Hello, welcome to an Optional Extra video for the Austin (really?!?) Princess, and yes I couldn't help myself.
I actually went out and bought a fibre optic lamp and a load of Ferrero Rocher which didn't
make it into the video but I thought I’d put it in the Optional Extra video. I thought about it
on the last spur of the moment. I found them in the shops and I thought I could put those
in the background. Anyway so there you go. The fibre optic thing in the Princess was very
interesting. It was obviously… I mean fibre optic lamps were kind of a big thing in the 70s,
and fibre optic cables were a big thing, and so obviously they thought it would be a good idea to
show they were forward thinking and innovative to have fibre optic lines going from one bulb to all
of these six different bulbs, sorry six different lights. But you could have just used six different
bulbs. It would have been a way easier way of doing it. And it just seemed to be a little bit
of a waste time. But it was cool I suppose. So first of all the Landcrab.
One thing I was realising when I was going through the video is that I said the SD1
had a very similar story to the Princess, and the fact that it was lauded by the
press and then had disappointed sales, and the quality was bad and supply issues and whatever.
Well the Landcrab, the Austin 1800 had the same issues. It was lauded by the press and then had
disappointing sales. So it was just a common trait of BMC and then British Leyland cars I suppose.
Also the Landcrab was ADO17 and the Princess was ADO71
which… either it's an homage to the fact that that one’s a successor to the other. The
whole ADO thing is something that came from BMC the British Motor Corporation. They just started
with ADO1 and just went up. It was just like that. And it may have been serendipitous that they
happened to get to 71 when the Princess was there. Maybe it was an homage to it, I don't know, but
in today's world particularly with computers when you're writing things down it's very easy to
transpose numbers. So 17 and 71, it was very easy to transpose the 17 and the 71. I mean
I did it in the script of the video! I had to go and change it. So it didn't seem to be the
smartest move to do that because it would be very easy to get those two switched around.
Another thing I noticed - there were a lot of similarities between the Princess and the Saab 900
that I did previously. They were both going after the same market. They both had similarities with
their trim level. They both had heating for rear passengers going underneath the front seats. They
both had that up high dash layout which you could start seeing on the Golf at the time. But I guess
maybe other cars were also doing it at the time as well. Having sort of up high things, so you didn't
take your eyes away from the road having the radio up high. They also had the same problem - they had
a lack of development cash to go and actually make the vehicles, and they both had weak engines. The
Princess had the O-Series four cylinder and six cylinder engine which... even with the 2.2L
six cylinder version people said just wasn't powerful enough. And Saab had the four cylinder
Triumph engine or Triumph derived engine that for two litres and four cylinders in the 1970s really
wasn't powerful enough to power a large car like that. Of course Saab solved the problems
with 16 valves and using fuel injection and also of course by turbo charging the engine.
One problem that actually I had as well with this video which I think many people also have is they
call it the Austin Princess, and the car wasn't known as the Austin Princess unless you count New
Zealand. I think New Zealand was the only place where it was actually called the Austin Princess.
But for my entire life I’ve called it the Austin Princess when it was never
known as the Princess. It was known as the Austin 1800 and 2200 and Morris and Wolseley
and then it was called the Princess. People call it the Leyland Princess for want of a better word,
but it was just known as the Princess. Then eventually it was the Austin Ambassador. Maybe
that's the reason why we got Austin Princess from it because it eventually became an Austin.
But anyway it was quite amusing that I had Austin Princess all the way through the video and then
it's like “oh it's wrong. I have to change it”. So anyway there you go, you live and learn.
So the union thing. I should probably make a video about
this because I’ve got a lot of stuff about the unions. But when I grew up in the 1970s
I used to see things about British Leyland, strikes, unions on a daily basis. I can remember
having no power in the early 70s because of strikes. I remember bread shortages. We used to
stock up on bread because we heard there was going to be a strike from the bread workers. And all
these issues that we had in the 70s. It's quite strange to think about nowadays, or maybe not
with COVID and limited stocks that we have. But we used to have all these problems with unions.
So I grew up looking at the nightly news every single day. There was strike action, people
talking about British Leyland, all these problems. It was headline news seemingly every few days.
And of course the public side of that is the workers walking out and striking. So, it's easy to
think the problems that British Leyland had were all the union's fault. It's easy to blame
them because they're the most obvious part of the problem. They're the ones physically walking out
and stopping work. You’d say “well just don't do that, then maybe we'd have a decent car industry”.
But of course the news reports say things like “Workers down tools” they don't say
“mismanagement didn't take the steps to harmonise worker relations which led to unrest”.
That's a nuanced story which news I don't think seems to do very well.
So workers have had a lot of the blame, but of course it's a much more nuanced story than
that. And as I’ve got older, and particularly as I’ve started making these videos my point
of view has changed from “Oh the unions were terrible. That's why the Rover SD1 died, because
the unions just basically ruined British Leyland.” to the fact that it's a management issue as well.
It's partly also a design issue. The cars needed to be designed better. But all this sort of thing
comes from management as well, and you set a relationship between management and workers,
and British Leyland in all their factories was clearly doing a terrible job with this
whole relationship, and management needs to be held responsible for that. It's not that
unions are completely blameless of course, but as I say it's a much more nuanced picture than that.
And another problem is BL’s problems with union disputes was masked by the fact that
the whole industry or the whole country was having problems between unions, and unions striking
and being dissatisfied in general. So you saw Dunlop had union problems. They had strikes, and
component suppliers had strikes, and Vauxhall had strikes, Ford had strikes, all these industries
were all having strike action, but British Leyland's problems were worse than others. British
Leyland's strike problems were compounded by the fact that they had problems between the workers
and management which exacerbated the problem. And when you have that… we talk about quality
issues with British Leyland, and boy did they have quality problems! But if you're spending all your
time trying to fix the problems between workers and management, or trying to get people working
when you don't know how to do it or not doing a very effective job, then you're not focusing on
fixing quality problems. You're fixing inherent problems that you've got between… systemic
problems you've got within the organisation. So quality is always tomorrow's problem once we fixed
all these other issues, which they never fixed of course, or they didn't fix until the late 80s.
They realised that in the late 80s... they realised it'd be really good to have
just one cafeteria then everybody can go to that one cafeteria. Back in the 60s and 70s there was
a cafeteria for management and a cafeteria for workers and it just not only creates
unhappiness between the different groups, they're not intermingling. They're not making those
connections between management and workers which are inherently useful to go and solve problems.
So you look at a company like Volkswagen. Volkswagen didn't seem to have these problems
because they had pretty harmonious relationships. They were all in it together. Heinrich Nordhoff
was very keen on trying to make sure that both workers and management were working together.
When Heinrich Nordhoff first came to Volkswagen in the late 1940s he slept on the factory floor.
There wasn't a place for him to sleep, so he slept on the factory floor every night.
He was in there with the workers down on the factory floor going and solving
problems and that was very important to them. So anyway, going back to British Leyland.
Of course with British Leyland being this basket case in the early 70s it leads to a brain drain.
They get good people who leave. Roy Haynes left of course and George Turnbull who was a senior
manager at Austin Morris, he also left in 73 or 74, and then went to Hyundai and helped kick-start
their car industry. And in fact he took people with him, and there's a really good video which,
maybe I can find the video, where they talk about how the atmosphere in South Korea is
completely different to Britain, and how they can actually get things done.
What have you found is the difference working out here with Koreans to working at home?
Many, many differences. I think the speed that things get done here actually. If you've
got a problem, they analyse it very well. The engineers are very thorough. They'll sit there
all night if necessary. We bring it back, put it on the test the same day which would take a long
time in the UK. I could fail parts on test here and within one day I’ve got new parts.
So it's not necessarily an individual issue it's more a cultural problem I think with
British Leyland. And then of course when you've got this nightly news problem where people are
talking about the dysfunctional British Leyland and all the union problems it doesn't help the
publicity efforts you're trying to do to try and sell your cars. It's fighting against it,
and it just seems madness to me that surely both sides must have realised at this point that
they were digging their own grave. And surely
ending this war would have been a better thing to do. But of course there's plenty of situations
you can see where people don't see the obvious and they just continue digging their own grave
and it goes into destruction. And so anyway maybe I'll do a whole bigger video about why
British Leyland failed, but that was my two cents about it as far as the Princess video went.
And so the Austin Ambassador is launched and it's really just too little too late.
The Princess has a bad reputation at this time and the Austin Ambassador, although it's supposed to
be very different, looks basically the same as the Princess. And people just look at it and say “OK,
well it's an updated Princess. Well I didn't like the Princess. It was unreliable, so I’m not going
to buy an Ambassador.” And also they seem to say, “You know we did a really good job on the restyle.",
but the fit and finish doesn't look great. You look at the front lights. You look at the rear
lights. They look just sort of badly bolted on, and just big gaps showing there. It didn't seem
to be a very good update in my opinion. So the last thing is that the Princess
and Ambassador were decried for having these very poor engines, but surely they could have used the
Triumph six cylinder 2.3 and 2.6 litre engine that the Rover SD1 was using. It had a five-speed
gearbox so it would have had more power. It certainly seemed to have enough power for the
Rover SD1 that people weren't complaining... didn't have enough power. Maybe with the Ambassador and
the Princess's low bonnet line maybe it wouldn't have worked. Maybe it was too big an engine to fit
into that bay. I don't know, but anyway that was another engine which British Leyland had
access to which maybe they could have used. Anyway thanks for watching this Optional
Extra about the Princess and the Austin Ambassador and I'll see you in the next video!