MG Rover dead - UK vehicle industry too?

True, my mistake.

How about one of each of these in your garage Wolfie ??

http://www.aulro.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=4619

;-))

Rosco, what an unfriendly site indeed. Not welcoming at all as it needs a username to enter. I think I will keep away from it's exclusivity.

Goodness me, to say I'm shocked and amazed is an understatement.

You wouldn't by chance have done something unusual in the past that hangs over your head?? No compromising photos involving chooks or anything ??

........... ;-))

hehe probably Rosco something to do with driving one for Baz before he bought it and I now suffer pennance.

I beg to differ ROTORD. I don't think that any nation, including USA, would even remotely approach loosing as many numbers of 'big name' brands of vehicle manufacturing in such a brief period of time.

Try writing a list and do a comparison.

These British factories weren't small 'boutique' manufacturers, most were major players.

Big shame.

Rotard some interesting points there, but I'll have to counter with a few arguments (all in good spirit - not starting a fight :-)).

1927 is universally regarded as 'the great stockmarket crash' and had claimed the scalps of countless US businesses across the board, which had a domino effect. It wasn't that the consumer stopped buying a particular brand of vehicle and bought another, it was that the consumer stopped purchasing full stop. Either way, I'm focussing on the post WW2 years.

I'll discount the elite Dusenberg and Cord's as they were pre WW2 and were comparable to specialist manufacturers such as MacLaren today. These marques would have cost the equivalent of 15 times the average yearly wage.

Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile - all GM and still very much alive. Admittedly they all came under the multinational GM banner at one stage or another, but they have all endured and produce individual and distinctly different vehicles, ie: not just a rebadging exercise (such as Ford Maverick/Nissan Patrol) which is what counts. Try fitting a 400ci Pontiac motor in to a 400ci Chev, or putting petrol into 350ci Oldsmobile and see how far you get. Very different vehicles.

Lincoln, Mercury - all Ford and in current production and in the case of Lincoln, producing some innovative and significant vehicles.

So to compare apples with apples, lets revise the list down to......

Studebaker (too inovative for it's own good)
Willy's
Packard
Nash / Rambler (died in 1980's)
Kaiser Fraser
AMC
Hudson
and I'll add DeSoto and Indian (motorcycle) to that.

The population of the US is just under 300million and the UK is 60million. This would leave the list on a per-capita basis at roughly 2 or 3 failures for the US compared to however many I wrote in my initial post (lots) for the UK, so I think you'd be drawing a veeeerryyy long bow to suggest any other manufacturing country even came close to vaugely approaching the unparalleled disaster of the British car industry.

"Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile - all GM and still very much alive." Sorry V8, Oldsmobile is very much DEAD! And you would be amazed at the parts interchangability between Olds, Chev and Pontiac, both pre-war and post-war.

Wombat, I thought Olds were dead too, but they still have a company website with current m odels listed. Very confusing. I tend to agree with you though, I was sure the Olds division of GM had folded.

As someone who has worked on 455ci Olds 98 (biiiggg tank), helped put a Pontiac motor into a Holden one-tonner and researched Oldsmobile 350ci V8 diesels, I can assure you that you'd be surprised at the NON interchangeability of cross branded GM parts. I was. PITA

V8, General Motors announced the impending closure of the Oldsmobile line of vehicles in December, 2000 and the last Olds drove off the assembly line at 10.00am on April 29, 2004. It was an Alero (VIN IG3NF52E84C243165) and the 35,229,218th Oldsmobile built since 1897.

With regard to interchangeability you will find identical components in different American manufactured marques but little, if any intercontinental cross pollination after the Australian body building company, Holden's discontinued building bodies for Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Pontiac, in 1948.

That'd make sense re: Olds as the most recent model on the website says 2004 upon closer inspection.

I can assure you with complete confidence from personal experience that all US GM parts are not interchangeable between marques. Naturally there are lots of common componentry, but there are many that aren't. Pontiac, Chev, Buick, Cadillac, Oldsmoblile etc are most certainly NOT rebadging exercises of one common vehicle. The new Pontiac GTO is a LHD Aussie Monaro for example.

Either way, my initial point was simply expressing my sincere amazement at the staggering and unparallelled ineptitiude of a massive number of individual manufacturing companies, going from world leaders, to dead and buried in 50 short years. Having had the misfortune of working on some of the Poms 70's and 80's examples of 'engineering' I think it is probably for the best anyway.

The "unparallelled ineptitiude of a massive number of individual manufacturing companies, going from world leaders, to dead and buried in 50 short years" can be summed up in one word - CONSERVATISM. The number of businesses which are unable to adapt with their relevant environments and technologies is amazing. I see it every day!

Hi Rotard,

I notice you listed Buick.

OK currently alive under GM banner, however you must be phsycic as GM are to drop the Buick brand. I received this news via a contact within GM in the US.

Hugh

Lord Lucas, The Crown Prince of Darkness!

Truckster. The future of their British owned mass production industry may not look good, but they still produce many vehicles for overseas companies.
Just like Australia, it's all owned by Ford and GMH but unlike us, there are still plenty of small makers of specialist vehicles around in the UK, with full order books.
As someone who's not so prejudiced pointed out, they once had an industry which supplied the world with all types of vehicles and machinery of many other kinds and made the vehicles used in the building of the Snowy Scheme.
Look back into the not too distant past and you'll find that this country was opened up with British built equipment not that supplied by the good old US of A or Japan.
What they haven't been good at is marketing or changing the product to what the consumer wanted and there can be no excuses for that sort of incompetence.
From what I've read there's going to be an investigation into the behind the scenes area in Rover as it looks as if plenty of money was made but got paid into the pockets of those that supposedly rescued the company not many years ago.
And the workers go down the road with no entitlements!

Alan, they did 'once' have an industry that supplied the world, but they don't any more which is my point.

Also, wasn't the Snowy the first job Toyota's were used on in Australia (imported by Theiss from memory)

Thiess was the first importer of landcruisers

Only 1,919,999.4 more to go to beat the 1972 record! ;-)

Bring back the Morris Marina and Triumph TC2000 I say! Pure class.

Make that 1.67 million.