So many turkeys, so little time. How about BL’s disastrous 1969 attempt to update the brilliant and cute little Mini with a big modern front end? And they even gave it a special name to go with it. Yes, BL really understood what the Mini was all about. Eventually, the big nose Mini reverted back to its true form. And that unfortunate name has been revived, no less. And just how many new Clubman owners have the faintest idea of where the name came from?
Oink!
It looks Japanese for some reason. Big American style grill on small car maybe?
It may be the mirrors, positioned way out on the front fenders. Japanese cars carry their mirrors way out front, or at least they used to.
I always thought Japanese cars looked weird with the hockey stick mirrors way out front – but my 1992 Nissan Laurel had them, and they were actually great. It was easier to scan from the road to them and back again, and they made towing a caravan an absolute breeze. They were electric though, I guess adjusting non-electric wing mirrors could be frustrating…
The Clubman front had one purpose in life to pass ADR crash standards. Australia changed its design rules and the new front was the only way the Mini could pass.
My wife drives a (new) Clubman. When I first heard about the new model a few years ago, the name “Traveller” was being kicked around, and I thought it was more suitable (this is the original):
Navistar still holds the rights to the name Traveler so they couldn’t have used it. Honda wanted to use the name Scout for the Pilot but Navistar wouldn’t license the name.
And there’s my answer. So Navistar still holds both Travelall and Traveler (or Traveller)?
Speaking of which, I saw a nice Travelall in a parking lot on my way home the other night–if it’s still there next week (when I can drive by in daylight, I hope), I’ll get a photo and post it.
Anybody who ever took a spanner to a Mini would appreciate that big nose.
There is that, but what’s practicality got to do with owning a Mini?
You needed a bigger piece of cardboard to block the grille in wet weather on the Clubman but it was easier to get at the distributor to dry it out when it stopped.
Yup. And if you want to stick a fwd v8 under there, clubman is the way to go http://www.spagweb.com/v8mini/
I’m gonna commit a real gearhead faux pax here…
I like it.
(ducks thrown monkey wrenches…)
Actually, I always liked the Clubman front better than the original! I think it looks more modern – particularly on the wagon and Traveller models. Having said that, I do like the original front as well though. And as Uncle Mellow points out, it made servicing them easier.
It looks like it’ll fall forward every time you hit the brakes.
I agree with Uncle Mellow- as an Allegro Club member, I can vouch that the big nose served a very practical purpose. Anybody who has tried to change a distributor or water pump would be thankful for that extra space to allow a spanner to turn more than 1/16th of a turn.
However, I still have to say that the Mini is the greatest turkey of all time, and a deadly sin to boot. The sin of sloth.
Yes, sloth. Not because Minis were slow, but rather because BMC-BL-AustinRover-RoverGroup-BAE-Honda-BMW all failed to fix its all too obvious flaws as technology developed. I mean it only took GM 8 years to turn the horrid Citation into the quite reliable ’round back’ Centuriera. BMC were unable to fix the Mini’s bugs in 40 years.
I’m not talking about a comprehensive redesign or character-endectomy. But rather, perhaps galvanizing that oh-so-thin and rust prone bodyshell- or at least drilling drain holes in the water traps. Or perhaps changing the clutch design to make it able to last more than 30K miles. Or fitting a proper seal where the gearstick enters the gearbox. Or even fitting a distributor that doesn’t need a plastic shield to not stall when it rains. I could go on.
Minis were designed as a people’s car, and they absolutely failed the brief. A people’s car is supposed to be robust and easy to repair. Minors were, 2cv’s were, Renault 4’s were, Beetles were, and even Fiat 600’s were. Mini’s were fiddly, unreliable, and difficult to get set up right- even dealers struggled and needed special tools. Today this isn’t such a problem, as the ‘specialist’ tools can be purchased cheaply due to Chinese slave labour, but the price of Churchill original tools (as required by the Haynes manual to do anything) was far beyond the reach of the average owner.
I liked my Allegro and think it was far better than it was given credit for. However, unlike many Mini friends, I don’t think it was a great car. My well developed ’81 Allegro was in many ways better than a 1981 escort. And that’s probably what will be on its tombstone: “better than the first year FWD Escort”
Minis aren’t great, or even good. They are quite fun as a toy, but are entirely unsuitable for transportation.
I really like the original Mini, but I’ll second your call for BMC/BL Deadly Sin status there Brian.
It baffles me that with all the frantic design and development work that went on there through the 60s, 70s and 80s, none of the BMC/BL brass ever seems to have recognised the need to properly refine their longest serving – and arguably most successful – product, to sort out of its (relatively) minor niggles.
Unlike so many other products of the faltering mid-twentieth century British motor industry, I’d say that the Mini was a fundamentally sound design. A little focus and direction it could have made it irrefutably great.
Mini as BMC’s Sin of Sloth: Nicely put.
According to Keith Adams and his formidable site Aronline.co.uk BMC had nothing in development when Leyland took over BMC to form BL in 1968. Except for the Maxi that was soon to be launched, they had nothing at all. The ADO16 had been launched in 1962, they hadn’t even begun to plan for a successor six years later. The same with the Mini, the same with the 1800. It’s simply astonishing.
I LOVE Keith Adams’ site – not crazy about the recent redesign (which I find makes locating content in his vast archive harder) but it is a real gem. I’ve been linking to it in comments where possible but it’s hard to see links here as they’re styled the same as plain content…
As I read it you’re absolutely right: there were (incredibly!) no actual models in development at BMC when BL was formed, but looking through the development articles for the various models, and Adams’ various articles in the “Concepts” section (like the amazing little 9X Mini replacement*) the engineers do seem to have been let run wild on some projects, even if they never came to fruition. And there was ongoing concept and development work in 1968… just not directed at producing an actual signed off model. Madness.
Focus and direction is what seems to have been lacking, not imagination, or capability, or activity.
* that’s a link for example.
Thanks and I think the farina saloons were another example. They sold ok so bmc left them alone. Had they used telescopic dampers ball joints and front disc brakes they could have had a Peugeot 404. Instead, they were selling early 30s technology in 1971 as middle class cars.
Is this all that different from the story of VW’s addiction to the Beetle? Both cars were almost impossible to redesign without changing their fundamental character, and they sold so well for so long that their manufacturers put off planning a successor. Of course, the irony is that it was when cars using the Mini’s basic design architecture achieved widespread popularity that VW finally had to throw in the towel on the rear engine cars.
I always thought the Clubman looked like someone mated the front end of a Ford Cortina Mk II to a Mini bodyshell. And that’s more or less what they did, as both cars are designed by the same man, Roy Haynes. While BL lost money on every Mini made, Ford Europe made hay with the Cortina. So, what do do? Benchmark the competition, snatch their designer, and make a Mini me-too effort. Because, obviously, the styling was what made the Cortina, and not the fact that it was a decently roomed car to a decent price.
http://www.oldclassiccar.co.uk/photos-smallwood/ford_cortina_mk2_85.htm
BL lost money on every Mini made
This legend is often repeated, and much as I’ve looked, I’ve never seen it proven either way, though I have read some pretty convincing rebuttals.
The claim stems from Ford Europe purchasing one of the original base 848cc Minis (near launch in 1959 or 1960 I believe,) and stripping it down to evaluate whether they could cost effectively produce the car for less than the retail sale price.
Ford determined that they couldn’t.
BMC always maintained that while the base 848cc models did indeed sell at “near cost”, the wider model range as a whole was profitable. Besides, the fact that Ford determined they couldn’t produce the car for less than BMC sold it for, doesn’t logically mean that BMC couldn’t: They were two different companies with different resources, manufacturing capacities and procedures.
It’s consistent with the obvious incompetence at BMC to imagine that “every Mini made” lost the company money, but – as incompetent as they evidently were! – I suspect the truth is less anecdotally neat.
It’s probably fairer and more accurate to say that BMC missed an opportunity for profit with the Mini by not maximising their margins on the model.
It doesn’t sound as good though.
Aronline had a link to a thesis before, that I’ve tried to lay my hands on. It’s gone now, but it showed how it actually was possible. BMC priced to Mini to be the cheapest car on the market, they priced it cheaper than the Ford Popular. That car was cheap, because it was pre-WWII technology sold long after the tools had been payed for. The problem was that the market demographic for the Mini wasn’t the Popular. In essence, BMC priced the car for less than the production cost, to gain market dominance. Their thought was that as long as people were in the door, they would soon rise the BMC ladder. The problem was that the ADO16 was priced likewise, so they didn’t earn any money on that either. And all the other cars in their range didn’t sell in any numbers to reap a harvest. What they should have done, was to raise the price, especially after the Mini became the icon it was in the 60’s, because the price wasn’t a determining factor at that point for people to consider it a buy. Instead, they continued making it at a loss up until the 90’s, when BMW took over.
Yes, all of that is very neat Ingvar, and I’ve heard those points before, but none of it demonstrates the validity of the claim, and it overlooks both the fact that the base model Mini was never the only Mini sold (while it is the only concrete basis for the “sold below cost” claim.) As well as overlooking that the cost of a base Mini, its specification, and relative value adjusted for inflation, cost of living etc. changed dramatically over the course of the model’s life.
The legend that the Mini was “always sold at a loss” is neat, and it certainly resonates with the fact that it was designed and manufactured by a systemically incompetent company… but it’s too neat to be believable once you start thinking about the economics of it.
If you find that thesis though I’d be fascinated to read it.
Well, the BMC/BL empire did unfold itself to irrelevance, from being the biggest exporter of cars in the world in the 50’s.
That thesis was pretty substansive, 50-60 pages or so, It was a pdf, linked from a university in England. Adams had it up on his site, but then the link went dead. I read it once, but didn’t think of saving it to my computer. I’ve asked him to try to locate it again, so perhaps we’ll see.
I found a section at Aronline that deal with this topic. I will steal that part outright:
Of course the other issue with the Mini that must be addressed is whether it made or lost money for its maker. The price for the base model of the world’s most advanced family car was £496.95 – astonishingly low. According to some historians, Austin had based the pricing of its cars in the pre-BMC era by mirroring what Morris charged. Austin supremo Leonard Lord believed that William Morris was the master in cost control and simply assumed that Longbridge’s cars cost a similar amount to manufacture. With the formation of BMC, the corporation now looked at Ford for its pricing policy. It appears that BMC simply decided to sell its new baby at a similar price to the sit-up-and-beg Ford Popular, which ceased production in 1959.
In an interview with Jonathan Wood for his book Alec Issigonis: The Man Who Made The Mini, former BMC executive Geoffrey Rose stated: ‘George Harriman (BMC deputy chairman in 1959) would have decided the Mini’s price and one of the key figures in the decision was Harry Williams, a cost accountant… Both Len Lord and George Harriman thought to some extent “volume will deal with it”. It’s on the basis that you make cars all the week until Thursday afternoon and Friday is when all the overheads have been covered and you make the profit. Sad to say, it came down to the sheer arrogance of ‘we’re BMC, we know what we’re doing’. But Alec (Issigonis) would have been completely outside the pricing process. In some board meetings that I attended I used to have to help him through the balance sheet, through the figures.’
The launch of the Mini had upstaged Ford’s own debutante, the Anglia 105E, and both cars were aimed at the same market sector. The base Mini compared with the £589 – the Dagenham product costing a whopping £93 more. How could BMC do it undercut the Anglia so handsomely?
One of the legends about the Mini is how Ford bought an example and took it apart down to the spot welds to see how BMC could sell it for such a low price. Although it has never been stated whether the car they took apart was the basic or De Luxe model. Terry Beckett recalled: ‘We then determined how much it would cost us to build it. On our cost analysis, which we thought was ahead of theirs, we really didn’t see how the car could be produced in this way to make a profit.’
According to Beckett, Ford calculated that BMC was losing £30 on every Mini it made. He added: ‘I could see ways in which we could take cost out of the Mini without in any way reducing its sales appeal… BMC could have priced it at £30 more, and not lost any sales at all. You can track the decline of BMC from that single product: it took up a huge amount of resources, it sterilised cash flow and it was a pretty disastrous venture’.
Strong words indeed, but Terry Beckett became one of British industry’s most outstanding executives, ultimately becoming the chairman of Ford of Britain, and head of the CBI. Beckett revealed that Ford of Britain did come under pressure from dealers, customers, fleet owners and above all the parent company in Detroit to respond to the Mini. ‘The great thing was that the Mini was a fine piece of innovative engineering and there we were with very conventional motor cars,’ Just to ensure that Ford UK had got their sums right, another Mini was taken to the Company’s product planning headquarters at Aveley in Essex and stripped down to the last nut and bolt.
‘…and we arrived at the same results we had achieved in the first place,’ commented Sir Terence Beckett.
Ford could now relax, they had proved that if they tackled the Mini head on in the marketplace, they could only do so by making a loss themselves. The major back-story of the car sales wars of the 1960s would be Beckett’s marketing brilliance versus Issigonis’ engineering genius. And in 1976 Ford overtook British Leyland as Britain’s favourite vendor of automobiles. One of Terence Beckett’s team was the late Alex Trotman, who rose even higher, heading Ford worldwide and gaining a peerage in the process. In a television interview, he recalled that the Mini cost around the same as the Anglia to manufacture – and Ford was making £50 profit car. In Ford’s opinion, the Mini cost around £539 to build, a similar figure to the list price of the De Luxe.
http://www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/2011/08/05/the-cars-mini-development-history-part-1/
Thanks for digging that out – as I mentioned I find the new structure at AROnline makes it hard to find things.
It’s a fascinating anecdote, but adds nothing concrete to the support of the legend. I’ll retain my skepticism.
Apart from the actual cost to produce the car, BMC/BL as well as other manufacturers had huge problems with strikes etc that did a lot of damage to the bottom line, so even if the direct costs worked, that wouldn’t have been enough.
Good theory except the Clubman was a down under Mini
They did sell them elsewhere, not sure if anywhere in addition to the UK though
splateagle: I think you said it well. They certainly didn’t make much on it, in order to properly fund their R&D. VW minted money on their Beetle.
Absolutely. Enough to pay for naff nose jobs though clearly. 😉
Interesting: VW’s struggle in the 60s was figuring out what to spend all that Beetle cash on developing (navigating the wilderness of the 411 etc.) while at the same time Austin-Morris seem to have been struggling to figure out which of their latest hare-brained designs they could scrape funds together to actually build.
Makes you wonder what wonders could have been wrought if 1960s British engineering imagination had been given 1960s German funds and direction…
Well, the VW profitability wasn’t all from engineering breakthroughs.
To start with, the whole operation was a non-company. It was an arm of the Nazi Party; and postwar, it had no owner. For a time it was a covert operation, working in contradiction to Allied orders to de-industrialize Germany.
There were no shareholders demanding returns. There were no high-paid officers…only Heinz Nordhoff, and the line crews…all of them glad to have something more useful to do than begging.
The factory was not encumbered by a mortgage; it needed heavy repairs, which the VW personnel did.
So yes…although it was a risky, unlikely success, the VW operation had an advantage in that overhead was virtually nil. The same could not be said of the Mini operation; certainly not after the Labour Government took control of the UK about the time of the Mini’s launch.
Umm, I was talking about the later fifties and sixties, not the late forties. By that time VW was a large corporation, with subsidiary plants in other countries, and paying decent wages and benefits. It was the Model T all over (up to a point), large volume, not a lot of R&D spent on new models and hydrolastic suspensions.
True enough. But…I read one of the many books on VW’s history long ago, and I seem to recall: that VW’s legal status and ownership weren’t established until the mid 1950s. Like a land without clear title, there were prewar claims against VW for prepaid KdF-wagens and from forced slave labor.
And then…if I remember correctly, Germany remained very poor right up until the mid-1960s. And in a poor land, wages tend to be lower. One reason for the worldwide acceptance of the Beetle was, that while they were put together carefully and correctly, they were so damned CHEAP! And that stayed that way until the general prosperity of the 1960s came to be.
Compare that to the unruly, restive, strike-prone British workforce in the same years…and also, the relative strength of the British pound to other world currencies…and you have various costs and conversion rates which would work against the Mini making money on meeting competitors’ prices.
Now be fair – “unruly restive and strike prone” was the British workforce in the 1970s, not the 1950s
Going past any BMC dealer back in the day the workshops would be full of dismantled Minis 11/1300s 1800s and a fair proportion would have been warranty work. Yes we have huge numbers of survivors here but those things were anything but durable or reliable or for that matter easy to fix, hell a noisy gearbox meant the whole thing had to be dismantled, clutches lasted not at all, exhausts were barely above the road and on gravel roads these cars did not last well
Like I said yesterday the Morris Minor was Isigonis best car.
Bought my 66 vw new in St. Johns newfoundland. Could have bought anything sold in Canada (though possibly couldn’t have taken it back to the states). Couldn’t find anything better suited for the area or for that matter for new england. Thought the brits made some neat looking stuff but neither then nor now have never regretted buying what I bought. Wish I could buy it new again.
This is the rare car where I don’t care enough to either like it or hate it.
Those of us who have driven these things usually have opinions on them they are that sort of car I like Minis but would not buy one they can be fun to drive but not to own and feed parts into. I as most of you know do have a British car but now as back in the day got something with a good reputation for durability and toughness.
HI Bryce, couldn’t agree with you more! I also have a British car from that era with a reputation for toughness- the Rover p4. Prior to Mercedes bringing out their w123 diesels, this was considered the pinnacle of vehicular indestructibility. The thing won’t die. My volvo 240 feels closer to my Yugo than it does to the Rover in build quality.
I agree with you though that old Rootes cars were very tough cars too- at least the Audax range, especially from ’63 on when they eliminated the greasing points.
I’ve found the quality difference between a Riley and the Rover to be spectacular- with the Riley feeling chintzy and cheap in comparison, and indeed even a ‘standard-unsuper’ minx felt far more screwed together than the luxury Wolseleys and Rileys coming out of BMC in the ’60s.
Also, Rootes Coventry plant and Rover’s Solihull didn’t strike much during the ’50s and ’60s. However, Longbridge and Cowley were constantly on strike even before the bad BL days.
Do you mean the Mini as a whole or just the Clubman Dan?
Actually I feel the same way about the Mini too. I recognise its place in history etc, in fact I nearly bought one years ago and have had friends own them, but they just don’t do a lot for me, they have their limitations. I do own a Hillman Imp which was a contemporary competitor, but does drive like a proper car not a roller skate in terms of comfort, while being just as much fun. The only downside is parts & ongoing development are scarcer.
John H check trademe.co.nz huge amounts of Imp parts for sale including speed equipment
Cheers Bryce, I’m not wanting for parts they are just (a lot) scarcer than Minis. Although it is a shame Impwerks in Christchurch closed.
It to be fair the Mini Clubman would have been better regarded had it featured the original hatchback body, since the hatchback together with the new front would have been seen as a logical update of the original Mini.
The Clubman hatchback was dropped because short-sighted conservative BL at the time stupidly believed hatchbacks were not the future on the one hand (despite claims of not having enough money to bring the Clubman hatchback to production), yet at the same time were intent on pushing the flawed Austin Maxi with its hatchback bodystyle being the unique selling point.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/clubman-hatch.jpg