the car maker’s recent abysmal reputation by using the strapline ‘It’s a Škoda, honest’. But the risk paid off: by 2005 the waiting lists for Škoda cars in the UK were full.