Reflections on Cars and Management

On a couple of sites I follow, I've been bemused to read comments about current electric cars, where they are likened to "the terrible cars from Japan in the 1970s", I just had to pause, as it shows very little grasp of history.

Being of an age that remembers Japanese cars showing up in the market in the 1970s and, if being a bit rust prone (but still better than Italian: remember the Alfa Sud where you could hear them disintegrate?), they were vastly better engineered and built than the English competition, and were vastly cheaper than anything European, other than genuinely dreadful things from firms like Soviet-era Skoda. 

American cars of the time were pretty poor as well, but they had the merit of being relatively simple and over-engineered enough so they could be fettled to be reliable.

When do you now see something like a Maxi, Princess, Allegro, or Avenger? They are deservedly gone. There are still a bunch of 1970's Corollas, RX-7s, GT-Rs, assorted small utes and the like in the hands of kids doing the JDM  and resto-modifier thing, as well as collectors who hunt the original-one-owner examples.

I grew up having to deal with the joys of British car ownership that includes: endless oil leaks, Lucas (prince of darkness) electrical systems, archaic mechanicals that kept being put in to new models, the need to do things like a valve grind every 20,000 miles, cracking blocks, haemorrhaging cooling systems, heating systems that needed an asthma inhaler, demisters that didn't, windscreen wipers that went on strike in the rain, indifferent-at-best dealer service, relentless gouging for import-controlled parts, miserly 12 month warranties, and all the rest.

Japanese cars typically didn't behave like that, and their systems worked for the - quite long - life of the car.

The management of the English motor industry is what made it what it is today, with any volume nameplate owned by someone overseas who installed their own management, leaving only some interesting niche and bespoke makers run by people who were actually good engineers and not amateur managers.

Illustrative story: a friend's father had a new Daimler 5.3 litre V12 from new (in those days farmer=money). He was careful with it, but six months outside the 1 year warranty the block cracked. Despite it being about as catastrophic failure as you can get, the dealer didn't want anything to do with the car, and with no disputes tribunal in those days the court costs of going after them were prohibitive. The repair price was beyond belief, so for far less an expert mounted a hand-built Chev V8 that neatly mated up to the existing General Motors TH-350 the Daimler came with: better fuel economy, more power and better reliability.

The extremes we had to go to get reliable cars is why the Japanese car firms were greeted with open arms. To quote a mate who was a bike guy: "oh my god, it's built like a watch!!" on opening up a Honda 360 twin...