Could The British Car Industry Be Saved... And Could the Beetle Have Saved It?
- cepmurphywrites
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
By Colin Salt.
The end of the British-owned volume car industry marks one of the most humiliating psychological defeats of that country. Naturally, there's been a lot of counterfactual discussion about whether or not somehow the total and absolute collapse could have been avoided. The short, oversimplified answer from a casual observer is "Possibly and maybe even likely, but even if the historical outcome was the worst case, it still wouldn't have been good."
Which isn't very satisfying, I know. But so many of the macroeconomic, political, and even cultural fundamentals go against it.
The first gigantic issue can be summed up in one sentence: The domestic market was too small. The elaborate version of this is that the domestic market in Britain was small and made even smaller regarding their domestic industry because A: The strength and appeal of the American offshoots there, and B: Slightly relatedly, British purchasers simply had less loyalty towards national brands than most of their continental counterparts. This is not an issue of trade policy. Regardless of where the actual cars were built, it does the brand/headquarters little good if people are more likely to jump into a Honda or a Ford instead of the home team vehicle.
The second is what was common to every single major industry in postwar Britain. I'm not the first or most knowledgeable person to say this, but it's true: the British were stuck with a jumble of firms meant for a globe-spanning empire and left with a ruined island, with this diluted and frequently obsolescent group of businesses struggling the moment competition from the rest of the world returned. The government attempts to "solve" this were inconsistent and frequently clumsy, with they themselves (anyone who knows about their arms industry postwar knows this) making huge investments on projects that were then cancelled.
So yes, there are some paths forward to save the British-owned car industry. A national champion could potentially work, with the idea of consolidation being one very applicable to something like the auto industry. Some of it (especially the higher-margin, premium Leyland) could potentially survive if left to sink or swim by themselves. It could at the very least get a second wind if it had lucked into a Volkswagen Golf-style mega-hit instead of a string of equally large misses. But there's just so much working against it, because it wasn't just the auto industry that failed.
Of course, the word "Volkswagen" brings me to the next pop-AH auto counterfactual that I dislike: "all the established automakers passed on getting the VW plant after the war and Volkswagen later became the largest car company in the world, so if a British firm did take it over then they'd be the biggest too!"
This ignores that by being independent, Volkswagen wasn't competing against itself, and that by having the Beetle as (essentially) its only thing, it had to improve and innovate on a base car that was essentially obsolete by 1945. In its original form, the Beetle/KDF-Wagen would be nothing but the Nazi version of the Trabant, Yugo, or any other of many awful autocratic 'people's cars'. Yet by making changes under the back hood instead of making glamorous cosmetic fixes every year, Volkswagen managed to create a brand. A brand that in its homeland was the same kind of reliable transportation that Americans view with the likes of the Toyota Corolla, and which in America was a counterculture car, an antidote to the giant land-yachts covered in chrome that packed the highways.
The most likely outcome for an acquired Volkswagen is that its new owner makes the Beetle for a bit and then uses the giant Wolfsburg plant to build something else. Of course, for the British that "something else" could be the trick to save them. An underappreciated part of their decline was them instantly assuming that they'd get into the EEC and revving up capacity to export there, only to have De Gaulle block it and leave them wobbling. By the time they did enter, all it meant was getting swamped by continental imports. This is one reason why carmakers will build factories in the local markets they aim to sell in (even if not the only one). Britain having a politically safe gigantic car plant in the continent to make Minis or whatever en masse with local supply chains would be a gigantic boon.
Of course, their actual history on the continent was one of timid inconsistency mixed with political backlash. It's too much to describe in detail but suffice it to say that it ended up as the worst of all worlds, like much involving the British motor industry. It was knockdown kits, then it was a half-hearted effort at full production, then there was a union backlash when they tried to use their continental plants to circumvent strikes (the American multinationals did this without incident, another factor in British Leyland's growing list of problems). And so on.
So, the cynic in me says that they could have had Wolfsburg dropped into their lap on a silver platter - and a British officer, Major Ivan Hirst, did fix the damaged plant up after the war and got it making Beetles before handing control over to a German - and it'd still have failed.
But still, different outcomes are why alternate history exits.
Colin Salt is an author who, among other works, wrote The Smithtown Unit and its sequel Box Press for Sea Lion, and runs the Fuldapocalypse Fiction review blog.
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