If you ever wondered why British cars were the best selling imports in the US in the early 50s and then quickly fell from grace, this film will explain it. Let’s just say that Americans expected the engines in their cars not to self destruct in 20,ooo miles of highway driving. And here’s proof that at least some of the time, they actually didn’t.
A handful of BMC cars were sent to Germany for daily drives on the autobahn at speeds averaging just over 60mph to test the latest versions of their 900 and 1050cc engines. It was expected that there would a major mechanical failure (big end bearing or such) before the end of the test at 20,000 miles, but the improved engines not only survived, but went on to run an additional 5,000 miles, for a total of 25,000 miles at normal highway speeds, without one of them blowing up! Cheers!
Needless to say, the ones in the hand sof Americans probably weren’t as thoroughly serviced as these, and commonly didn’t make it to that distance. It explains why VW suddenly overtook Austin and became the best selling import. A VW would typically run 100k miles, including endless full-throttle highway speeds, as I can personally attest to in several cases.
My love affair with LBCs is yin and yang. A little suffering just makes you appreciate the good times a little more.
The pre-production new for 1955 Packard V-8 ran 25000 miles at an average speed of 104mph and was still like new condition. Hmm
So they were on the Autobahn (but not going *that* fast), in temperate Germany. That’s cute. They should’ve been hammering them from LA to Vegas and back all summer long before shipping them up to the Arctic Circle for the winter.
…and without changing the oil, or even adding any until the little red light went on!
Who does not change the oil or check it on a regular basis, it makes no sense. Old oils did not last that long, why deliberately destroy an engine, surely people are not that stupid or lazy?
Who doesn’t check the oil? Average American drivers, most of whom don’t give a damn about their car as long as it starts every day and gets them where they need to go.
Well yeah, they weren’t building cars for the US or Norway or Australia, they were building them for Britain which is why they failed as exports. It was still a relatively tough test compared to British driving.
Whether they really thought 25,000 was impressive is anyone’s guess. Presumably BMC were always going to present whatever distance they managed as exciting, and like politicians quoting tax and spending figures, it’s meaningless number to the public.
Yes but faster than a VW could manage.
I don’t think they could afford to do that amount of testing. Consider that in 1955 there were 7.1 million cars sold in the US with the manufacturers having basically one model each. I’m not counting wheelbase variations because UK models often had those too. The UK market was about 1 million cars, the Morris Minor was the best seller but didn’t crack 100,000 sales from what I can tell. Austin had 3 separate cars on sale (not including sports cars), as did Ford.
On the other hand, they couldn’t really afford not to!
Minor was the first UK car to sell 1 million cars celebrated by the Minor 1,000,000 model.
…at a point when VW was celebrating their ten millionth Beetle and expanding towards a million *a year*.
I was referring to a single year, it took what, 12 years for the Minor to reach the million?
At about 6:55, the column shift is vibrating like crazy. I’ve seen floor shifts do that in old cars at low idle, but never a column shift. The motor mounts must have been loose.
On the other hand, Cars Such As These were made for a long time in India and Persia, and survived well after being toughened up for local conditions.
” the column shift is vibrating like crazy… The motor mounts must have been loose.”
Since the movement is so irregular, I doubt it’s related to rotational vibration such as the engine or driveshaft. The lever seems to bounce up and down in concert with road bumps, so I’d guess the shift linkage bushings have excessive clearance or “slop.”
Google BMC hot weather testing in the 50s they thrashed their cars on African roads in the heat regular airborne jumps etc they were designed for the poor roads of the colonies, their six cylinder cars were better than these economy models though.
Polistra – my first thought on seeing the Morris Oxford and hearing mention of the 1489cc engine was “Calcutta taxi drivers’ favorite”. Then again, they probably didn’t have many options and frequent engine rebuilds wouldn’t have been such a big deal.
Fascinating. I love films such as these for the snap shot in time and the different expectations.
It was also interesting to see the Corvette at around 8:10 and the Mercury at 8:30.
In 1964, Mercury made a big deal of running Comets at Daytona at 100 mph for 100,000 miles.
That’s 40 days of driving non-stop. I bet they drank a lot of coffee
One thing to remember is that those old British cars were low-geared and designed to ramble from one English village to another. The poor little Morris Minor’s engine was chewing its innards out spinning at 4,000 rpm @ 60 mph in top gear.
The date and the mode of testing, on German Autobahns, is significant as the cars shown all had the enlarged engines that would be in their replacement (updated rather than all-new) models that would be the cars on sale when the first of the new Motorways opened (1958). While there were ‘A’ roads with dual carriageways or of the 3-lane ‘overtaking/suicuide’ pattern most main roads were just 2 lanes, one each direction, and would pass through many towns and villages on the way so the opportunities for sustained high-speed running over any distance in their home market was limited. In retrospect they should really have been designing them for such sustained running at least a decade earlier of they wanted to successful in the US market.
Significantly the Nash Metropolitan, despite being about the same size as a Morris Minor, never had less than a 1.2 litre engine, enlarged to 1.5 litres after just two years.
I was giggling like crazy throughout the whole film, because this wasn’t just the British automobile industry, but the motorcycles, too. To wit:
Back when I lived in Western Pennsylvania, if you wanted a Triumph, you hit the Triumph dealer in Johnstown, PA (originally Indian, then Indian/Triumph, then Triumph/Royal Enfield, thenTriumph/Kawasaki, finally Kawasaki/Yamaha before the owner retired and sold the franchises off). If you wanted a BSA, you had to go twenty miles north to the county seat of Ebensburg. If you wanted a Norton, etc., you drove 75 miles west to Pittsburgh.
Now, in 1962 both BSA and Triumph did what would be the final updating of their engines in their motorcycles, going from the ‘pre unit’ (separate bolt-on transmission) to ‘unit’ (engine bottom end and transmission in the same case) design. For some reason, while the Triumph used two main bearings at the end of the crankshaft, BSA used one (yes, one!) main bearing, and a locator bushing at the other end of the crank. Needless to say, in the remaining ten year history of BSA/Triumph, Triumph engines had a much better reputation for longevity and reliability.
I’d always known this. Go to the mid 1990’s, and both motorcycle shops are still in business. The Triumph shop was now Kawasaki/Yamaha. The BSA shop was a restoration shop for vintage BSA’s with a very good reputation. I dropped by one day, and in the course of conversation mentioned the long-term reputation for BSA’s being rather lousy.
The old guy (he was somewhere in his 70’s, and not early 70’s) immediately got pissed off at my having the temerity to say this and in the course of his yelling at me, mentioned that they had “no problem getting 6000 miles out of a BSA bottom end”.
At which point I shot back, “Given the way I was riding in the 70’s, this would mean that every fall I’d have to plan on dropping my bike off so you could pull the engine, split the cases, and completely rebuild the bottom end, so I could have it for the following spring. And you wonder why the Japanese put you out of business?”
At that point, he threw me out of the shop.
I was amused that the film showed them passing Volkswagen Type 1’s every chance it could get. Never mind that the Type 1 was the only small foreign car in the late 1950’s that could get on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at Philadelphia and drive to Pittsburgh at whatever the speed limit at the time (either 60 or 65, I think) – and then get back on the road and do it again the next day, followed by a couple of year’s of competent service.
Sheesh, I would have had the engine rebuilt 3 times in my first year of riding, good thing I had a 450 NightHawk 🙂
I too noticed them passing VWs, I’d imagine those beetles were in service long after the LBC’s
A friend of mine just returned from a motorcycle trip in Canada’s far north. He rode 14,000 km on a Kawasaki KLR650, most of it on gravel.
The bike ran perfectly and he didn’t even change the oil.
The really silly part of all that was Triumph was owned by BSA.
Happened shortly after WWII (don’t remember the exact date). And all thru the Fifties and Sixties management favored BSA over Triumph, yet in the US Triumph’s sales were greater, and it was usually known to all but the most rabid fans that Triumph built the best engines (Triton anybody?).
Yet when the collapse came in 1972, it was Triumph that survived, such was its reputation both in the US and UK. And BSA became synonymous with failing thru stupid decisions, even more than British Leyland or General Motors thirty years later. They could have done worse if Sochiro Honda had picked their board of directors personally.
So, the engine made it to 25,000, but that doesn’t address many other factors, such as the performance of the ancillaries, resistance to dust and moisture, comfort, medium term corrosion resistance, crooked driving position (take a look at the Oxford’s driver).
But good to see that the chaps dressed properly with sports coats and ties for this test…..and the symbolic “overtake a Beetle” moment
Interesting! What was the average lifespan in miles of an American car in the mid 50’s if corrosion was not a factor? 50K, 75K, 100K?
Did folks actually drive that much less back then? Even in the 70s/early 80s when I was growing up flying was the domain of the upper middle class and above so regular folks didn’t fly much if ever so driving long distances was probably more common back then if I had to guess.
To drive my car from Vancouver to Toronto return would cost about $1500 for fuel alone, plus hotel and meals. This doesn’t even factor in the wear and tear on the car.
I can fly in five hours for $500.
In general, the conventional wisdom was that you wanted to be rid of a car before 50,000 miles.
Basically back then you started major parts replacement at 50,000 miles, and if the car had turned over the odometer to straight zeros (there were no six figure odometers then) it had probably been complete rebuilt.
Used cars usually had a major value drop as they approached 50,000 miles.
I’m sure British people drove less, those who drove a lot had a company car and weren’t paying for engine rebuilds. People who owned a car were “motorists”. They had driving gloves and spent lots of time at the weekend adjusting and greasing things. My great uncle had an inspection pit, not because he did “projects” but just because he liked to take care of his car. He did lots of “tinkering” until the end, which was probably unnecessary as his last car was a 1986 Nissan Bluebird.
My 1920s born grandparents’ generation (those who had cars, because most didn’t) would say things like “Oh, we should give the car a run”, because the car spent most of its time in the garage with a fresh coat of wax.
One of my great uncles was a doctor in the 50s so he had a car for house calls but didn’t use it so much other than that. He was notorious for absent mindedly walking to the next house then coming out and wondering where the car was.
I had a Python moment, imagining the testers being wary of German industrial spies out to steal advanced British technology. “Johann, please find out about zose overhead valves.”
LOL!
My late father would like a word with those blokes.
How did they get their Oxford to sit on 80mph? His laboured to reach 60. How did they do 25000 miles at any speed without cracking the manifold on their Oxford like his did after two weeks? Why were no spares available – in Australia, for cryin’ out loud! Why did this newfangled Austin engine not last as well as the old reliable 1476cc side valve Morris engine in his old Oxford? No problem getting parts for that. Even in far north Queensland.
On second thoughts maybe a couple of minutes with one of their engineers round the back of the factory would suit him. Ambulance optional. 🙂
You forgot about the lowered compression ratio for the antipodean markets these high comp engines were UK or hoped for US market only,
Fun video in many ways. The times have certainly changed.
My 1952 MG with it’s ~1250 CC engine would be running about 4000 rpm at 60 mph, so this might be a pretty good test for that car. Most of my driving with it is on country roads rarely topping 50 mph, so not a problem. The car is in great shape (the engine has been rebuilt once, although the car has no where near 100,000 miles), but a long cross country road trip with it could certainly be an adventure.
By comparison our 2007 Volvo V70 is only running about 2000 rpm at 60 mph, and has ~105,000 miles with the only work ever done on the car (except a broken wheel and strut thanks to a large unavoidable Chicago pothole) standard maintenance including a timing belt just done at 100,000 miles. The car is still solid and tight and I wouldn’t hesitate to go anywhere with it.
Very interesting video and test from a different era. So much progress in so many ways.
When I was a kid, I remember 100,000 miles as something that never really happened. Cars like the BMC masterpieces shown here would have rusted to nothingness long before they magical figure was attained.
It’s a lot easier on a car to run it up and down the freeway for 25,000 miles than to do such mileage in say, two years of Quebec driving.
Now, 160,000 km really isn’t that high.
So the British are happy, nay proud when their engines go 25,000 miles before needing a major service like a bottom end job? And in conditions which are not the typical ones which wear bearings the worst like idling in stop and go traffic and cold-starting to the grocery a mile away and back? These ‘high speeds’ meant the bearings were getting a good supply of oil at that rpm and there wasn’t much cold starting from zero oil pressure and maximum wear.
No wonder the Beetle kicked their asses.
Well, that’s debatable.
Yes, at high speed the supply of oil to the crankshaft bearings is good.
However, if the oil itself is not good enough (e.g. – doesn’t stay viscous enough at high temperature & load), you still can run into problems because the load is also very high, and if the engine is not specifically designed for this kind of conditions the bearings in it would worn out very quickly (eventually the oil film fails to separate the surface of the shaft and the babbitt lining of the bearing, and the shaft tears it away, destroying the bearing and causing engine seizure). There is no difference how much oil you supply to the bearings if the oil is not able to withstand the loads in it.
When the standard grade of oil for car engines was something like SAE 20, this was a very real problem for the car industry.
To mitigate it, the bearings in older engines were made very large, with a lot of surface area to better spread the load and thus increase the load capacity. The engineers also used trimetal bearings with an intermediate layer of copper under the babbitt overlay.
What I’m trying to say is that even back then it was not very difficult to build an engine that would go 25,000 @ 60+ MPH without fuss. However, you had to have this requirement in mind to achieve that. Many manufacturers of the time just didn’t, because at the time that was not considered normal driving conditions outside of US and probably West Germany. Not for a small economy car at least. That’s not necessarily about the engine being of poor quality or something. Just not designed for this kind of job.
Of course you are right to mention that frequent cold starts and stop and go traffic are the worst conditions for _normal_ engine wear. But it seems to me that in this case we are talking about a specific problem encountered by car designers before good quality oils and advanced bearing materials became available, not normal wear.
Who was the intended audience for these films? Really, they could have conveyed the same message in about one-quarter of the over 9 minutes they used here. Despite the subject matter, I had trouble keeping my attention span up for the whole length, given the repetitive nature and predictability. Was there any real doubt as to the outcome? I was almost expecting “hey since it still didn’t have any problems even after the unplanned extra 5,000 miles at the end, how about we try for 30,000 miles?” Follow up with more footage of the BMC fleet passing Beetles on the Autobahn, a few quick shots of the instrument cluster, then pulling up to a service station to refuel. The refueling may have been the most interesting part – is that really how it was done back then, pouring from upright petrol cans stored in the trunk using a double funnel?
Not to mention how fast they seemed to pull in to the pump!
Here in the U.S. Nash “proved” the endurance of the British-built Metropolitan at a NASCAR track back in 1953:
http://www.raleighspeedway.org/secondary-sources/2010_proving_the_metropolitan
At 4:09 the steering wheel hub remains fixed upright while the wheel turns.
I don’t feel inclined to defend these spartan, uptight little farters, as there’s just something grimly repelling about them that seems to speak of a disdain for those who had to buy them. (I’ll give the Minor a partial exception, because it handled).
However, it’s missing the point a bit to say that US cars could do 20,000 at 60-75mph without fuss, which they sure could. These cars have tiny engines and gearing that meant they were flat out, 5,500+ revs at the speeds shown. On the oils, fuels and materials tech then available, if you drove a Blue Flame 6 or even a Detroit V8 at THEIR flat chat speeds for 20,000 miles in one sitting, they too would be largely knackered. You would have got it over and done with a hell of a lot quicker, mind.
The Volksys did indeed show this up, designed never to exceed 4,000rpm-odd at top whack, though in this country, about 60-70K miles was rebuild time. I surmise that that was very poor fuel (and perhaps greater heat) here because the valves were burnt up by then. Still, that was nearly three times what was got from English machines even when NOT driven flat out, and combined with no worries about water/overheating, VWs were quickly a hit here too.
One last word in their undeserved defence. If you drove a Fiat 1100 or a Renault Dauphine in this same test, they too wouldn’t have lasted much better.
One cylinder on the VW four had its cooling air stream blocked by the oil cooler that was the cylinder that burned valves first and broke the pistons not helped by Australias climate, the pancake engine eliminated that problem but didnt fix the longevity issues, they still died regularly and expensively.
Oh Bryce, that ship sailed and sunk almost fifty years ago, but you still beat that tired drum at the bottom of the ocean. You have my admiration, if not my agreement.
I got 100k miles out of a 1600 pancake engine I rebuilt for my ’66 Fastback, and this was in hot SoCal climate. My parents added the last 40k miles after I sold the VW to them, It did crack the right head at about 75k miles, this was because the air intake bellows split apart and they kept driving, overheating the engine. I replaced the head and bellows for them, when they sold it the engine was still running well.
Worked for VW dealers for years and would note mileage when cars came in with blown engines. Upright engine buses, even doghouse style 15/1600 engines seemed to be needing at least valve jobs between 60-70k miles, usually would get replacement long blocks. The type 4 pancake engines in the ’72-’79 Bus would generally be good for around 100k miles.
100k miles on an air cooled Beetle engine was not uncommon. The factory rebuilds were long lasting as well, but there were lots of aftermarket “rebuilds” around that struggled to last even 50k miles.
Lets see what state was Britain in in the mid 50s, rationing had just come to an end after WW2. People were still being rehoused after the bombing.
We were desperate to get US dollars to pay off lease lend so threw anything we could at them.
To say British cars self destruct after 25000 miles is not true, the mistake was trying the sell the wrong cars to the US, it should have been obvious that small displacement cars designed for A roads and European use were not suitable, fuel economy and consumption of raw materials, so important in Europe did not seem to concern the US
There are plenty of excellent 6 cylinder British cars that would laugh off 60mph and could give the US cars a run for their money
Take the Mk 7 Jag, Rover P4, Humber, Wolseley 6/90, Riley, even a Ford Zephyr 6 would be comfortable at 60. I would say any British 6 with an overdrive gearbox has decent cruising ability for the mid 50s. Look at the rally achievements of the Sunbeam Talbot 90
The US might have preferred Autos but many of the 6s would have been quite happy at 60-70 even with an autobox, though the manual is the preferred option in Europe and improved performance significantly
I know that the 6 cylinder P4 Rover will cruise well above 60, I was surprised how effortless it was at 85, and will definitely not be clapped out after 25k, they are competently engineered vehicles of quality that last a long time.
I read a side by side comparison between a manual O/D Mk7 Jaguar and a 53 Cadillac, the Cadillac thrashed it to 60, but the Jag soundly outpaced it after, and that was giving 2 litres away in displacement, it was also described as feeling like a sports saloon in comparison.
Britain did engineer very good cars in the 50s, just a shame we tried to sell economy cars to the US.
The US attitude to maintenance is often mentioned, which appears to equate to none, or even abuse, I just do not understand this attitude.
Lee, you answer many of your own points.
Sure, the upmarket models you mention, exported in relatively tiny numbers, were perfectly ok for US cruise speeds (not to mention they are pretty much all lovely vehicles still) whilst the UK national debt-relieving exported econoboxes were not. But the VW proved that both speed and reliability over time could be combined in a cheapie. And the upmarket jobbies from the UK that you mention weren’t really competitive with US upmarket jobbies, IN US CONDITIONS (shouty capitals only because I can’t use italics, btw).
The English littlies, which were undergeared, underpowered, under-equipped, styled by Mrs Frump, whip-yourself spartan all round, they really did shit themselves at low mileage, despite having punished you for getting to that. The reality is that BMC DID sell these in America, they weren’t suited or any good generally, and the further reality is that sales collapsed when it was shown that (as it so happens) those bloody Germans could do better, much better. (And then the same happened to those Germans at the hands of the Japanese later on, but I digress).
And there’s no point raising the US attitude to maintenance defensively in relation to Britmobiles because the product has to be suitable to the market it’s sold in: no point telling ’em they really should be more careful. It’s about as sensible as complaining that their country is too large.
And finally, those lovely posher Brit cars required far more fussy attention than their understressed US counterparts, and if it wasn’t given, they too self-destructed at way too low a mileage, maybe even 25,000. I just don’t see the evidence of good engineering, not in the world beyond the slow roads of ’50’s England anyway, a place where, as opposed to many other countries and particularly the US, 25,000 meant at least five years motoring.
Hi Justy
I was not supporting the vehicles in the video, just trying to put it into context and I appreciate that we sent the wrong cars, the only decent small car we made before the Mini was the Morris Minor in my opinion, that was child’s play to maintain and was good to drive, still fun today
The Beetle was perhaps the only European car that was comparatively high geared being designed for autobahns , The Minor I believe to be as good as the beetle in almost all respects and a simple axle ratio change would have made the choice difficult. Issigonis originally proposed a water cooled flat four for the Minor with a larger capacity for the export market, how close would that have been, what an opportunity missed. Why lower ratios or overdrives were not put on export cars I don’t know,
I wanted to point out that not everything we made was crap, in fact a lot of things were excellent
Having owned and driven a fair number of US V8s admittedly from the 60s to 80s, I can definitely say neither country had the engineering superiority, it depended entirely upon the particular engine, by the mid late 60s pushrods were definitely archaic, but alloy heads could warp if the engine overheated which was better or worse? . I have been pleased and disappointed in both equally in design and quality of construction, and I have worked on both, complete dismantle and rebuild.
As for maintenance, it has cropped up often, its almost as if the US boasts about the lack of it that bewilders me. Beetles were not rare in the UK, my relative had one of the first VW garages in the UK and trained in Wolfsberg, they were not exactly pushing out the horsepower in the 50s and still required normal maintenance to have the power to reach 70, off tune they quickly slowed down on even small gradients
So often my experience of cars mentioned on this site is completely different to the US writers I wonder if we are talking about the same things, could it be my attitude to maintenance that makes the difference?. My Jag 420G with Triple SUs ran very sweetly with just regular oil, filters , plugs and points change, Rovers are even easier to look after, it was the same for Mercedes, Rust not mechanics was always the problem
Lee, You’re missing a key point:
It was not a matter of a bad decision as to what cars BMC (or any other importer) sent to the US; in fact BMC dealers offered essentially the full line of cars here. But Americans wanted only three kinds of imports; 1.) sporty-luxurious prestige cars like Jaguar, which was the best selling premium import in the 50s. 2.) sports cars, like the MG, Triumph and Porsche, which of course sold quite well, and 3.) cheap, low-end economy cars, like the Austin A40, the Minor and the VW.
There was essentially zero market for the more typical larger Brit sedans (except Jaguar) because the competed on price directly with the domestic cars, and could not compete on features like size, power, convenience, ride, etc. It’s the same reason the Toyota Crown could not ever make any inroads either.
The imports did well where there was no direct competition. And there certainly was none at the bottom of the market. Which explains why the Austin A40 was the best selling import sedan in the early 50s here, until it was blown away by the VW.
It’s not a question of gearing either; the gear ratios that the A40 and Minor came with were absolutely necessary in order to exploit the power bands of their engines. Lower (numerical) gearing or overdrives on these little engines would just have bogged them down.
Here’s the key difference: bore and stroke:
The 1955 Austin A40’s 1200cc engine had a 2.58″ x 3.50″ bore/stroke, and made 42hp @4600 rpm. The 1955 version was priced in the US @ $1450.
The 1955 Morris Minor Series II had the 803cc A engine, with 2.28 x 3.00 bore/stroke, and made 30hp @4800rpm. It was priced at $1430.
The 1955 VW 1200 had a 3.03 x 2.52 bore/stroke, and made 36hp @3700 rpm. It was priced at $1495.
Do you see the problem? The Brit engines all had tiny bores and long strokes because of the taxation. Which meant small valves too. So they had to tune them to run at higher speeds in order to make adequate hp.This is the basic flaw in their design; I should say fatal flaw.
The VW engine had a very modern oversquare engine, and if it was tuned properly (like by Porsche) it could make plenty of hp. But VW wisely throttled it down to peak at 3700rpm, and it wouldn’t exceed about 4000rpm in any circumstance. Therefore the piston speeds and all sorts of other wear points were much lower in the VW, and it could happily run flat out for days, months and years on end.
Don’t forget: Hitler demanded that the VW to be able to run on the autobahn all day at 100kmh. That was the design brief in 1934, and that’s how it came to be as it was designed.
That’s certainly not the case for all the Brit engines, right? Motorways were still a very distant dream when these long-stroke little engines were conceived.
I had two Beetles, bought used with original engines, and I took both over 100,000 miles without any engine issues. MY GF finally killed one by driving it in fourth gear in the mountains during an epic heat wave. It should have been downshifted into third.
My brother bought a low-mileage ’66 1300 and sold it with just over 100k miles, and theta engine was still running like new.
Admittedly, many VWs didn’t last that long, but invariably they probably were overheated by extreme circumstances or not shifting down to keep blower speed up on grades, etc.. But the standard expectation here was that a properly driven and maintained VW factory engine would run 100k miles or more without any issues.
Later BMC cars had bigger and better engines, and did hold up somewhat better. But their basic long-stroke design did them no favors.
I was about to write that it’s bizarre that a tax regime (in this case aimed at the rich of the ’20’s) could end up forcing an industry into designing unsuitable engines that ultimately helped kill an industry, but then I realized that the examples worldwide of tax distortions on design are legion. In Aus (to use but two examples here), huge LPG tax breaks meaning large engines surviving beyond the realistic cost of fuelling them normally, not to mention gigantic taxes on normal fuel itself, thus driving more economical consumer trends. In Italy and France, I seem to recall big penalties over 2 litres. In the US, the chicken tax and (I may be wrong) work vehicle tax breaks being a driver of the sales of those whopper bestseller utes.
Though I reckon the English system of taxation based on bore must remain unique, and in the end, uniquely destructive.
And Lee, to answer your question, yes, your attitude to maintenance DID likely make all the difference. But your lovely 420G from a fairly broke England where even posher owners would look after any car, was also sold into a super rich country where a car was a consumer good expected to perform at command without thought or attention. And if it didn’t, it sure wasn’t going to be replaced by the same brand next time.
But your lovely 420G from a fairly broke England where even posher owners would look after any car, was also sold into a super rich country where a car was a consumer good expected to perform at command without thought or attention. And if it didn’t, it sure wasn’t going to be replaced by the same brand next time.
Which explains why Jaguar fell from being the #1 premium import brand in the US in the 50s and became a marginal player behind the Germans and Lexus.
Paul, all very good and valid points, but I just can’t agree with the bottom line.
So, the British small cars had long-stroke, undersquare engines that generated a lot of low-end torque for their displacement, which is perfectly good for badly underpowered economy cars designed for low-speed motoring. Perfectly adequate for the local conditions. Not so good for American highways, though.
The Beetle’s engine was the direct opposite, with a large bore and a short stroke, designed for high revolutions and high speeds – perfectly adequate for Hitler’s Autobahns and American highways (also good for compactness, as the stroke length determines how wide a horizontally opposed engine would be – actually, that could be as much a part of the original rationale for using an oversquare design as anything else).
But I just can’t see why the latter concept is better, or “more modern”, than the former. We’re just comparing apples to oranges here, really.
Being oversquare and high-revving does not make and engine inherently better or “more modern” – just better suited to a specific set of requirements. This concept looks “more modern” only in a very specific context.
If today we task a modern engineer with designing a modern car engine for the same requirements the British engineers have had in 1950s, I’m sure that he would come up with a very similar undersquare design.
Actually, we can see just that if we look at modern aircraft piston engines – they are almost universally low-revving, undersquare, designed for sustained 2000…3000 RPM. The same goes to large tank & marine diesel engines.
It’s just that the requirements in these areas remained the same as they were in 1940s and 50s, and the requirement for car engines in most countries have changed completely since then.
IMO, the bad idea precisely was marketing such cars in the US, not designing engines the way they were designed in the first place.
By they way, a lot of native American engines were undersquare as well, e.g. Chrysler’s 225 Slant Six (3.40 x 4.215 inches). But with 3.7 liters of displacement, when used in relatively light vehicles like the A-Body Valiant & Dart – not that it mattered a lot. With Austin A40’s 1.2 liters and ~1000 kg of weight – it did.
And now, imagine the Valiant competing against a similarly sized 3800 cc Mercedes-Benz on a German highway of mid-1970s… looks a bit like an Austin A40 against a VW 1200, really ? That’s why context always matters. A lot.
“There was essentially zero market for the more typical larger Brit sedans (except Jaguar) because they competed on price directly with the domestic cars, and could not compete on features like size, power, convenience, ride, etc.”
Nor on widely available parts and service.
Four cylinder British cars of the 50s were not designed for high sustained speeds simply because they didnt have those sort of roads when motorways appeared those same cars were modified to be capable of greater speed and they do ok, dont forget I have one built in 59 it was perfectly happy at 45-50mph when stock it has since been uprated using stock factory parts from later models giving it an easy 100kmh cruising speed and a top speed of approx 150kmh, and brakes to match, BMC did similar to their smaller cars in the 60s but by then it was too late they had lost the US market.
Taller gearing is what made the big difference in a decent cruising speeds British cars like mine ran 4.44:1 it now has 3,89:1 and it made a huge difference more than swapping engines about I did the rear axle first with the original engine.
Stanislav, I’m not sure I get your point(s).
The VW was NOT a high revving engine; quite the contrary, it was a quite low revving engine. That combined with being an undersquare design means that the pistons and bearings had much less stress on them ,as well as other moving parts. You understand that in a short stroke engine, the piston acceleration on each stroke is considerably lower than on a long stroke engine.
Nowadays, most engines actually do have rather long strokes, because it’s better for emissions. But the materials and tolerances are so much better now that it’s obviously not an issue. And with four valves, even small bore long-stroke engines can breathe well, rev high and make lots of power.
But back then it was a different situation. Prior to WW2, many engines had relatively long strokes, because they were designed to run at low rpm. American car engines had plenty of displacement so they didn’t have to rev high to make adequate power.
The reason the Brits built such extreme undersquare (stroke longer than bore) engines is because the cars were taxed based on the size of the bore only, nit the actual displacement. Makes no sense, but thta’s how it was, for a very long time.
That led to extreme undersquare engines. And generally small ones too, in terms of displacement. So they had no choice but to tune them to run at relatively high rpm in order to make adequate power. Please go back to my original comment and re-read the specs for the two Brit cars and the VW.
After WW2, there was a huge shift to oversquare (bore larger than stroke) engines, as it resulted in smoother, better breathing, and more efficient engines, with less friction and less wear on the bearings, rings, cylinders, etc. All the new American V8s after WW2 were oversquare, as well as essentially all/most new European engines except in the UK, where the bore tax kept them undersquare.
With the technology of the times (50s) oversquare engines were decidedly superior, and almost universally adopted, especially as car speed were increasing due to better highways and motorways.
The VW engine was just ahead of the times, designed to be oversquare from the beginning, and as such to be suited for contiguous high speed operation, even though the engine itself was tuned to run at low rpm.
Yes, the British engines were reasonably well adapted to the typical British roads in the 40s and 50s, but they aggressively exported them to the US, Canada and also the continent. It was apparent that their engines were not so well suited for extended higher speed operation.
The whole point of this film is to try to improve the image of Brit cars as being weak in that regard; that’s why the engines were all newer versions and then tested like this. It was a response to problems with their predecessors.
Brit car engines did improve throughout the 50s and 60s, but only incrementally, as they were all based on basic designs that although they were not old engines, looked old-fashioned because of their small bores and long strokes. And almost universally they had three main bearings instead of five, or four instead of seven, for the sixes. They were simply not state of the art engine designs.
And they fared poorly in the US as a consequence. And the VW engine fared significantly better. Which explains why in 1955 VW sales in the US exploded, and Austin and Morris sales dropped. It was the result of many buyer’s bad experiences with them. Meanwhile, VW buyers had good experiences, and kept buying them, year in and year out, until the early 70s.
Have I made it clearer for you?
Airplane engines are not relevant to this discussion. They were designed for a specific purpose. Actually, the VW engine is quite similar to an airplane engine, in being able to run at full or near-full throttle continuously because the rpm were kept low to being an intrinsically throttled design.
The 225 slant six was an anomaly of the times, the only significantly undersquare new engine. That’s because Chrysler couldn’t afford to develop a new larger six for its large cars, so they added a lot of stroke to the 170 engine. But it was engineered so well, that its stroke was not a liability.
But you’re right, American engines were not designed for continuous high/full speed operation. Neither were the British engines. The Germans, because of their autobahns, placed a very high priority on that quality. But your comparison of a Valiant and a Mercedes is invalid, as the Mercedes cost several times more, so they were never in competition. The Austin A40, the Morris Minor and the VW competed directly against each other.
No; if there were no taxation on bore size, and a British company wanted to design a new engine in the 50s or 60s, they would not have designed such extreme long stroke engines. And eventually the Brits did build more modern engine designs.
RAC hp tax was abandonned prior to 1950. but roads developed from centuries old laneways remained.
The RAC hp based tax was dropped at the end of 1946, but it was about 5 years before ‘square’ engine designs appeared from Ford and Vauxhall, Rootes following in 1954, though Ford kept side-valve engines in their smaller cars until 1959 so their economy cars would have been much the same as BMCs. Austin had designed a new ohv engine for the 1947 A40 but to the same dimensions as their pre-war design which, given the tax situation when it was developed made some kind of sense, but there was no room to enlarge the cylinders. With the RAC hp tax restriction gone they effectively started again with the replacement B series, though carrying over the cylinder stroke, keeping it very undersquare in its original 1.2 litre form. Progressively enlarged to 1.5 and 1.6, it eventually approached square dimensions by the time it was enlarged to 1.8 litres, but they do seem to have taken a very cautious approach.
All this was really too late though; reputations take a long time to be built, but far less time to wreck.
I once heard that in the 1950s, a British car actually made it into production without jacking points. Any truth to this, and if so, which car was it?
Probably a Peel P50 – Just lay it on its side to change to wheels.
Rolls-Royce perhaps, because they don’t break down? (just occasionally ‘fail to proceed’)
Oh here, I say, built-in jacking system old chap, dontcha know.
I’ll stick my neck out and say that the main problem with many British manufacturers (of not just cars but trucks, locomotives and other heavy equipment too) back then was not listening to what local dealers and subsidiaries were trying to tell them. This repeated itself in the USA, Canada and the antipodeans regularly. There were quite a number of improvements which could have been made even to those ancient under-square designs to make them more robust under the conditions in the export markets (as the Japanese did show later – many early Japanese designs were in fact an improvement of a British template) but nothing got done. It was an issue of bad attitude at the top more than anything else. Management assumed that people in the (no longer) colonies would continue buying their rubbish no matter what. They were wrong.
+1. Absolutely.
I agree, and you can see where this led, to the industrial unrest in the 70s and collapse of the industry. German and Japanese labour relations as much as other factors contributed to their justified success
The 70s were a tough and violent time, but it was a phase that we had to go through for many reasons outside of scope here.
Pleased to say we got over it and manufacturing is better than it has been for decades