How Just One Mistake Destroyed Britain‘s Motor Industry

Click to reserve a copy of our book: → mettlehistory.co.uk ← Remembering the Britain that made things. ——— In 1950, if you walked into a showroom in Sydney, or Auckland, or Cape Town, the car you drove out in was almost certainly British. More than half of every exported vehicle across the world that year came off a British line. Only America built more. But only twenty-five years later the largest car maker in the country was bankrupt and begging the state for money. Everyone has a reason why. The unions. The strikes. German engineering, Japanese imports, Margaret Thatcher. Every one is true. None is the answer, because every one came after. The real mistake was made decades earlier, on a shop floor and in an accounts office, by men who built some of the finest cars in the world and never learned what a single one cost to make. There’s a workshop in Dagenham where a Ford man took a new Mini apart on a bench and wrote a number at the bottom of the page that nobody in Britain’s car industry could answer. We’ll come back to that bench. That number is where the truth about all of this begins.