Let me introduce you to the Austin Allegro.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
This little car holds many lessons for us as we consider our auto industry today - for it is a stark symbol of an bygone era - the era of the British auto industry. For the Allegro can legitimately be considered the part of the last gasp of a once mighty company that has brought us many legendary marques such as Triumph, MG, the Mini, Rover, and many, many other cars that used to rule the road in Britain. Of course I am speaking of British Leyland. Its history is very illustrative, and I had the opportunity to observe it firsthand. Follow me over the fold...
I had the opportunity to test drive the Allegro once, or rather, my father did. I was in high school, and we were living in my mother's native Britain. It wasn;t a bad car, pretty modern. Maybe a little overpriced, but not terrible. It did little to excite my father however, who once owned a mighty Studebaker, and a Mercedes in Germany. Living in Europe,, I was an auto nut. My dad was in the US military, and we lived in Germany, then England. I loved all the European cars. I knew the names of them all. On the roads of England back then, they were almost all British cars - Austins, Morris, Ford Anglia (of Harry Potter fame), funny 3 wheeled Reliants, and of course the Mini in all its variants. Not mention the sports cars - oh the sports cars.
This was in the days before Maggie Thatcher, and nationalized everything seemed to be 'the way' in Britain. Rails, utilities, even cars. It was well known at the time that the British Leyland companies were the 'official' national cars in Britain - that the industry was subsidized.
Enter the Allegro. The Allegro was developed as the 'modern' British Leyland car. It was Leyland's answer to the emerging Japanese cars, the improved models from Volkswagen, the ingenious Citroens of France. It was British Leyland's car for everyman. Except for one small problem - it wasn't any good. British Leyland's products lack of reliability was legendary. The car was produced by an inefficient, top heavy company with too much bureaucracy and too little innovation. Though popular, the Allegro and cars like it definitely did a lot to speed the eventual demise of British Leyland.
So, why has the British auto industry disappeared while its continental European counterparts have not? What lessons can we take from the ugly little Allegro?
British economists and historians will tell you that, through bailouts and other measures, British Leyland was 'saved' but, in the end, it disappeared. There is no British owned auto industry today. The taxpayer costs for 'saving' British Leyland in the end amounted to nothing. The marques that were worth saving (Rover, Jaguar, even the Mini) are now foriegn owned - though the Mini of today looks like the old, it is a BMW. One must conclude that the world consumer likes British cars, and they have saved some of them, but there is no British owned auto industry to benefit from it.
http://edition.cnn.com/...
I can vouch for this firsthand. I have had the opportunity to return to England many times. The roads are devoid of British made cars. There are ubiquitous French, German, Spanish, Czech, Japanese, and Korean cars, but few British ones.
Surely we can do better than the fate of British Leyland with the US auto industry. I think it starts by recognizing that it cannot continue in its current form, that radical changes will need to be made. The big 3 are caught in a web. The web is not just union costs, there are many strands such as overcapacity in dealer networks, real estate agreements, many others that are easy to identify with a little research. Somehow this web needs to be cut - the beast needs to be freed. If we focus on it as a political issue, as a battle between unions and workers versus the oppressors who want to destroy them, we will miss the real issue, and we will fail. The guiding principle needs to be - save what is worth saving, address the human impact of liquidating what needs to be liquidated, define a clear future direction for what a US auto industry needs to be.
The US knows how to build autos. We have mad auto building skills, great people, wonderful technology. Lets figure out how to channel it into a sustainable future for the auto industry. I don't want to look back in 25 years and lament a bygone industry, as the iconic little Allegro forces us to do for the once mighty British Leyland.