I'm not jumping on any bandwagon. I have had 2 princesses, 2 Itals and at least 6 rover sd1s and loved them all. although a striking design, I could never say the Princess was "good looking" . distinctive, maybe- but not attractive. the front overhang always made it look like the body was trying to overtake the wheels, and the rear was awful, carrying the trapezoidal shape to the rear lenses to poor effect.the triplex estate car based on the princess showed what could have been done.
The answer is at 4:35. "We wanted to design a car that is all things to all men". Impossible, so it was designed by committee, compromised right from the word go, and at no point did anyone stop and veto the whole thing. The best designs are often made by driven, visionary individuals, like R.J. Mitchell's Spitfire. Sadly such visionaries were rare by the 1970s, especially in the British car industry.
@@ryanthompson2893 it still runs perfect, I also have a mk1 and mk2 escort, I actually enjoy driving the allegro almost 12 years later, I bought it for €850 at the time in mint condition, it’s always kept indoors
The design for Austin Allegro was quite sporty. It was turned into flying pig because of the E-Series engine and huge heating system, they should have used the engine and suspension of other BL the Triumph 1500/ Dolomite and added a hatchback, and then it would have looked like an Alfa Romeo Alfasud. Sadly Austin/Morris managers wouldn’t have triumph parts, Despite them having same parent company.
Do not agree though doubt the Triumph 1500 would have been an improvement over the A-Series, while looking at Saab's version of the Slant-4 as a rough guide (particularly the work/cost involved in making the Slant-4 fit transversely into the Cavalier-based 900 NG with GM backing) it would have required a lot of work/cost just to get their version of the related Slant-4 to be mounted transversely into the Allegro.
@@wickiezulu The point I was trying is why all the different companies under the BL banner, get together and design a model with all the best parts BL had to offer. Like if BL had put a Triumph 1500/ Dolomite smaller heating system with E and A -Series engine and suspension the Triumph 1500/ Dolomite and added a hatchback. Then it wouldn’t have looked so bloated.
@@englishjack5112 the Triumph 1300 (and therefore 1500/Dolomite) was quite dumpy (though well hidden thanks to Michelotti) because of it's gearbox in sump, and this was what made the A-series and E-series so tall. I realise that the Allegro didn't really turn out as Harris Mann had styled, but did he not have the engine and heater dimensions to work around? And what gets me is that nobody looked at the the finished clay model and said "Wait, that's not right". But maybe it's much easier to say that with hindsight, a new car needs to look different and new - and maybe it's hard to see what's right and wrong when you are looking at something you haven't seen before!? And you are right, a few tweaks and it would have been a Alfasud - I guess a few tweaks are what separates good and bad styling! Incidentally didn't the Alfasud originally not have a hatchback (seized hinges and broken rear screens IIRC)? Also don't forget that the Marina had a development of the Triumph gearbox, and that George Turnbull was originally a Standard/Triumph man so I'm sure he would have used Triumph parts if they'd have worked.
I think the majority of BL's problems were as Jeremy Clarkson once pointed out, that nobody in different teams was really speaking to each other, the design team wasn't communicating properly with the engineering and mechanics teams, then the management weren't being fed the right story about what the engineers and designers views were, and which they could all come to an agreement on, if anybody had any sense the Allegro would've been a hatchback, had a more realistic set of engines (as Harris Mann said himself putting the Maxi engine was the main cause of why the body got so tubby from his original sketch) and been built with some quality workmanship. Also as Quentin Wilson said it was "designed by blind commities and assembled in an atmosphere of industrial terror". What does that say, the workers were not being taken into account so they didn't give jack shit about how they assembled them, they could go out the door with 10 bolts that were supposed to have held the frame together missing ,trim on one side and wire dangling from the dash touching the body and no-one gave a monkees. Basically, BL was a mess from the word go, the management had no sense of organisation, people skills, efficient delogation of tasks and utilising the teams to their abilities, all they saw was their competitors and money, which is what it's all about fair enough, but they were fixated on rushing a product to market without planning it through properly, flooding the market with 3-4 cars per sector, all badge-engineered btw dunno what gave them the hope that that'd work, and generally not planning out a comprehensive, simple set of products, they had far too many anyway. They also didn't view the company as a whole (as Derek Robinson union leader said, the whole policy was wrong, trade unions had no part or say in anything, and they made the cars, you Have to involove everybody through every stage of development, because if everyone is on-board and gets the plan, things usually work a lot better, granted the unions got abit out of hand when they started making impractical demands but again management should have investigated things better than they did. BL had so much that was right and so many good ideas and designers, they had access to the technology and people which could've made them world leaders in cars, what a real shame all that talent resulted in the rather duff junk that came off the showroom floor at the time. Just as a funny aside my dad had a Vandan Plas top of the range Allegro some years ago, drove down the road and the whole engine block fell out the car Lol, he tied it back up with some heavy string or something similar to get home and believe it or not it actually held the block better than the bolts originally in place.
Samthebam4044 One huge problem is they competed against themselves in that each company under the corporate umbrella built relative duplicates all up and down the model line. Remember how many versions of the mini were marketed?
True, though the Mini atleast came in different body-styles for each model name, the Countryman was an estate, the van, the pickup etc so I'd single out the Mini abit bud. With the other models like the Princess line yep there were 3 almost identical versions, only the Wolsley 6-cylinder had something unique about it. Plus they used alot from the parts bin, alot of it whilst still good parts were really starting to show their age, Metro's a good example, as is the Range Rover alot of trim was from the Marina, in a car that was supposed to be a top of the range 4x4. Like I was saying some of the things that came up were spot on had they been developed and planned better, the Metro had alot to offer as did the trip computer with the Maestro. The turbine car was real interesting had they tried it out, but alot of it was dogged by the bean counters and beaurocracy of the company. The designers probably knew what was coming and what they could do but they had to try and fight against 2 sets of well, knobends tbh, the management and the lazy workforce that they created (no offence to any of the hard working people by the way I'm sure there were many). Now what we got, no car industry except specialists, the PM ordering docs to work a 7 day week busting their pan in whilst she loafs about in her big foreign saloon LOL. Not like much is improving but let's not get into politics eh?
Yes there was some poor design going on in BL, my parents had a 1972 `K' reg. Maxi 1750 and an engine mounting failed allowing the engine to drop alarmingly on one side. About a month later their neighbours Maxi 1750 did the same thing! The engine mounting was hurriedly redesigned!
The narrator is Patrick Allen. He was also the voice over for all those adverts for the builder Barretts throughout the 1970-80s. I remember he had a so-called chiseled chin, which set him out as a man’s-man, the women apparently found him quite “dishy” ha! Those seventies mums eh?!
Probably due to lack of sufficient funds and an unrealistic timescale (Development to Production). I once read an interview article about when Lord Stokes became chairman of the newly-formed BLMC that he was horrified that the brands previously under BMC had no new models in the pipeline desbite the fact that their last new model was made in the early-mid 1960's and with ever-increasing competition from Ford, they released the Austin 1100's successor...the Allegro. Dave
BL decided that Maxi's hatch was to be its unique selling point and that the Allegro therefore couldn't have one. They did the same thing to the Princess, another hatch-shaped car without a hatch.
Here's one - which brand do you think would have best carried BL forward? Wolseley? Austin? MG? Triumph? Morris? Riley? Or did they get it right with Rover and what happened was the best anyone could have done? Most iconic brand in car world today is BMW. Now, which one of the brands could have best carried BL forward in a similar way?
@H HOUR HOTEL You got that right! People were expecting the second coming of the 1100/1300 when the Allegro was launched, but that didn't happen. Austin All-Aggro vs. the Morris Marooner! There won't be another BMC ADO16 (the code name for the 1100/1300). Have you watched the Allegro episode of "The Car's The Star"? It's posted on rovamota's RU-vid channel.
Yes, I did! Harris Mann wanted the All-Aggro to be like the Austin Princess, but that design wouldn't accommodate the 1750 Maxi engine or the Marina heater. The Allegro had to lose the angular look in Harris Mann's original design and become bloated. That's what happened when George Turnbull and company got its way, the Allegro's rounded body the result of a package requirement dictated by the Engineering Department of Austin Morris.💕
The Allegro, a product of great engineers whose efforts were scuppered by bad management. Many of the top engineers in recent years at companies such as Audi were British engineers. Also, the Nissan factory in North Eastern England is the most efficient car manufacturing facility in Europe. It makes me wonder what the managers were doing during this time to allow such the efforts of such great workers and engineers to result in the poor quality and unreliable cars of British Leyland ??
what I could never fathom, is how come nobody at BL ever said "I'm not signing that off for production, it looks hideous!" I mean Allegro, maxi, princess, sherpa.. all quite gobsmackingly ugly
I had probably a dozen or more company cars - starting from 1976 and an Escort mark 1. Finished up (admittedly by then my own company) with BMW 6 series and Range Rover Sport. In between, there were Cortina’s, Rover, Honda, Mazda, Volvo and others I can’t remember. The worst car I ever had by a mile; by a marathon was an Allegro. Dreadful to drive; unreliable - I was so pleased when the garage declared it uneconomic to fix engine and gearbox.
06:31 - 06:36 There is ALREADY significant corrosion on this car. Not only is this supposed to be a promotional film, but how old can it possibly have been at the time this was made? A few weeks? A month or two?
Depends if you think that is actually rust and not the remnants of grubby water that it is being driven through on these tests. Like them or not they were at least pretty resistant to rust compared with most models available at the time.
***** That really does look rust bubbles and bits missing to me, but the resolution isn't great so I'll grant you the benefit of the doubt and admit they could actually be bits of caked on mud and gaps in said mud.
+BritishCommentWriter Maybe it's a pre-production,developing only test unit. (The kind that had go though EVERYTHING before they made this video.As the promotion video usually made at a time near launch date,after all the pre-production test were done.)
So they just took all what people want Style Performance Comfort Reliability Practicality And just threw all that out of the window when they developed Allegro Biggest pile of shit to ever grace our roads
The Allegro was a masterpiece , it was deliberately dumbed down by management as they felt it was a better car than others in the range , the EU were also worried and imposed strict import quotas as they were so afraid it would obliterate sales of the citroen GS , peugeot 504 and the Fiat 124 range to name a few of johnny foreigeners offerings :-(
A perfect goulash of misfortune and poor oversight/management. It was designed to replace ADO16, so a hatch was deemed superfluous, despite the emergence of the R5 and others. The sleek front end was a victim of the decision to fit the E Series motor... Itself a victim of the odd (originally tax-driven) British fascination with long-stroke engines. There were so many other calamities that the Allegro stood little chance on the domestic market and none at all as an export. The R5, the 127, the Golf, the Polo (Audi 50) and many more besides were designed for the European (even global) market. The Allegro was designed for Welwyn Garden City, and any chance export opportunities would be a nice little bonus. Despite the Gentlemen's Agreement, the launch coincided with the arrival of serious competitors from Japan at serious prices. Poor old Allegro. A year into production, a used late-model 1100 or 1300 was still a superior car on almost every respect.... 😢
This Commercial mus be from 1973 ? ... Look at the BLMC cars - they are all products off the late 1950 or 1960`s .... BLMC did not make a new model for more than 10 years - and when they did, they turned out to be bad quality and unrelaible cars 3:10 The horse is going no where - and most BLMC cars were doing the same ...
I think every millenial who's considering supporting Corbyn should bbe forced to watch all these old BL videos so they understand just how naff the 70s were
what failed is capitalism, the capitalist bosses didnt want to make decent cars, then tried to sell crappy cars to france, france who have loads of strikes, still makes better cars than we did, and they didnt want our crap
It should be known,that the Allegro was voted,britains worst car of all time,it was knicknamed the All Aggro,or the Allergic.Every person i know that ever had one,had no end of problems with them,they wre a wothless heap of junk.One frustrated mechanic told me one time.The All-Aggro,should have gone straight from the assembly line,and into the crusher.Thats how bad they were!!!!!!!!!
A significant part of the problem was the p! $$ poor build quality as a result of the almost non stop strikes. Parts miss fitted or missing altogether...
