(first posted 5/23/2013, as a follow-up to yesterday’s Grosse Pointe Myopians)
This is the kind of stuff I inhaled as a fifteen year-old: Brock Yates analyzing the British Car industry, and prognosticating. It’s a bit long-winded, from a time when we weren’t bombarded with media flying at us from all directions and we craved long articles to fill the time (and brains). And of course, it’s old hat; we know how the British car industry essentially melted down and away; the few remaining remnants (except Morgan) all in the hands of foreign ownership. But if you have the time, here’s a trip back to 1968, when the British auto industry was really just beginning to face its do or die situation. (from the December 1968 issue of Car and Driver).
A most interesting article from before I was born! Still, it seem to portray the British car industry accurately, and many of its prediction came true. Very sad that even with such a timely insight (presumably 1968 is early enough that, if something’s done about it, the British car industry could survive) they still did not make it.
You might enjoy further reading over at aronline.co.uk – particularly some of the development stories from 60s and 70s models. The farcically long development (resulting in products obsolete at-or-before launch) Brock mentions appears to have been the norm, rather than the exception.
From what I’ve read it was probably too late by ’68, even if anyone in a position to effect change had been listening to Mr. Yates’ insightful commentary. Which I suspect they weren’t.
Just looked at the pubs website the sign has gone and the treei s bit bigger. You ll be thinking ” well it would be ,so what” but many a old English inn closed late 70s- 90s.Survivor .
The pub is near Ashford in Kent so not far from the Euro Star railroad terminal.
Is there a ” Brook Yates sat here” plaque at the bar?.
I remember this article well, and I’m sure it helped inspire the creation of “Curbside Classic.” As we frequently lament, current magazines lack insightful criticism of the automotive industry, instead pumping out content designed to sell advertising, or even creating “Special Advertising Sections” designed to disguise advertising as review copy.
This article recalls a time when magazines engaged in meanigful commentary on the state of the industry, rather than focusing on vehicle design and features.
I’m sure Brock Yates helped shape the automotive viewpoint of many of our readers, and his words and insight can help fill in the gaps for those who did not live through the turbulent automotive years between 1968 and 1986.
D/S
LJK Setright was a great British motoring Journalist
i read his book “drive On” was quite good read
Seconded – he was a truly gifted writer with an encyclopedic knowledge on an astonishingly wide variety of subjects.
Third-ed. Is that a word?
I wonder what Brock Yates thinks of Car and Driver today. One might say it “fits the jelly mold of weak, ambiguous reportage that unctuously seeks goodness (and advertising support) even in the worst cars.” The US automotive press has become a clone of the British automotive press of the late ’60s, and for the same reasons.
Sadly, Brock Yates has Alzheimer’s.
That’s probably why he didn’t retort to this:
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/ralph-nader-what-id-do-differently-feature
I don’t think I have ever seen an article as long w/almost no pictures in a car magazine in a long time.
“That Fireball guy?” Makes you wonder what else might be mistaken.
Brock passed away in October of 2016.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/brock-yates-1933-2016
Was one helluva run.
Car and Driver was my favorite car mag in the ’70s and ’80s. Before they went all glibertarian and bitter.
…and turning pro-regulation, celebrating…persons…like Nader, who are, arguably, anti-car.
The news Yates has Alzheimer’s was a shock. However, I remember one of the young guys David E. recruited, Rich Ceppos…has gone fool-bore, er, full-boor….okay…full-bore…let’s just say, he’s celebrating the people who are regulating out of existence any hope of a Corvair, a Beetle, a Fiero…or even another Panther.
C/D had a good crew, back in the day. Larry Griffin lost his mind and died at 63, friendless and broke, in 2008. Quite apart from his subject matter, he was one of the best writers I’d ever read…better than his boss, Davis, who was himself good. And Bedard, and even Sherman. Yates was out of favor with David E. in those days, but I remember snippets of earlier and later works.
I learned a lot in those days. About cars; and about good conversational prose.
An engrossing article. Having read it, I feel more educated in the state of the British auto industry of that era. I had not realized the extent to which societal attitudes stood in the way of a talented corps of managers. I had understood that labor/management issues were prickly, but not to this extent.
After reading the article, it is a wonder that any British industry survived at all!
I think it’s important to understand why business was not considered an especially prestigious activity. In a pre-industrial feudal society, from which the British were not many generations removed, the wealth and status of the upper class is based on the ownership of land. If you had land, you could have tenants from whom you generated income, and even in a pinch, if you had enough land your household could conceivably sustain itself at least for a while. Becoming a shopkeeper or going into some other type of business was something you did if you didn’t have any land, if you had fallen so far that your land wasn’t sustaining you, or if you were far enough down the line of succession that you were unlikely to inherit any of the family’s real assets.
Theo Nichols, the author of the highly recommended The British Worker Question in the ’80s, posits that one of the problems facing British industry was that British capital (investment banks) still operated with a similar mentality. He suggests that throughout the ’50s and ’60s, it was often easier for British businesses to secure financing to buy new land and construct new facilities than to make major upgrades to existing plants. If you invest in a new industrial space and a new factory, if the factory fails you still have the land to resell, whereas if you invest in tools and machinery for an existing plant, the best you can hope for in the event of default is a pittance from liquidation of the tools.
The British government compounded this tendency with what I’d call rather heavy-handed efforts to spark development in areas like Merseyside in hopes of propping up the local economy. In addition to offering incentives to build in poorer areas, the government would often refuse permits for factory expansion and the like in the Midlands, where a lot of the British auto industry was centered. The message was, “If you want more capacity, build a new factory somewhere that needs it.”
The result was that British companies — particularly BMC, but even Vauxhall faced this issue — often ended up with more plants than they needed. The money for tooling the new plants also cut into the funds available to update the existing factories. So, by the ’70s, BLMC had a whole bunch of factories, spread out geographically more than really made economic sense, most of them running under capacity and a lot of them with outdated or otherwise inadequate equipment. (When Michael Edwardes took over BL in the late ’70s, he said a lot of their plants looked straight out of Charles Dickens.)
C&D used to be the rebel car magazine, part Rolling Stone part National Lampoon.
Back when c&d was worth reading ….
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing that Paul!
I watched the British motor industry’s drawn-out death throes throughout my childhood, adolescence and even early adulthood (I was 28 when MG Rover finally coughed its last and lay down to be picked over by China). The decline and fall of my local auto industry has been a lifelong source of fascination. Not least because of the contrast it has with the British auto industry my Dad grew up with. Getting a glimpse back to the beginning of the end (my parents were married two years before this article was published) is genuinely fascinating, if sad.
With hindsight I’m surprised Yates is so optimistic about the prospect for recovery. I’m not sure I’d agree with his assertion that a focus on US exports would have saved UK manufacture… but it’s a compelling piece all the same.
Well, even Lord Stokes agreed that the British industry desperately needed more sales volume to keep all their many plants working at something like a profitable level and a major expansion in the U.S. market would have been the most obvious way to do that, albeit not the one Stokes chose. I honestly don’t know if BLMC could have afforded to do so effectively, particularly by the mid-70s: massive inflation followed by the sudden and unexpected strength of the pound relative to the dollar, which made most of the U.S. exports BLMC did have into money-losers.
BLMC had Alec Issigonis working against it from the inside.
Car & Driver used to be not only a great car magazine, it was terrific reading, period. Pat Bedard, Brock Yates, Csaba Csere and David E Davis were outstanding writers along with being car enthusiasts. That was when they made fun of Motor Trend and its “ran like a raped ape” style. Hell, the letters were great fun, too.
Right now, C&D is unreadable, fallen prey to the Gawker type smartass journalism they must love and attempt to emulate. Pity.
Not only the people you mentioned but C&D also had some great columnists such as Jean Shepherd and Warren Weith. I have read Car and Driver for nearly 50 years and, while I wouldn’t say that it is unreadable today, I find that I skim through many issues in 30 minutes or less. My thought on this is that magazines, and many other elements of popular culture such as TV shows and musical groups, have a definite shelf life and hanging on past that date is not a good idea. At best you become a carricature of your former self, relying on past glories to cover for current deficiencies.
I always thought that C&D fit nicely between the yahoo 16 year old oriented MT and the Big Bang musings of Dennis Simanaitis at Road & Track. Smartass? Yes, but in a very amusing way. Now? Eh…not so much. In fact, no better than Motor Trend, which is a major come down.
I wrote off Bedard when he started filling his columns with climate change denial bullsh1t. I liked the Don Sherman era the best. Bruce McCall’s “Denbeigh Motor Co” stories were funny and something I loved even as a kid. Csaba Csere was dull as dish water.
Csere probably was a better writer than editor. I thought the DED years were outstanding.
I miss the C&D of the 80s. They deteriorated when Ziff-Davis sold them off to the corporate machine at CBS, who soon booted David E. Davis and put them on a pablum editorial diet.
Bedard was a sharp writer who should have retired earlier. Near the end his column degenerated into manichean Fox News-ish climate change denial and evil-guvmint ranting every month.
Have they ever posted the Denbeigh stories on the internet? I’ve often looked, but never found them.
Runningonfumes, your point about Bedard is important. Why have so many auto “buff” magazines assumed that its readers were ridiculously ignorant about politics and science?
I decided that if Bedard was going to hack — and rather viciously, I might add — for the fossil fuel lobby that they could pay for his magazine. I certainly wasn’t going to subscribe anymore.
By the way, can someone forward this article to Jeremy Clarkson? Thank you.
Give me a compilation of everything that Yates and David E Davis ever wrote and I would never have to buy another book again.
Stan, when Car and Driver had their 50th anniversary a few years back, a hard cover book was published of the Best of Car and Driver. It’s a pretty good snap shot of the magazine through the decades and worth a look.
This article got me to thinking I need to get Brock’s book on auto racing, circa 1955. A tragic year for motorsport.
Some of my all time favorite writers: Peter Egan, Brock Yates, David E Davis, Jr. Pretty good company, I’d say. Honorable mention to Don Sherman and Patrick Bedard. The last of the Golden Age for Car Magazines for me was somewhere between 1980 to 90,
I bought my 2000 New Beetle TDI with Brock Yates’s 1998 test drive of the New Beetle and his thumbs up. Certainly if Brock took a liking to it, then it had to be a good car.
I miss those writers; as time goes on too many are passing on and the others are fading from the scene. The medium is changing too. When the Car and Driver ads in their magazine were advising me to check out the added content on their website (I was not on-line at the time) I began wondering why I was bothering to pay for the magazine at all. Every year the content was shrinking as much as the actual magazine itself.
I’m sorry to hear that Mr Yates is ill with Alzheimers.
You can read quite a bit of “Fifty Years with Car and Driver” here at Google Books. Looks pretty wonderful. I may have to find a copy.
Ordered though Amazon, should arrive by Weds. Thanks for the tip.
Paul:
Thanks for the article, I remember reading it sometime in the late ’60s. It brings back memories of when Car & Driver was a great magazine and had some really talented writers such as Brock Yates, Warren Weith, Leon Mandel, Bruce McCall, Don Sherman and others. The magazine did some great journalism through the late 60’s and into the 70’s. Unfortunately in the ’80’s many of the writers began moving on and the magazine began losing its edge. Today it is simply a shadow of its former self; I regret to hear that Mr. Yates is suffering from Alzheimer’s-perhaps in the future you could post the article Yates wrote titled “The Grosse Pointe Myopians” in which he blasted the Detroit automakers for their short term planning which he claimed was setting them up for failure. Mr. Yates was loudly criticized for the article, but events proved him absolutely correct. It would be a fitting tribute to the gentleman.
Brock Yates wrote a short piece for TTAC as the Big Three were teetering into bankruptcy in 2008, observing how little had changed among the later generation of myopians: Brock Yates: Grosse Pointe Blank
Yates expanded upon “Grosse Point myopia” in his brilliant book, “The Decline and Fall of the American Auto Industry.” It is a must read that deserves renewed interest. Groupthink has changed clothes but is still ever-present . . . and has even insinuated itself in foreign automakers.
He was right about England, it has become a park/preserve where people go to study history, drink ale with the locals, and eat fish and chips.
Having said that; I still want an XJ sedan.
A fair assessment. If by “England” you mean the home counties. London operates on a totally different wavelength than the rest of the UK (greedily hoovering in all available development funds and impetus for most of the past century) and the further North or West you go the more ironic that U in “UK” feels. It’s tongue-in-cheek for the most part long before you cross the borders to either Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland
With luck, on-going constitutional shake-ups might begin to break some parts of the country free from Westminster (mis)rule, and allow them to opperate as the small dynamic northern european countries they are, rather than staying shackled to the decaying theme park remnants of a long past empire… I live in hope.
(sorry, bit political, but entirely on topic)
I’ve tongue-in-cheekly commented to a transplanted Brummie coworker that the only reason the UK doesn’t establish an English (only) Parliament and a full federal system is that they’d no longer have grounds to field four “national” teams in international soccer that wouldn’t also allow, say, Bavaria or the three US states that were once independent republics to do so.
“Having said that; I still want an XJ sedan.” Quote
Do you mean a Series 111 ( the Pininfarina facelift ) or that beached-whale like thing they make now ?
The one that actually looks like a Jag and not an “angry” Buick, of course!
Yates mentions personal cars, in addition to sports cars. That might have been a good niche for the Brits.
As a true-blue tory Brit, I think I was lucky to get out when I did ( 40 years ago ). I regard the British car as long extinct, so I drive the next best thing – a proper made-in Japan Japanese car. ( the Japs drive on the correct side of the road, oblivious to Napoleons’ whims ) Anything made in Europe is off the radar, though I might make an exception for a Quattroporte if I ever strike gold.
Sad to hear Brock Yates is no longer completely with us and that C+D has decayed – my long time companion Autocar is also a mere shadow of its’ former self.
Excellent article. His observation about British cars being well-suited to the home market at the time, but bordering on irrelevant almost anywhere else, is spot on. As are his observations on the class system, still visible and still corrosive – sadly – in the Britain of 2018.
+1 Well stated.
Have to disagree with your comment about the class system, it is much more of a meritocracy than its ever been
In my opinion the UK is still saddled with the class system to a greater extent than its residents realise – but at least they are aware of the existence of a class system.
The danger for Americans is denying, or being oblivious to, their own.
.
Having lived in the UK in the ’80s, the class system was still strong at that time. It was very hard for people to move from the situation of their birth, in part because the education system (which I worked in), as well as the other major cultural and social elements of the system, taught people from day one to accept their place in things, and all would go as well as it could. To step away from your personal station in life was just not done.
I think how this related to the British car business was that people accepted the cars appropriate to their station. So the typical car was a bit small, tinny, underpowered and finicky. It was a statement of the people who bought them. The politicians and solicitors (lawyers), and the landed, they got the Jaguars and Bentleys and the Aston Martins. It was Austins and Morrises for most everyone else. If one wanted a small Triumph or MG, that was alright, but don’t start shopping for a Rover, you must remember who you are.
This was 35 years or so ago, and no doubt times have changed. But at that time, people in the UK still shrugged and accepted the comparatively awful cars offered to them, because owning a crappy Austin or Morris was what was done. The fact that most of the cars were unworthy of their own British customers, let alone absolutely uncompetitive in most ways in the foreign markets, led to the destruction of BL. I saw the tail end of it first hand back in the ’80s. People at the time, when I asked about it, said that if you wanted a car that stayed together and lasted, buy a Ford. But if you want to “support the home team”, buy an Austin. By the ’80s, the “home team” thing was just about over.
I just don’t recognize the description of people not buying a Rover or a Jag because they had to “know their place”. They drove an Austin mostly because they couldn’t afford a fancy car, or at least couldn’t afford to fill the tank(s).
Until the 70s most couldn’t afford a car at all – they weren’t sitting at home wishing they had the guts to blow all the savings they had from their 2 quid a week wages on an Alvis.
I’d also say Jaguar is a bad example – not truly a posh person’s car – they were to some extent associated with gangsters and used car dealers.
Edited to concede the class system may have put people in a position where they could only afford an Austin, but that’s another matter.
Agree with all that. Where Yates is bold is in saying the class system (as ‘of 68) assigned a certain attitude to aggression, ambition, within business or management, because such doings put one out of one’s place, and anyway, for the posh (and better educated) one didn’t go into grubby commerce at all without a grudge. THAT cheekily puts class at the forefront of the problem. It means bad management.
I’d add another. It meant quite a bit of whacko detail engineering persisted because it wasn’t challenged, and that led to unreliability. Rolls is the world’s best, diffs are tested with a stethoscope and all that – with no-one game to tell Sir Whoever at the top, no, it’s bloody not!
I agree slightly with Dutch 1960 that there was an English trait of not getting above yourself, (which was quite strong in Aus too), and it perhaps did lead to a quiet suffering with a not-good-enough car. Add in Yates’ (slightly overcooked) observation that the car was a cherished item and kept accordingly, to your point tonito that poorer people just couldn’t afford more – war had left England utterly destitute just 20 years earlier – and a real picture emerges as to why the industry was making stuff that didn’t work elsewhere.
You then add in a really militant unionisation, which arises directly from long-held grudges arising from treatment of the working class in decades earlier, and class again plays it’s fatal role. Yates misses WHY the “British worker” has the hair-shirt attitude he rather condescendingly describes!
Finally, I’d agree America didn’t, and maybe still doesn’t, recognize the class issue it has. Those Grosse Pointers, sometimes from the Ivy League and certainly monied enough to be sending their offspring there, sure weren’t going to have line workers telling them anything, let alone a grotty journalist.
Have to disagree with your earlier comment that we are still ruled by the old class system even though we don’t know it,
Don’t confuse the old class system with a minority of wealthy people with power, that is the same problem for capitalist democracies all over the world.
but agree with you that people didn’t buy cars to match their place in society, the purchase was based on available money and running costs. My father was a scaffolder, so working class, but he bought a fintail Mercedes because he liked it and could afford it
British cars were built for our roads which do not translate to other countries, just like American cars were totally unsuited for many European countries
The article was dead right about out driving conditions and congestion. We did not have fascist dictators to build motorways, and if you look at the topography of the land, it is for the most part hilly.
Straight roads would have cost an absolute fortune to build, and we were still paying off loans for WW2 during the demise of the car industry, there simply was not the money to build such roads
That is an impressive piece, expressing fully thoughts that I’ve long had about the UK motor industry’s decline. I don’t recall ever reading someone who put it so firmly in the context of the class system and national attitudes, especially as they related to business. And one statistic screams out from the page – 200,000 men to build as many cars as Toyota with 38,000. I’m sure America probably had some degree of over-staffing in those days, but not on that scale.
A footnote. His praise of Car magazine – aside from the criticism of the editorial he quotes and partially misconceives – for it’s chutzpah amongst the mouldiness of UK motor noting, is something that tickles me, because all the editors of Car have been cheeky upstarts from Australia. LJK Setright, ofcourse, liked their style enough to write there until he died.
We’ll see who remembers this.
“The Yukon, where you need a high-powered radio receiver to hear static; where grizzly bears outnumber people and eagles float without novelty in the skies above; where man is a mere visitor stuck to the ground with no more permanency than a tent stake — this was our proper place, though it forced us to ponder the frivolities of civilization as we know it.”
And this
‘Northwest Passage’ Part 2′, March 1976 (my copy is a 90-degree chair-swivel and a quick grab off the shelf). Classic C&D!
The reprint of these articles by Brock Yates demonstrates perfectly why Car & Driver was the pre-emenent automobile magazine from around 1965 to about 1988 or so.
C & D had a really talented group of writers who produced excellent articles and really covered the big picture on the automotive industry-both domestic and international. I always thought Yate’s “Grosse Pointe Myopians” was the finest piece of automotie journalism of the 60’s. Today the magazine is simply a shadow of its former self.
I stopped subscribing to C/D in 1987.
Even Playboy has lost the cachet it had in it’s heyday. The photography, changed in a way to appeal to those younger than me, leaves me unmoved. But it does get my attention with the occasional story by a good writer.
Good writing is what sells. Always has, always will.
Ya hear that, C/D? Start writing good again and I’ll start subscribing again. But stop being a shrill and a whore for the auto manufacturers.
I remember reading this article-along with “The Grosse Pointe Myopians”. This was long before social media had been invented and the quality of writing was vastly better than it is today. I really enjoyed Car & Driver in the 1960’s and 70’s; they had an amazing group of writers during this period and the journalism was head and shoulders above any other of the automotive magazines then in existence. Sadly, it started to decline in the 1980’s and today the magazine is just a shadow of its former self.
I wonder if Brock Yates had written similar articles about the French, Italian and German auto industries?
On a off-topic sidenote, to see most of the recent Hollywood movies gone bust. We could wonder if Hollywood have caught the Grosse Pointe Myopia?
Turtleneck and sports coat, so very 60’s. Not in a bad way, just what it was back then. Read Yates in C+D for many years but never knew what he looked like. A bit like Sean Connery in that pic. He must have had space to fill, not that I disagree with what he said, but he could have said it in a few paragraphs.
But him and DED and Bedard, Charles Fox, Don Sherman, LJK Setright and more. How could one car magazine have so many good writers? I didn’t run across it until the early 70s, killing time in the college library between classes, I wasn’t even really into cars then, but greatly enjoyed Car and Driver. Subscribed a couple of years later and continued on for about the next 30 years until it became at once juvenile and boring. But it had a good run with a mix of good writing, good material, near total irreverence and a sense of humor.
Another cool reading:
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15151281/northwest-passage-feature/
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15150457/northwest-passage-part-ii-feature/