My inner 10-year-old boy was eager to visit the Heritage Motor Centre (HMC) in
Gaydon, Warwickshire. Until my brother was old enough to drive, my family
was carless and I sought consolation in Dinky toys, notably a Studebaker
Golden Hawk and a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud (shell over Tudor grey, since you
ask). All cars, as a result of this traumatic deprivation, still fill me
with an aching sense of longing. But soon after I turn off the M40, my heart
sinks and I grow old again.
Our national car museum looks, somehow, disappointed, like a DIY superstore.
No wonder. Its roots are in the 1970s, when the British Leyland Motor
Corporation — universally regarded as the worst car company the world has
ever known, until General Motors and Chrysler bid for the title — decided to
preserve its “historic vehicles”. Given that these included the Austin
Allegro and the Morris Marina, the word “historic” is something of a laugh.
The HMC is now a charity, but the ill-displayed collection is still
dominated by the legacy of the decade when the British motor industry,
burdened by union madmen, dud management and appalling cars, decided,
understandably, to kill itself. Gaydon is, in fact, a cemetery.
In May the HMC opened an exhibition dedicated to 50 years of the Mini. Fair
enough, the Mini was a great British car. But though it was designed and
engineered by geniuses, it was produced, sold and marketed by idiots. The VW
Beetle, a much, much worse car, massively outsold and outlived it. Now a new
Mini is made by BMW, a German company. No British company makes it because
there are no British car companies apart from a few eccentric oddities:
Bristol, Morgan, Westfield, Ariel, Noble, Caterham — none of which can or
want to mass-produce cars. The most glamorous names of British automotive
culture are now foreign-owned — Rolls-Royce and Bentley are German; Land
Rover and Jaguar, Indian; Aston Martin, Kuwaiti — and the rest — Austin,
Riley, Alvis, Morris, Hillman, Humber, Rover, Triumph — are dead and gone.
Vauxhall is hanging on by its fingernails.
Yet, thanks to Toyota, Nissan, Honda, BMW and even GM via Vauxhall, we have
some efficient car-production plants. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near
enough. Before the recession we made 1.7m cars and various commercial
vehicles a year. France made 3m, Germany 6m and Japan 11.6m. Not only that,
these are not even real car plants.
“Most of what we are doing in the UK is just screwdriver assembly,” says Max
Warburton, an auto-industry analyst — the best in the business — at the
investment group Sanford Bernstein.
“A lot of these plants are no more sophisticated than plants now being opened
in emerging markets. There’s very little product development and engineering
expertise involved.”
In spite of all that, we remain a nation of petrolheads, producing the world’s
best racing cars and the best car TV show in the form of Top Gear. Well,
it’s really about boys and the cars are just props, but still… Yet the hard,
sad truth is that Britain has almost no presence in the world car market.
Worse, what little presence we have may be about to evaporate. The 1970s may
be happening again — though, as Warburton says grimly, “This time we have
less to lose.” It’s not just the recession, it’s the long and terrible
legacy of our withdrawal from the world car market. British car-making is
again on the brink, and this time there won’t be the consolation of a few
gleaming Japanese plants. This time it will be the apocalypse, and hundreds
of thousands of jobs are on the line.
The recession has exposed the rocks on the beach,” says Richard Parry-Jones,
“but the rocks were always there.” When he was at Ford, Parry-Jones
masterminded the Mondeo — pound for pound and corner by corner, Jeremy
Clarkson and I agree, the greatest car in the world. Parry-Jones knows more
about how to engineer sensuous joy into mass-produced cars than anybody. His
misfortune, perhaps, is not living in Germany or Japan, where society would
rate his genius more highly.
Also in Gaydon, a short drive from the cemetery in the amazing little iQ
Toyota has lent me, is Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). Here the buildings are
slicker and there is a distinct air of high-tech confidence. Inside I am
shown the Range Rover LRX (previously badged as the Land Rover LRX), which
you should be able to buy for about £30,000 in the not-too-distant future.
Swoopy and funky, it is the car the Thunderbirds would have driven if they
hadn’t been puppets, and the one James Bond will if he has an ounce of
conscience. I’d certainly have the Dinky. More to the point, in hybrid form,
the LRX should emit 120 grams of CO2 per kilometre. A full-fat Range Rover
emits 376 grams. Jaguar Land Rover makes high-emitting cars, and everybody
now knows that cannot be their future.
Here I meet JLR’s chief executive, David Smith, an urbane, intelligent man who
finds himself in the supremely post-colonial position of handling two of the
greatest British marques on behalf of an Indian, Ratan Tata. “It’s a
critical moment,” he says, fixing my eyes towards the end of the interview.
“It was a critical moment anyway, but the recession has made it more acute.
It’s all quite vulnerable — there’s nothing to anchor the industry in this
country.” Are we facing another 1970s? He shrugs, alarmingly.
To summarise: as if the death of British-owned volume car makers wasn’t bad
enough, it was followed by the loss of what are known as Tier-one suppliers.
These are companies like, in Germany, Bosch and Siemens, which produce
large, assembled chunks of cars — control systems, gearboxes, whatever. The
importance of the supply chain that feeds the car makers cannot be
overstated, accounting for 75% of the value of the material in a new car.
Only GKN — which has a 40% market share in drive shafts — and a few others
survive as world-class Tier-one players. The industry has thus been hollowed
out and left almost entirely dependent on foreign companies, not just for
finished cars but also for the bits inside. Yet, for strategic and political
reasons, the car makers stayed here, even though their rationale for doing
so was getting ever more dubious the longer the pound stayed high. The
recession, having provided a collapsed pound, has therefore bought the
British car industry some time — a consolation for the accompanying losses.
But the structural issues remain.
The world car industry is consolidating and we are not players in that game;
we are supplicants. Fiat’s Sergio Marchionne, who went for Chrysler, also
wanted GM Europe. But by that he means Germany’s Opel. In the event, Opel
went to the Canadian group Magna, over which we have even less leverage.
Britain’s Vauxhall, like Sweden’s Saab, is a potentially disposable bit-part
player, whatever assurances the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, may
wring out of the Germans. On top of that, Nissan’s presence in Sunderland
may be at risk. Nissan is controlled by the protectionist-minded French, and
in a cold economic climate they may want to see those jobs contributing not
to perfidious Albion but to la gloire de la patrie.
