The Demise of the Pommy Trucks

The Poms never quite mastered trucks, even long after WW2 they just blundered along, a real shame, they had good idea's but some how never quite got it right

Paul

Paul

I think the difference in driving distances between GB and the Empire and the rest of the world escaped them. I am sure the pommy trucks were just fine at a speed limit of 30 mph and the vast majority of trips being home by supper time. We got lumbered with them by the unbelievable forelock tugging Buy British empire trading arrangements which stifled our development by making local production less attractive and hugely penalising any purchase of cutting edge technology from the rest of the world.

GM, Ford and Chrysler got around it partially by setting up assembly plants here using "Canadian" produced base vehicles.

You only have to look at UK in the 60's when overnight the Volvo F86 almost destroyed the British truck industry within a few years. Volvo were smart enough to set up a UK factory to get around any protection and the British manufacturers were forced into a meteoric leap from the 30's to the 60's but never did really catch up ending with the Leyland debacle and union sabotage.

Lang

One thing I have noticed working on the occasional pommy item - why use 20 screws to hold the sump on, when 75 will do?! (and it still leaks)

Jarrod.

Lang wrote:

You only have to look at UK in the 60's when overnight the Volvo F86 almost destroyed the British truck industry within a few years. Volvo were smart enough to set up a UK factory to get around any protection and the British manufacturers were forced into a meteoric leap from the 30's to the 60's but never did really catch up ending with the Leyland debacle and union sabotage.

Lang

The amazing thing to me was just how blind they were to the truth, the Poms were so sure they would succeed in the EU or EEC as it was known at the time they gave up their protected export markets

I'm not knocking the Poms but they really were blind to what was about to happen, I guess it was like Ford and the Edsel

I guess it is a case of believing ones own B.S.

Paul

If you ever want to read about the disaster of the century the "Death of the British Motorcycle Industry" is a classic.

"Why spend money on developing new models when we have 75% of the world market"

10 years later - "What happened? Those damn Japanese have only left us 10%, and falling, of the market"

Look at the Mini, an absolute world beater stuck in a time warp until the Japanese sucked up all their buyers with wonderful little cars improving with a new model every two years.

Land Rover 90% of the Australian market in the 1960's but by the end of the 70's they were out the back door.

And so it goes on. Very sad.

Lang

Painting a broad brush there Paul. Need to remember that Mack et al followed in the tracks made by the bigger pommy trucks. Part of the trouble was that Aus put loads of taxes on imports and so ended up with the cheaper end of production and that carried on with the Aussie production all the way to the end. Post war and into the early 50's the bigger pommy stuff was good for it's time. Poms were held back by the need to get afloat after the war - and they were still paying the yanks into the 80's - so there was a lot of band aid production and class war - the bosses and shareholders were just as into it as the unions. Need to remember that when the Volvo explosion happened in 1967 (same time there as here) they couldn't make trucks fast enough with over 12 months wait for a Gardner engine and customers bought the Europeans not because they were better but because they were available. The Scottish assembly plant wasn't about import restrictions (as in Australia) but to meet demand, including a bus unique to that factory. Leyland finally got everything together with the modern Ogle designed cabs and new chassis with models like the Roadrunner (Leyland Australia had closed shop by then due to Aussie politicians choosing favourites) but with a coincidental recession it was too late. Similarly Foden/ERF had over capitalised and the recession sunk them.
Getting back to the WWll era the AEC Matador was a winner with 4wd and 7.7 litre diesel, 7 ton winch and is still in demand as timber tractors today. After that the cold war coloured British military purchase decisions with lots of blind alleys. Need to remember that through the 60's and 70's they supplied the bulk of what the Aussies wanted - cheap cheap send a boy to do a mans job type gear. At the time American trucks were outliers and why they are iconic and collectable today.
By the time Britain joined the EU in 1972(?) the 'captive export markets' were already dwindling and they saw the need to tap into the markets on their doorstep. I can't remember it being said explicitly but part of the motivation would have been to create a more solid economic bloc as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

I can only speak being a post land rover owner. Think the poms are good at innovation, but hopeless are evolution. They seem to think they got it right first time and know best.

25 years of basically the same Defender and they still didn't centre the steering wheel, make it wider, or give occupants more leg room. Forgetting the leaks, and squeaks, price, and no options besides the number of doors, when the call was generally more power they still stuck to just enough on the lesser side. Good car but not surprised its extinct. I would not consider the new Defender evolution, its just a cash grab on past glory, like VWs Beatle

asw120 wrote:

One thing I have noticed working on the occasional pommy item - why use 20 screws to hold the sump on, when 75 will do?! (and it still leaks)

Jarrod.

It's because your brother owns the screw factory and has too much stock.

Too true Mammoth, we did send those poor underpowered models to do a man’s job, no doubt the reason there’s very few surviving today.
It wasn’t until I saw my first LAD Beaver that I realised there were big Pommy trucks. Air assist clutch, hub reduction diffs, lovely clean chassis, a proper truck.
Meanwhile something like a B61 was considered massive, yet it had absolutely puny brakes, tiny universals, baby front springs and so on.
Zero creature comforts from any makers until the Japs and Euro stuff arrived and shook them up.

Forgot to mention the one thing created a real shake-up. In the early 70's the gulf states were feeling rich from all that oil money and so started importing lots of western goods. Trouble was they had no decent ports so it all had to go overland. West Germany was one of the many countries that this growing traffic passed through and they were getting jack of slow trucks clogging up their mountain roads. First was a requirement of 6bhp per ton of gvm and later this was increased to 8bhp . EU gvm was 36 ton and then 40 ton. So straight away the manufacturers got into a power race. Leyland made a video of their Marathon doing a run to Doha or somewhere in Arabia but there were so many breakdowns
the tv crew got the shits, their test driver smashed his (false) teeth in a fall and so on. I think it took them something like 6 weeks to do the return run in what could be done in three. Still a good video for the flavour of what it was all about. I don't think they showed the desert sand part of the trip, but maybe they never got that far!
The tool of choice was the Scania V8 followed by Volvo F88 and then all the others. There were a few Kenworth and White cab-overs but they stood out by their small number. The middle east run lasted into the late 80's by which time ports had been built and eastern bloc transport groups undercut the rates