If you want to know just how nuts British Leyland was, when a fire broke out in the Longbridge tunnels in the 1970s, someone (obviously) used an office phone nearby to call for the city fire brigade. He then got reprimanded by management for unauthorised use of a company telephone.
To give you an idea: when the USA introduced a new law that specified the minimum height of the headlight centers of any car sold here, British Leyland had a problem on the MG MGB. The headlights were two inches too low. Instead of restyling the hood slightly, a committee that investigated the problem determined that it was cheaper to raise the car's suspension by three inches, which completely wrecked the fantastic handling that the MGB was known for 😂
This story reminds me a lot of the death of Bethlehem Steel. According to a friend of mine who worked there for 50 years, the departments used to charge each other shipping between the buildings at their plants.
No,when it's originally a certain country's brand,it really should be pronounced like it is in the Mother country. Also,exonyms/xenonyms should be banned,endonyms/autonyms rule! 💪💪 I am English,but grew up in Pennsylvania,& I get just as annoyed when Brits say Maryland as 'Mary-Land' & Arkansas as 'Ar-kan'-zas'🤣🤣
@@markhealey9409 It can be said however in it's home country, but I'm not ruled by a foreign country, in murika we have the freedom of speech so I don't have to follow the witch the queen's rules :-) It's a shite brand anyways, not worth saying right, just like ASS-stain martin, brits don't make good cars, no one does today though so nothing personal and I actually own a land rover (it's a piece of crap too, 2nd one I've had, both were prone to breakdowns at random.
@@markhealey9409 Yeah if you live under imperalism from a foreign country, neah plenty of boys died so I can call it whatever the hey doo doo I want to. jag is a junk brand anyway, not worth saying right.
Dont forget also that cars were only built on the odd day that theunionised workers could get round to it, and be bothered to put most of the parts in.
Nice to hear the tale of British Leyland's demise from an American point of view, it makes the General Motors fiasco seem well-managed. What's more remarkable is that you didn't explode in sheer disbelief.
My mother bought her last British Leyland car in the late sixties. It was terrible so she bought a Citroen, which was flawless, then two more. I have never owned a British car and now drive Hondas. We watched BL destroy itself in real time and this film is the sad truth.
at 17:20, there is a Allegro and a Passat shown in a UK motor show....the Passat is still build....the Allegro is in the museum, for many good reasons!
If you actually look at it now with hindsight, with better management and understanding of the market you can see how it could have worked. The relaunch of the mini as your cheaper small car, jaguar competing as your luxury brand against Audi and Mercedes, rover as your mass marked family car and then Land Rover/Range Rover as your luxury 4 wheel drive.
The idea of Triumph being a luxury brand 🤣 'Proud' owner of a Triumph Spitfire here. It's on bricks right now and when running always had the feel of being about to break down.
the spitfire wasn't exactly a show of luxury and was more of a slightly more upscale rival to the MG midget and AH sprite. If you compare those two or the TR4-6 with the MGB, you'd start to see the difference. Add to that their saloon offerings, and you've found yourself the british BMW :D
We used to have a Triumph Herald (one of probably only a handful in the US). It still had the plastic on the door panels. Never got it running, ended up selling it to one of the rare other Herald owners in the US. Then there were the three Austin Americas we had (none ever got on the road either) Austin America was the US model name for the British Leyland 1100-series cars.
Interesting factoid: Produced from 1962 till 1980, the MGB was the most popular sports car in the world until the Mazda MX5 Miata came along. Leyland decided to kill MG and develop the Triumph TR-7 which was still outsold by the MGB when both cars were still in production. Working examples of TR-7’s are few and are plagued with problems. Meanwhile, MGB‘s are plentiful and inexpensive as well as their parts. Most of the body panels and many of the other parts remained unchanged since 1962. Many consider the MGB the biggest bargain in the classic car market. The Chinese now on the MG brand which is now on miserable little Econo boxes and cheap electric cars. MG sold more cars than Jaguar. Austin Martin, Healey and Triumph ever did.
@@brianwillson9567 Are you aware of Moss Motors? They are the biggest supplier of British sports car parts in the world. They also sell parts for Miata’s. 😉
I’m a new subscriber. Got here because UA-cam recommended the toysrus video. And man I gotta say you are funny and love the video format and narrations. Keep the good work on this company collapse videos!!!!!
My father owned and raced several British cars and motorcycles in his youth. I bought my first Triumph motorcycle, a 1969 T-100C because I knew my father had desert raced those and its big brothers the Tiger and Bonneville. I called him, excited about my new purchase, and he said "Remember, anytime you buy a piece of British engineering it has to be for the love of the ride... and the walk... and the push. Every hour you ride it will turn into 2 hours of maintenance. My dad was right about a lot of things. He loved them until the day he died, and I still own and love my bike, but reliable it is not.
My favorite was the govt making them build a new factory up in Scotland, staffed by disgruntled coal miners, while keeping engine production down in England making production control a nightmare.
My uncle was stationed in England in the 80s. He never had a good thing to say about British Leyland. Ever. The car he praised was a 1957 ford prefect.
With British leyland competing with itself it was even design divisions that were divided between absorbed companies, often the company would only produce one car for a target demographic but have all the divisions designing one, going as far as drivable cars & production level tooling, only to be told that they weren't going to be produced, Rover was typically in competition with Triumph, even though they were both already part of Standard Motors before being merged into British Leyland, Jaguar just wouldn't play with anyone else, Jaguar's team even claimed their XJ model was specifically designed so that the Rover V8 wouldn't fit, but several owners have proven this to be a lie.
Must not forget Lucas electric components aka The Prince of Darkness. I had an MGC, I replaced the charging system with a GM and also the intake with a Rochester system, and that made it a very reliable car. The Stag would be a prime candidate for a worst of series. I’m surprised you didn’t mention Neufield that was also a major component of BL.
British Rail wasn't as bad as people make out. it was doing pretty well on the run up before privatisation. There's a great book called loosing track which goes into the time before and after privatisation it's quite eye opening.
An interesting and well researched article. I think the main problem, among many, was that the cars were just rushed to market without any of the problems ironed out. By the time many models had been on the market for two or three years ,they had, in the main, become ok. A 1978 Allegro was a more reliable and well made vehicle than a 1973 one, for example. Image was another problem. In the UK, Fords were the cool cars, think The Sweeney or The Professionals with their Granada and Capri, contrast that with Basil Fawlty and his Austin 1100 or more recently Alan Partridge and his Rover Sterling. I would say with British Leyland the intent was there but there were too many other factors to have made it successful. Fun fact, John Lennon drove an Austin Maxi, but crashed it while on holiday in Scotland. Would there be a review or retrospective of American Motor Corporation in the future? I always thought they were closest in spirit to BL.
Well, with the professionals, BL was the original supplier of cars. However the story was that BL could never understand that continuity mattered for a story and would just send whatever random vehicle from their press fleet on any given filming day, where as ford gave them consistently the same cars as needed.
years back, the first "decent" car I bought, came down to a choice between a Toyota Carina E, in dark green or a gold coloured rover of some sort. one was £6,500, the other £5,000 my then partner couldn't see why I wanted the more expensive Toyota until I explained the Rover was British built
@@caseyjones1999 Not only Jaguars : Also LandRovers are the victim of Lucas the Prince of Darkness.... I can sing a Song about IT!😁 In Germany WE call Britisch Leyland the Britisch Elend (mysery)....
@@caseyjones1999 Not only Jaguars : Also LandRovers are the victim of Lucas the Prince of Darkness.... I can sing a Song about IT!😁 In Germany WE call Britisch Leyland the Britisch Elend (mysery)....
Well, at least the American cars of the period were far better looking, if only marginally better built. I especially like the C3 Corvette, looks wise. Most of ours, on the other hand, looked more like things you'd see in communist states.
Really nice video! 👏 I would also add that, for sure currency fluctuation of the Pound might've helped not that much in certain periods, refraining BLMC/BL/Rover Group from certain possibly winning bets, but looking back in History and products, I also can't stop thinking that there was an absolute lack of vision, i.e., a narrow-minded thinking with focus on the idiosyncratic wishes of the UK domestic market and lack of real interest especially in the European export markets. Also, the more we search about certain discarded prototypes, cancelled projects and others (and some of them could've been profitable or not being very expensive to conceive, being a mere reskin of existing ones, or heavily based in cars already into production), the more I believe that the successive management boards were really thinking small.
That mention of one brand stealing sales from another brand is on of the problems that the Chrysler Corporation had in the 60's and 70's and probably beyond too. If Plymouth had a model that was selling well, the Dodge dealers wanted a version of it. Also GM in the 80's 90's. I always felt that each car model should have had an exclusive model, body design or type (coupe or convertible) that was not shared with another brand in the same company.
VW produce cars that compete among their many marques so that wasn't the problem. There were good cars that sold well but management and unions caused problems that lead to BLs downfall. The company that joined with Leyland was called BMC by the way.
funny, born in the late 60s....i watched in awe the news, talking about strikes all the time in the UK... living close to the biggest car in factory in Europe, i never heard about my uncles going on strike...all they did been on vacation to Spain!
Most of the visuals in this video that are not from newsreel footage, are taken from _The Quality Connection,_ a 1977 training film commissioned by British Leyland that stressed the importance of, unsurprisingly, workers doing their job properly and not turning out shoddy work by, for instance, getting distracted ogling the typist from the planning office. In fact it starts out with police turning up at the scene of a fatal traffic accident where there is no apparent cause. The film was directed by Bert Wilkins and featured a plethora of well-known British mainly television actors of the day such as Michael Robbins, Paul Barber, John Comer, Trevor Bannister, David Suchet, Maddy Smith (Wendy, the leggy bird with the hourglass figure), and George Cooper (the customer who tries out the white Morris Marina in the showroom.) The duration is 24 mins 36 secs and three examples have been uploaded to UA-cam.
Badge Engineering also screwed General Motors - and, like UK govt, the US govt bailed them out. Ford also had Mercury and Chrysler had Dodge & Plymouth. I was amazed that these duplicate brands lasted as long as they did
I was thinking that maybe Volkswagen would go the same way...here in the UK they sell cars that compete which each other and essentially the same..VW Audi Skoda and Seat.In a recent satisfaction survey the Golf 8 had come stone dead last out of 75 cars, i suppose at least they haven't gone on strike
@@obelic71 Funny how so many of the British marques ended up in the hands of former colonies (USA and India, and--to a degree--China) or their historical enemy (Germany). If we could figure a way to get the Irish, Australians and French in on this, then I think we'd have a clean sweep. The sun has set on the British automotive empire...
12:00 Ford did, it was called the Lincoln Blackwood. Truck buyers didn’t want the extra expense and luxury buyers didn’t want a truck. It only lasted one year so they’re rare and collectible now. I’ve only seen one, ironically on the street like any other truck.
And then they replaced that with the Mark LT, which was just a more luxurious F-150 (Which is what the Blackwood should have been to begin with). And now the F-150 offers luxury versions anyway.
Some great cars did emerge...great engineers overshadowed by dismal management.The Rover SD1 was way ahead of its time and the Jaguar Xj6/12 could compete with the top luxury cars on a low budget.
I avoided any of those cars in the 1970s and 1980s by buying mainly Ford and Vauxhall. Later on I had a couple of Triumph Dolomites as classic cars in the late 1990s and they were basically very good small cars, but boy did they like to rust.
01:53 Jaguar = JAG-wahr 03:24 _Volkswagon_ = FOHLKS-vah-g'n (in German; what's in the video is the standard USian pronunciation) 07:28 niche = NEE-shh or NIT-ch (USian)
@@alexhajnal107 The dropping of the third syllable might only be relatively recent, Always three syllable in Australia, New Zealand & South African English, English media we got here used three syllables in the 80s & 90s, & every British car show up until Clarkson was sacked from Top Gear for the third & final time used the three syllable pronunciation.
A lot of information was given in this video. Making and selling automobiles is very complex. The major problem was all of the major automobile manufacturers of Great Britain were brought together into one giant company. General Motors had a similar challenge. General Motors was the mother company of Cadillac, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, ... Automobiles across these brands were basically the same vehicle with different names. Often they look alike with similar add-on features. Chevy would make a middle-class cheaper model and Pontiac would make a slightly more expensive sporty model while Cadillac would make an upscale, luxury model that was very expensive. The problem was many customers saw through this and did not consider the different models offered as being different. However, I am not an expert so I cannot be this was the primary problem. There were other issues presented on this video that were quite interesting. All I can say is that free-market capitalistic trading systems are more efficient in delivering what the market or the people wants. Whenever governments get involved you introduce a group of political elites who are good at politics, but who do not know how to make and sell cars. In Great Britain the government became the primary owner of all British auto-makers. Can the primary owner sit by and allow the managers of these auto-makers run their company without interference? Of course the British government interfered. In a democracy the political leaders have to appease the general population. In a free-market capitalist trading system it is supply and demand that determines how auto-makers operate their business. That is the fundamental conflict. The British government wanted to control its automobile manufacturers in order to save the JOBS of those who voted them into office. Not to create a competitive (domestically & internationally) automobile industry. In a free-market, competitive automobile market-place the auto-makers must make cars the market (or the people) want to buy. The British government wanted to save jobs for their automobile workers. British automobile managers were trying saving jobs in their factories. British automobile makers were not focused on making products that people wanted to buy, which would have saved British jobs. As a result, British auto-makers slowly but surely failed. The British government used British taxpayer money to help the British Auto Industry die a slow painful death while depleting the Treasury. Just look at the former Soviet Union (Russia) and all the former Eastern Bloc Warsaw-Pact countries. Their industries were based on a Command Economy centrally planned by the benevolent socialist-communist governments. None of them can compete with the private companies of the modern democratic Republics with free-market capitalist trading systems. This is not a coincidence. The British Auto Industry failed because it did not make cars the markets (or the people) wanted to buy. I understand the narrator of this video claimed that British Auto-Makers won prizes for making the "best cars." I do not know what he meant by "best." The only way established auto-makers can fail is because not enough people wanted to buy their cars. The people of the former Eastern Bloc and the remaining third-world, agrarian countries live in societies where the markets and indeed trade is controlled by a handful of elites. Individual property rights are not protected, because a handful of elites have all the power. Often the political elites ignore individual property rights for the greater good of all. I hope the people of the modern, industrialized Republics will understand this and continue to do the things that make them successful. It is the modern, industrialized Republics with free-market capitalist trading system and RULE of LAW who created the conveniences of the modern world.
Our first ever family car was a beige Morris Marina 1.7 super and when I passed my driving test I bought a 1.3L brown Allegro. Looking back they were awful cars but back then they were the mutts nuts! 😂
In the end it were two American companies which profited of the mismanagement of British Leyland, Ford and GM, which had taken over Vauxhall in 1925. British Leyland cars from the 1970s and 80s had in general a bad name for reliability and longevity on the European export market, proven by the fact that you still can see German made cars from the 1980s on the roads now, but a Mini Metro or an Austin Maestro is rarer as seeing a Pagani Zonda on the road now.
Leyland as a brandname is now a part of PACCAR. In the factory based in the place Leyland 40% of all DAF trucks are build. The European DAF brand of PACCAR has 3 plants. Eindhoven Netherlands (origin of DAF) Leyland UK (origin of Leyland) and DAF/PACCAR Westerlo Belgium who is a hirstorical parts supplier for DAF and Leyland. DAF and Leyland have a long history togehter. DAF did license build Leyland engines trucks and bus chassis for all their Trucks and busses. They became one of their biggest customers. They even merged in the 1987 to Leyland DAF (LDV Leyland Daf vehicels). in 1993 LDV went bankrupt and Leyland and DAF went their own way. After PACCAR aquired DAF and Leyland both came for teh 3th time togheter. The Leyland brand name is shelved and only a modern production site at Leyland remains. And yes they are expanding and hiring these days.
Leyland Trucks actually sponsored the Williams F1 team in the early 80's and sir frank williams had very little nice to say about them behind closed doors. Eventually he would trade leyland for Bin Laden Group (yes that bin laden) and TAG before securing a whole new raft of sponsors in 1985.
There was nothing wrong with the design of the cars for the time, some of these were innovative and recieved high acclaim from critics. It was the laughable management decisions, negligible quality conrol and apalling worker relations that ultimately doomed them
As a British car enthusiast I know all about BL... The biggest problem with BL wasn't the strikes or even the shitty cars. Management just sucked, full of infighting. Rover especially had many amazing designs, almost ready to go, before the merger. The Range Rover was the only survivor - argubly the first luxury SUV ever made and the ancestor to most cars sold today. BL was headed by an ex Jaguar boss who killed all of Rover's designs to make Jaguar look better in return. This happened constantly within BL. They needed to bite the bullet and scrap all the competing brands - Rover for luxury, Triumph for premium, Morris/Austin for mass market, MG for sports. Think how richer the car market would be with a strong BMW/Audi/Merc competitor (Rover), and a VW Group competitor with Triumph/Austin. Although MG would probably not have survived to 2024.
Volkswagen group did the same and are succesful. The problem was money. The pound was to expensive to export. Strikes and poor quality didn t help either. Because of all of this they got an bad image.
My early childhood memories of the 1970s are week after week, the BBC News programmes telling continuous bad news stories. It felt like the end was hours away for years. 😢❤😢
Same in America. In the automotive world it's called the malaise era, but that applied to the county overall. The economy was craptastic, inflation was at a rate that prices became noticeably higher almost every time you went shopping, and an general feeling that everything was falling apart.
Innovative designs that could have been world- class automobiles if they weren't underdeveloped and released to the buying public before they were ready. Disastrous reliability and durability and subpar workmanship turned off buyers both in the home market and their export markets. Couple those problems with strikes a militant workforce and inept management and it's a recipe for disaster. Once Britain entered the common market and higher quality more reliable Continental and Japanese vehicles became available they were doomed and they just remained on life support until they finally died.
9:16 makes me curious how much these people were getting paid if they were frequently on strike. Cuz everyone needs a living wage, one that is able to provide them with enough money to pay for a home, pay for healthcare, other insurance, etc. Like in the modern era folks are pushing for a bare minimum of $15 dollars in the US and have been for quite some time, even though because of inflation, the minimum wage necessary floats around $24 dollars. If they weren’t getting paid their dues they had every right to strike, if working conditions were poor, they had a good reason.
Ah, sorry. Most of my own following knows them but it makes sense this video would be interesting to newer viewers. Penn Central was an American railroad born from the merger between the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central. They were also a complete disaster. I have a documentary about them as well.
The death of the British mini is the craziest part. The car had a great reputation, and they should have been able to increase the sell price to make it profitable. It's strange how the mini was once a simple, cheap, reliable car, and now it's an over-engineered, over-priced, unreliable junker.
I feel like British Leyland is the BR of cars, both big companies composed of smaller companies that died in very short amounts of time and became government owned, making absolute garbage.
If you want to know just how nuts British Leyland was, when a fire broke out in the Longbridge tunnels in the 1970s, someone (obviously) used an office phone nearby to call for the city fire brigade. He then got reprimanded by management for unauthorised use of a company telephone.
I can hear a little man from Birmingham crying in the distance...
Some would say he COULD be a hamster...
He was never the same when his father brought home that Austin
Funnily enough, I heard a rather large bloke from Redditch screaming "everybody out!"....😅
Red Len?
@@EE12CSVT Red Robbo!
To give you an idea: when the USA introduced a new law that specified the minimum height of the headlight centers of any car sold here, British Leyland had a problem on the MG MGB. The headlights were two inches too low. Instead of restyling the hood slightly, a committee that investigated the problem determined that it was cheaper to raise the car's suspension by three inches, which completely wrecked the fantastic handling that the MGB was known for 😂
Enjoyed this, it's not often you get a video on this from outside of the UK
Just a small note, it's *Jag-U-Arr*
Thankyou, everyone in Britain
Well, it’s actually Jag-ware. Thank you, the people where the animal actually lives
@@michaelimbesi2314 yes, but not JagWIRE... Thank you, the people who still keep it to the point: that it's spoken wrong, no matter what.
@@TheChill001 Jag-wire is not the normal Americanized pronunciation either. Most Americans pronounce it as jag-warr.
Jag-wire
😭🤣🤣🤣😭😭🤣😭🤣😭
Only ever heard Jag-u-are in scamerica
I assume he calls the cat a jag-wire
😭🤣😭🤣🤣😭🤣😭🤣😭
This story reminds me a lot of the death of Bethlehem Steel. According to a friend of mine who worked there for 50 years, the departments used to charge each other shipping between the buildings at their plants.
@@thundercreekcustoms What was going on here ? 🤣
Oh British Leyland. You made the 1970s American Motors and Chrysler look well run. 🤣🤣🤣
With apologies to Samuel L. Jackson: "Say 'Jag-wire" one more time!"
Jag-you-are in England.
@@The-Sea-Dragon-1977 jag wire make bicycle brake cables!
jag-war, team murika!
No,when it's originally a certain country's brand,it really should be pronounced like it is in the Mother country. Also,exonyms/xenonyms should be banned,endonyms/autonyms rule! 💪💪 I am English,but grew up in Pennsylvania,& I get just as annoyed when Brits say Maryland as 'Mary-Land' & Arkansas as 'Ar-kan'-zas'🤣🤣
@@markhealey9409 It can be said however in it's home country, but I'm not ruled by a foreign country, in murika we have the freedom of speech so I don't have to follow the witch the queen's rules :-) It's a shite brand anyways, not worth saying right, just like ASS-stain martin, brits don't make good cars, no one does today though so nothing personal and I actually own a land rover (it's a piece of crap too, 2nd one I've had, both were prone to breakdowns at random.
@@markhealey9409 Yeah if you live under imperalism from a foreign country, neah plenty of boys died so I can call it whatever the hey doo doo I want to. jag is a junk brand anyway, not worth saying right.
A falling piano and a Morris Marina is my OTP
@@DetectivePhatWeedington yawn 🥱
I can hear Jessica playing in my head lol
Dont forget also that cars were only built on the odd day that theunionised workers could get round to it, and be bothered to put most of the parts in.
And leave used cigarette ends in the doors behind the door cards, and scrunched up newspapers they'd just finished reading.
Going on strike because it's a day that ends in Y takes a lot of planning.
Nice to hear the tale of British Leyland's demise from an American point of view, it makes the General Motors fiasco seem well-managed. What's more remarkable is that you didn't explode in sheer disbelief.
My mother bought her last British Leyland car in the late sixties. It was terrible so she bought a Citroen, which was flawless, then two more. I have never owned a British car and now drive Hondas. We watched BL destroy itself in real time and this film is the sad truth.
at 17:20, there is a Allegro and a Passat shown in a UK motor show....the Passat is still build....the Allegro is in the museum, for many good reasons!
If you actually look at it now with hindsight, with better management and understanding of the market you can see how it could have worked. The relaunch of the mini as your cheaper small car, jaguar competing as your luxury brand against Audi and Mercedes, rover as your mass marked family car and then Land Rover/Range Rover as your luxury 4 wheel drive.
The idea of Triumph being a luxury brand 🤣 'Proud' owner of a Triumph Spitfire here. It's on bricks right now and when running always had the feel of being about to break down.
They were more luxurious than a Morris with leaf springs and lever arm shocks.
the spitfire wasn't exactly a show of luxury and was more of a slightly more upscale rival to the MG midget and AH sprite. If you compare those two or the TR4-6 with the MGB, you'd start to see the difference. Add to that their saloon offerings, and you've found yourself the british BMW :D
We used to have a Triumph Herald (one of probably only a handful in the US). It still had the plastic on the door panels. Never got it running, ended up selling it to one of the rare other Herald owners in the US.
Then there were the three Austin Americas we had (none ever got on the road either) Austin America was the US model name for the British Leyland 1100-series cars.
Interesting factoid: Produced from 1962 till 1980, the MGB was the most popular sports car in the world until the Mazda MX5 Miata came along.
Leyland decided to kill MG and develop the Triumph TR-7 which was still outsold by the MGB when both cars were still in production. Working examples of TR-7’s are few and are plagued with problems.
Meanwhile, MGB‘s are plentiful and inexpensive as well as their parts. Most of the body panels and many of the other parts remained unchanged since 1962. Many consider the MGB the biggest bargain in the classic car market.
The Chinese now on the MG brand which is now on miserable little Econo boxes and cheap electric cars. MG sold more cars than Jaguar. Austin Martin, Healey and Triumph ever did.
MGB good, but would not swap my mark2 MX5 for one.
My ste[brother had a 1978 TR7 with a swapped 2 litre Granada engine. At least the engine was reliable.
The Chinese version of MG has made a sports car now
@@brianwillson9567 Are you aware of Moss Motors? They are the biggest supplier of British sports car parts in the world. They also sell parts for Miata’s. 😉
@@brianwillson9567mgb for me no jap hair dresser car thanks 😅
Good episode. As a proud owner of two MGBs, I enjoyed this. My '64 was BMC and the '77 is a BL, but they're both out of Abingdon. Thanks for sharing.
I expected to see the British Leyland logo to keep appearing like the BR one does on your Wrist Trains videos 😂😂
@@peddersmeister Yeah, and the GPO (later British Helecom, sorry, British Telecom) for the telephones
I’m a new subscriber. Got here because UA-cam recommended the toysrus video.
And man I gotta say you are funny and love the video format and narrations.
Keep the good work on this company collapse videos!!!!!
Ooh my eyes lit up when I saw you had done this. Good move. Great subject. Great video. Great channel.
My father owned and raced several British cars and motorcycles in his youth. I bought my first Triumph motorcycle, a 1969 T-100C because I knew my father had desert raced those and its big brothers the Tiger and Bonneville. I called him, excited about my new purchase, and he said "Remember, anytime you buy a piece of British engineering it has to be for the love of the ride... and the walk... and the push. Every hour you ride it will turn into 2 hours of maintenance.
My dad was right about a lot of things.
He loved them until the day he died, and I still own and love my bike, but reliable it is not.
I'm surprised the Top Gear episode centered around British Leyland didn't make an appearance.
It remains to be seen if Stellantis will turn out to be the modern global Britsh Leyland.
My favorite was the govt making them build a new factory up in Scotland, staffed by disgruntled coal miners, while keeping engine production down in England making production control a nightmare.
That was the Rootes Group. The government at the time made them build their new factory, intended for the Hillman Imp, in Glasgow
My uncle was stationed in England in the 80s. He never had a good thing to say about British Leyland. Ever. The car he praised was a 1957 ford prefect.
With British leyland competing with itself it was even design divisions that were divided between absorbed companies, often the company would only produce one car for a target demographic but have all the divisions designing one, going as far as drivable cars & production level tooling, only to be told that they weren't going to be produced, Rover was typically in competition with Triumph, even though they were both already part of Standard Motors before being merged into British Leyland, Jaguar just wouldn't play with anyone else, Jaguar's team even claimed their XJ model was specifically designed so that the Rover V8 wouldn't fit, but several owners have proven this to be a lie.
Must not forget Lucas electric components aka The Prince of Darkness. I had an MGC, I replaced the charging system with a GM and also the intake with a Rochester system, and that made it a very reliable car. The Stag would be a prime candidate for a worst of series. I’m surprised you didn’t mention Neufield that was also a major component of BL.
British Leyland: if you thought British Rail was bad, we take it to a whole new dimension!
British Rail wasn't as bad as people make out. it was doing pretty well on the run up before privatisation.
There's a great book called loosing track which goes into the time before and after privatisation it's quite eye opening.
An interesting and well researched article. I think the main problem, among many, was that the cars were just rushed to market without any of the problems ironed out. By the time many models had been on the market for two or three years ,they had, in the main, become ok. A 1978 Allegro was a more reliable and well made vehicle than a 1973 one, for example. Image was another problem. In the UK, Fords were the cool cars, think The Sweeney or The Professionals with their Granada and Capri, contrast that with Basil Fawlty and his Austin 1100 or more recently Alan Partridge and his Rover Sterling. I would say with British Leyland the intent was there but there were too many other factors to have made it successful. Fun fact, John Lennon drove an Austin Maxi, but crashed it while on holiday in Scotland. Would there be a review or retrospective of American Motor Corporation in the future? I always thought they were closest in spirit to BL.
Very true
Well, with the professionals, BL was the original supplier of cars. However the story was that BL could never understand that continuity mattered for a story and would just send whatever random vehicle from their press fleet on any given filming day, where as ford gave them consistently the same cars as needed.
years back, the first "decent" car I bought, came down to a choice between a Toyota Carina E, in dark green or a gold coloured rover of some sort.
one was £6,500, the other £5,000
my then partner couldn't see why I wanted the more expensive Toyota until I explained the Rover was British built
Jag-wire reminds me of the bad Lucas wiring the Jaguars cars have
Lucas - Prince of Darkness - wiring was bad in everything. We've so many memes about them it's hilarious.
LOL
@@caseyjones1999 Not only Jaguars : Also LandRovers are the victim of Lucas the Prince of Darkness.... I can sing a Song about IT!😁 In Germany WE call Britisch Leyland the Britisch Elend (mysery)....
@@caseyjones1999 Not only Jaguars : Also LandRovers are the victim of Lucas the Prince of Darkness.... I can sing a Song about IT!😁 In Germany WE call Britisch Leyland the Britisch Elend (mysery)....
l60 chieftain engine sums it it up in so many ways. Visited the museum recently, well worth it.
08:11 Ah, the Morris Marina, as featured in the brilliant Brittas Empire episode "Not a Good Day" (at least its engine block was).
Interesting topic, but the grating voice KILLS IT!
Best way to shut up a British car fan who dunks on American cars...
Ask them about British Leyland 😂
Well, at least the American cars of the period were far better looking, if only marginally better built. I especially like the C3 Corvette, looks wise. Most of ours, on the other hand, looked more like things you'd see in communist states.
GM and Ford would have gone bankrupt in 2008 if it wasn't for government bailouts. Don't forget that.
lol ask them about ashok leyland who uses there logo today
They did not explode and could turn though.
When even American Motors thinks at least i'm not British Leyland.
Well told tale, having lived through it and heard it told so often, you nailed it!
Well done! Thank you for making the nonsensical make sense.
Ensure our employees receive fair pay and a safe work environment?! Fuck that!!! We'd rather destroy ourselves!
Jagwire??? Wtf is a jag wire?
Really nice video! 👏
I would also add that, for sure currency fluctuation of the Pound might've helped not that much in certain periods, refraining BLMC/BL/Rover Group from certain possibly winning bets, but looking back in History and products, I also can't stop thinking that there was an absolute lack of vision, i.e., a narrow-minded thinking with focus on the idiosyncratic wishes of the UK domestic market and lack of real interest especially in the European export markets.
Also, the more we search about certain discarded prototypes, cancelled projects and others (and some of them could've been profitable or not being very expensive to conceive, being a mere reskin of existing ones, or heavily based in cars already into production), the more I believe that the successive management boards were really thinking small.
Honestly hearing how so many cars were badge engineered reminfs me so much of GM from the 80s to the 2000s.
Which film was a lot of the footage taken from? I recognised several actors who were famous in the 1970s.
A lot of the footage is from a BL quality film, called "The quality connection" and a Thames TV documentary report, from February 1980.
Most of them from comedy shows. Sort of appropriate in a way...
GM - Chevy - Saturn - Pontiac - Plymouth - Saab.... yeah nobody else did that intercorporate competition thing.
That mention of one brand stealing sales from another brand is on of the problems that the Chrysler Corporation had in the 60's and 70's and probably beyond too. If Plymouth had a model that was selling well, the Dodge dealers wanted a version of it. Also GM in the 80's 90's. I always felt that each car model should have had an exclusive model, body design or type (coupe or convertible) that was not shared with another brand in the same company.
British Leyland was kind like the British version of the Malaise Era, ironic both happened around the same time.
VW produce cars that compete among their many marques so that wasn't the problem.
There were good cars that sold well but management and unions caused problems that lead to BLs downfall.
The company that joined with Leyland was called BMC by the way.
Bmh 😅
funny, born in the late 60s....i watched in awe the news, talking about strikes all the time in the UK...
living close to the biggest car in factory in Europe,
i never heard about my uncles going on strike...all they did been on vacation to Spain!
Most of the visuals in this video that are not from newsreel footage, are taken from _The Quality Connection,_ a 1977 training film commissioned by British Leyland that stressed the importance of, unsurprisingly, workers doing their job properly and not turning out shoddy work by, for instance, getting distracted ogling the typist from the planning office. In fact it starts out with police turning up at the scene of a fatal traffic accident where there is no apparent cause.
The film was directed by Bert Wilkins and featured a plethora of well-known British mainly television actors of the day such as Michael Robbins, Paul Barber, John Comer, Trevor Bannister, David Suchet, Maddy Smith (Wendy, the leggy bird with the hourglass figure), and George Cooper (the customer who tries out the white Morris Marina in the showroom.) The duration is 24 mins 36 secs and three examples have been uploaded to UA-cam.
Why, why do Americans insist on pronouncing Jaguar as "Jagwire"? It's exactly was spelled "Jag-u-ar"!
I cringed every time he said it.
If in doubt, just say "Jaaaag" like Jezza Clarkson
They usually seem to say it Jag-wah. I think he was trying to get it right... but failed miserably! 😄
because it draws the British jag ire.
I'm American and have never heard this pronunciation you're claiming. Always Jag-wahr.
I was just watching to tge Top Gear episode on these cars
@@rhogardelmirev3530
"It may well have been the best car that British Leyland ever made"
Jeremy Clarkson talking about the Triumph Staaag
Great video about the shameful demise of basically the entire British car history......but I just can't unhear the Jag-wire and D-A-F...
Badge Engineering also screwed General Motors - and, like UK govt, the US govt bailed them out. Ford also had Mercury and Chrysler had Dodge & Plymouth.
I was amazed that these duplicate brands lasted as long as they did
If only they’d stayed with Honda. I had a Rover Mini and Rover 400. Great cars!
I was thinking that maybe Volkswagen would go the same way...here in the UK they sell cars that compete which each other and essentially the same..VW Audi Skoda and Seat.In a recent satisfaction survey the Golf 8 had come stone dead last out of 75 cars, i suppose at least they haven't gone on strike
Darkness forgot to mention that MG got swept up in this mess as well.
Pretty much all no niche british car brands did.
MG (electric cars) are a Chinese brand now.
@@obelic71 Funny how so many of the British marques ended up in the hands of former colonies (USA and India, and--to a degree--China) or their historical enemy (Germany). If we could figure a way to get the Irish, Australians and French in on this, then I think we'd have a clean sweep.
The sun has set on the British automotive empire...
My favourite car brand of the period, none of the modern cars excite me anymore unlike the last models of the Rover brand demised in 2005
So the British Government did not help? The bailed out BL in 1975. Without that the company would have folded then.
Anybody else notice that Darkness DIDN'T whimper when he mentioned British Railways???
12:00 Ford did, it was called the Lincoln Blackwood. Truck buyers didn’t want the extra expense and luxury buyers didn’t want a truck. It only lasted one year so they’re rare and collectible now. I’ve only seen one, ironically on the street like any other truck.
And then they replaced that with the Mark LT, which was just a more luxurious F-150 (Which is what the Blackwood should have been to begin with). And now the F-150 offers luxury versions anyway.
Some great cars did emerge...great engineers overshadowed by dismal management.The Rover SD1 was way ahead of its time and the Jaguar Xj6/12 could compete with the top luxury cars on a low budget.
You should feel bad for Leyland, as someone who lives there the entire town is a disaster.
I avoided any of those cars in the 1970s and 1980s by buying mainly Ford and Vauxhall. Later on I had a couple of Triumph Dolomites as classic cars in the late 1990s and they were basically very good small cars, but boy did they like to rust.
Just in time for four other channels to have covered it this year!
Yeah I knew all of this from the 6 videos on BL that I watched last year! Still enjoyed it though
01:53 Jaguar = JAG-wahr
03:24 _Volkswagon_ = FOHLKS-vah-g'n (in German; what's in the video is the standard USian pronunciation)
07:28 niche = NEE-shh or NIT-ch (USian)
If you speak actual English it's Jag You Are, but that's possibly wrong anyway since it's a Mesoamerican word.
@@milksheihk I've heard both in UK dialects, though primarily the two-syllable one. The UK's really diverse though when it comes to pronunciation.
@@alexhajnal107 The dropping of the third syllable might only be relatively recent, Always three syllable in Australia, New Zealand & South African English, English media we got here used three syllables in the 80s & 90s, & every British car show up until Clarkson was sacked from Top Gear for the third & final time used the three syllable pronunciation.
@@milksheihk Interesting. I'm not really a car person; if that's the standard pronunciation in the media then I stand corrected.
@@milksheihk Jag you err here in deepest Slough. I liked the 'Merican Jag waar.
A lot of information was given in this video. Making and selling automobiles is very complex. The major problem was all of the major automobile manufacturers of Great Britain were brought together into one giant company. General Motors had a similar challenge. General Motors was the mother company of Cadillac, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, ... Automobiles across these brands were basically the same vehicle with different names. Often they look alike with similar add-on features. Chevy would make a middle-class cheaper model and Pontiac would make a slightly more expensive sporty model while Cadillac would make an upscale, luxury model that was very expensive. The problem was many customers saw through this and did not consider the different models offered as being different. However, I am not an expert so I cannot be this was the primary problem. There were other issues presented on this video that were quite interesting.
All I can say is that free-market capitalistic trading systems are more efficient in delivering what the market or the people wants. Whenever governments get involved you introduce a group of political elites who are good at politics, but who do not know how to make and sell cars. In Great Britain the government became the primary owner of all British auto-makers. Can the primary owner sit by and allow the managers of these auto-makers run their company without interference? Of course the British government interfered. In a democracy the political leaders have to appease the general population. In a free-market capitalist trading system it is supply and demand that determines how auto-makers operate their business. That is the fundamental conflict. The British government wanted to control its automobile manufacturers in order to save the JOBS of those who voted them into office. Not to create a competitive (domestically & internationally) automobile industry. In a free-market, competitive automobile market-place the auto-makers must make cars the market (or the people) want to buy. The British government wanted to save jobs for their automobile workers. British automobile managers were trying saving jobs in their factories. British automobile makers were not focused on making products that people wanted to buy, which would have saved British jobs. As a result, British auto-makers slowly but surely failed. The British government used British taxpayer money to help the British Auto Industry die a slow painful death while depleting the Treasury.
Just look at the former Soviet Union (Russia) and all the former Eastern Bloc Warsaw-Pact countries. Their industries were based on a Command Economy centrally planned by the benevolent socialist-communist governments. None of them can compete with the private companies of the modern democratic Republics with free-market capitalist trading systems. This is not a coincidence. The British Auto Industry failed because it did not make cars the markets (or the people) wanted to buy. I understand the narrator of this video claimed that British Auto-Makers won prizes for making the "best cars." I do not know what he meant by "best." The only way established auto-makers can fail is because not enough people wanted to buy their cars.
The people of the former Eastern Bloc and the remaining third-world, agrarian countries live in societies where the markets and indeed trade is controlled by a handful of elites. Individual property rights are not protected, because a handful of elites have all the power. Often the political elites ignore individual property rights for the greater good of all. I hope the people of the modern, industrialized Republics will understand this and continue to do the things that make them successful. It is the modern, industrialized Republics with free-market capitalist trading system and RULE of LAW who created the conveniences of the modern world.
I read Stellantis in this
You should do one on the Studebaker-Packard Merger. Very similar story.
Our first ever family car was a beige Morris Marina 1.7 super and when I passed my driving test I bought a 1.3L brown Allegro. Looking back they were awful cars but back then they were the mutts nuts! 😂
In the end it were two American companies which profited of the mismanagement of British Leyland, Ford and GM, which had taken over Vauxhall in 1925.
British Leyland cars from the 1970s and 80s had in general a bad name for reliability and longevity on the European export market, proven by the fact that you still can see German made cars from the 1980s on the roads now, but a Mini Metro or an Austin Maestro is rarer as seeing a Pagani Zonda on the road now.
Its Jaguar NOT Jagwar - its mainly the americans that can't or won't pronounce Jaguar and call it Jagwar but they can pronounce Utah and Umbrella ,
12:00 - Don't worry, Ford actually did that. It was called the Lincoln Mark LT.
12:05 Isn’t GM doing the same thing with GMC and Chevy? 🤔
Leyland as a brandname is now a part of PACCAR.
In the factory based in the place Leyland 40% of all DAF trucks are build.
The European DAF brand of PACCAR has 3 plants. Eindhoven Netherlands (origin of DAF) Leyland UK (origin of Leyland) and DAF/PACCAR Westerlo Belgium who is a hirstorical parts supplier for DAF and Leyland.
DAF and Leyland have a long history togehter. DAF did license build Leyland engines trucks and bus chassis for all their Trucks and busses. They became one of their biggest customers.
They even merged in the 1987 to Leyland DAF (LDV Leyland Daf vehicels).
in 1993 LDV went bankrupt and Leyland and DAF went their own way.
After PACCAR aquired DAF and Leyland both came for teh 3th time togheter.
The Leyland brand name is shelved and only a modern production site at Leyland remains.
And yes they are expanding and hiring these days.
Leyland Trucks actually sponsored the Williams F1 team in the early 80's and sir frank williams had very little nice to say about them behind closed doors.
Eventually he would trade leyland for Bin Laden Group (yes that bin laden) and TAG before securing a whole new raft of sponsors in 1985.
The guy using a carpenters Yankee screwdriver to assemble the door locks.
Love your pronunciation of Jaguar
If I could go back in time and redesign these cars, BL would have survived……..
There was nothing wrong with the design of the cars for the time, some of these were innovative and recieved high acclaim from critics. It was the laughable management decisions, negligible quality conrol and apalling worker relations that ultimately doomed them
'Jagwire'. I do laugh at how north Americans pronounce it. Nice video :)
As a British car enthusiast I know all about BL...
The biggest problem with BL wasn't the strikes or even the shitty cars. Management just sucked, full of infighting. Rover especially had many amazing designs, almost ready to go, before the merger. The Range Rover was the only survivor - argubly the first luxury SUV ever made and the ancestor to most cars sold today. BL was headed by an ex Jaguar boss who killed all of Rover's designs to make Jaguar look better in return. This happened constantly within BL. They needed to bite the bullet and scrap all the competing brands - Rover for luxury, Triumph for premium, Morris/Austin for mass market, MG for sports. Think how richer the car market would be with a strong BMW/Audi/Merc competitor (Rover), and a VW Group competitor with Triumph/Austin. Although MG would probably not have survived to 2024.
Volkswagen group did the same and are succesful. The problem was money. The pound was to expensive to export. Strikes and poor quality didn t help either. Because of all of this they got an bad image.
The pound had damm all to do with it. The cars were rubbish and outdated.
No one wants outdated tech and design topped off with poor reliability.
My early childhood memories of the 1970s are week after week, the BBC News programmes telling continuous bad news stories. It felt like the end was hours away for years. 😢❤😢
Same in America. In the automotive world it's called the malaise era, but that applied to the county overall.
The economy was craptastic, inflation was at a rate that prices became noticeably higher almost every time you went shopping, and an general feeling that everything was falling apart.
Jagwire? Not familiar with that brand!
i like how you pronounce the word jaguar
Jaguwire 😮
@@dustin_4501I prefer the Texas pronunciation Jagwarrrrr. 😊
Made me think of something to do with electronics: JTAG-wire (some weird mix of JTAG and 1-wire?)
The Moris Minor looks like a British Bug.
British leyland is now Ashok Leyland
Which manufactures trucks and buses in India
Who's got a Delorean mates? I'd like to go back in time, and woo the beautiful woman putting on makeup at her desk.
Innovative designs that could have been world- class automobiles if they weren't underdeveloped and released to the buying public before they were ready.
Disastrous reliability and durability and subpar workmanship turned off buyers both in the home market and their export markets.
Couple those problems with strikes a militant workforce and inept management and it's a recipe for disaster.
Once Britain entered the common market and higher quality more reliable Continental and Japanese vehicles became available they were doomed and they just remained on life support until they finally died.
@11:11 it's Arthur from On the Buses.
Also John Comer from Last of the Summer Wine also appears in several scenes
5:00 Sir David Suchet
You should do one one our Aussie made Leyland P 76 🤦♂️
Every time a human being utters the word: “Jag-wire”, somewhere on the planet a baby deer gets hit by a car…
Probably just outside Buffalo, New York.
I wonder what the union had to say when they found out about all the actors (and actress 😍) who 'starred' in the film? Now, who can name them all? 🤔
@12:16 we're all looking at you Chevy Silverado/GMC Sierra
What is the BL documentary featured in this all about, l wonder with all those 70s comedy actors!
9:16 makes me curious how much these people were getting paid if they were frequently on strike. Cuz everyone needs a living wage, one that is able to provide them with enough money to pay for a home, pay for healthcare, other insurance, etc. Like in the modern era folks are pushing for a bare minimum of $15 dollars in the US and have been for quite some time, even though because of inflation, the minimum wage necessary floats around $24 dollars. If they weren’t getting paid their dues they had every right to strike, if working conditions were poor, they had a good reason.
I think British Leyland failed for one simple reason. Merging car companies is like a marriage: two is enough.
The last Car by rover was the 75 I owned one and was a nice car, Look it up.
@@bsasteve lots of 5 series bits....
Anyone know what or who Penn Central is? 🤷
Obviously a US reference, but on a worldwide platform...
Ah, sorry. Most of my own following knows them but it makes sense this video would be interesting to newer viewers. Penn Central was an American railroad born from the merger between the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central. They were also a complete disaster. I have a documentary about them as well.
Had to stop after, Jag wire.
The death of the British mini is the craziest part. The car had a great reputation, and they should have been able to increase the sell price to make it profitable. It's strange how the mini was once a simple, cheap, reliable car, and now it's an over-engineered, over-priced, unreliable junker.
The classic Mini is just so much cooler than the modern ones.
I feel like British Leyland is the BR of cars, both big companies composed of smaller companies that died in very short amounts of time and became government owned, making absolute garbage.