Very true Pete, especially about the BMC 1100/1300 range which often gets forgotten today, despite outselling the Mini and Cortina for many years.
Summed up here quite well by AROnline I think:
"In Britain, the 1100/1300 series was Britain’s best selling car every year from 1963 to 1966, and 1968 to 1971. The exceptions being 1967 when the Ford Cortina Mk2 narrowly beat it, and then from 1972 onwards when production of the car was cut by the decision to concentrate assembly at Longbridge. The ADO16 was the nearest Britain got to producing a world car and in company with the Mini, it represented the high tide of the British motor industry.
But where BMC went wrong with ADO16 was that the car was not developed in order to meet the changing tastes of its customers. Both the Mini and the 1100 were being priced so competitively that there was little margin for profit in these cars, and so ADO16 remained largely unaltered throughout its long and successful life. John Barber certainly thought the ADO16 was underpriced, and Austin Morris only returned to profit once the Morris Marina was fully on stream in 1973. As the ’60s drew on and the country began to become more affluent, the little car was left behind through a lack of development.
The question of why things went wrong for BLMC after ADO16 was finally dropped in 1974 can be answered by reference to predecessor BMC’s marketing and (lack of) development strategies. Any illusions that ADO16 still represented the desires of the middle-market car buyer were shattered by the appearance of the larger Mk2 Cortina in 1966, and were finally buried by the arrival of the altogether larger Mk3 Cortina in 1971.
So by the early 1970s, ADO16 had been well and truly left behind by what was once its adversary. However, this did not sound its death knell, because in its size and proportions it perfectly epitomised the small family car, a breed that would become so popular just a few years hence. The sad thing here is that no-one in the company seemed to recognize this shift in the market: the car was perfectly sized to form the basis for a supermini in the modern idiom, being of similar dimensions to the Ford Fiesta and Volkswagen Polo of 1976. Had BLMC ordered a weight-reduction programme and developed a hatchback body for ADO16, the company could have had the ideal car with which to compete during the crisis-riddled ’70s.
Of all the missed opportunities catalogued within this website, this failure must stand as an important milestone in the downward slide of BMC and then British Leyland. With the benefit of hindsight, a logical course of action would have been for ADO16 to become an early supermini, and for a re-bodied Maxi to occupy the slot further up-market that the Allegro was eventually designed to fill. In short, the money spent on the ADO67, ADO74 and ADO88 programmes could have been more wisely spent elsewhere. Immediately following the 1968 merger, Donald Stokes stumbled towards a rational model policy, but the tragedy was that the path he followed led to the Allegro and Marina, and all the inactivity of the ’60s was to be replaced by a misguided wholesale model replacement during the following decade."
http://www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/cars/bm ... t-history/
Alec Issigonis told Basil Cardew of the DAILY EXPRESS: ‘We have tried to produce a good looking, functional car- while cutting out as far as possible the risk of things going wrong. My main plan was to design a motor car to travel as efficiently as possible from A to B, with full comfort over really rough roads. The world will decide whether we have succeeded’
http://www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/cars/bm ... hed-today/
I will watch the BBC2 programme tonight.....hopefully it won't be to depressing!
