Sir Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis CBE FRS RDI; talented engineer, packaging visionary, arguably the most influential car designer in British motoring history, and I ask the question “hero or villain”?
If I was so inclined, perhaps I could rephrase the question to ask, did Issigonis do more harm than good, but anyone who harms the company they are supposed to serve is rarely considered a hero, unless “bringing the organization down from within” is a positive. There is no evidence to suggest that Issigonis wanted the heart of the British car industry to fail, indeed quite the opposite. However, I venture that his actions and attitudes were key reasons for its downfall. Just because someone had a few good days at work and struck lucky when the company he worked for failed to replace his most famous creation in a timely manner, thereby gifting man and machine with an untouchable halo of reverence, doesn’t make that man a genius. It’s all very well wanting to push the technical boundaries of mass-market vehicle engineering, but it’s specifically not all very well when intransigence and sheer bloody mindedness ends up hobbling the whole circus to the extent that it stutters, falters and ultimately fails. Like the Manson Family, Tony Blair, and The Bayside Boys 1995 remix of Los del Rio’s international dance craze disco hit “Macarena”, not admitting when you are wrong is nothing to be proud of.
I shouldn’t insult your intelligence by relaying the well-worn backstory, but perhaps I’ll just lightly insult you by picking out the bits that support my argument. You probably know the part about Alec Issigonis being born in the Greek city of Smyrna in 1906, being evacuated to Malta in 1922 following the Turkish invasion, and how he moved to London in 1923 to study engineering. You’ll probably recall that he first gained employment with Humber, before moving to Austin and then scoring his first production hit at Morris with the 1948 Minor. After a short stint at Alvis where he developed an ambitiously advanced saloon that Alvis would never afford to actually produce, he moved back to BMC. There, from 1955 until the late 1960s, he set about repeating the same mistake of developing cars that were uneconomic, except this time BMC and BL were so badly managed that he got away it. You have to wonder how the situation came to be that the leading designer in one of the world’s largest motor manufacturers came to be so out of touch.
During the 1930s, Issigonis was learning his trade and honing his skills. As a skilled technician with a competitive streak, he built his own racing cars and successfully campaigned them at club level. After initially re-engineering a supercharged Austin 7 Ulster, he then took a blank piece of paper and designed his own car from the ground up. His special, constructed by hand from laminated plywood clothed in aluminium, weighed all of 266kgs including the engine, completely dominating the 750cc class. Issigonis demonstrated the same innovation and dedication to lightweight engineering that Colin Chapman would show a decade later, but in his working life Issigonis was to follow a different path to Chapman. Rather than strike out on his own, Issigonis seemed content to be an employee within a large organization, albeit destined for seniority. Mass production normally requires a different mindset from the purity that benefits the creation of sports cars. The average driver wants comfort, ease of operation and low ownership costs derived from proven reliability. Given that Issigonis never lost his drive for innovation and placed his interpretation of technical excellence above all other concerns, a career in mass market car manufacturing just doesn’t seem like a good fit given the benefit of hindsight. He was later quoted as saying, “Market research is bunk! It is the designer of the car who knows best what is good for the prospective car owner. I never consulted sales people about what cars they are going to get”. Does that sound like a man in touch with the needs of his customer?
Launched in 1948, the Issigonis designed Morris Minor was envisaged as post-war transport to remobilize the common man and generate valuable export revenue. It fulfilled that role very well, and although it’s a car of its time, the Minor is light, airy and manoeuverable, and there’s nothing to stop you using one as daily transport today. The reason there is nothing much wrong with it is because there is nothing too clever about it. It was cheap to produce, profitable for Morris, and cost effective for the customer to buy and run. From a modern perspective, the best thing about assessing the Minor is that they stopped making new ones in 1971 so we don’t expect it to be any better than it is. Contrast that with the man’s most celebrated creation, the Mini. That car was launched in 1959 but was still being churned out at the dawn of the 21st Century, so perhaps familiarity has bred contempt. It’s one of those classic cars that everyone is supposed to love, unless you are a heartless bastard. Well, hello there. I won’t deny Minis have an appealing aesthetic, but they are best appreciated from the outside. They may have been revolutionary in 1959 but the primary novelty of a Mini was its small size and its agility. If you dig beyond that, you start to quickly run out of positives. Comfort levels are non-existent, reliability was patchy and even by 1960s standards they knew how to corrode. Worst of all, it wasn’t costed properly, so not only did BMC lose money on every one that left the gates, they got doubly stung with warranty costs (not very) further down the road.
Conveniently, most of the competition were turning out such rubbish that the Mini seemed to be beamed straight from the Gods. Buoyed by the success of the new car, Issigonis was promoted to Technical Director of BMC. Having decided the core attributes of the Mini were a template for a whole family of cars, he continued unblinkingly to produce the ADO 16 Austin/Morris 1100. I want to like the Austin 1100 and it was a best seller in the mid-1960s, but the driving experience is too reminiscent of a long wheelbase Mini for it to really appeal. Compared to the less advanced Ford Anglia and Vauxhall Viva, the ADO16 was more spacious, and much was made of the Alex Moulton-designed Hydrolastic suspension which supposedly delivered a smoother ride, at the expense of a tendency to feel somewhat floaty. However, whilst Issigonis’ commitment to delivering cutting edge engineering may have been noble, BMC was heading for a financial hole.
In 1964, Harold Wilson’s government inherited an £800m deficit in the UK’s balance of trade. Rather than devalue the pound (although this would happen in November 1967), the government imposed a temporary surcharge on imports in 1966 and squeezed credit to suppress consumer demand. This hit the domestic car industry as consumer confidence was hit, resulting in BMC making a £3m loss in 1966/67. Part of the problem was BMC’s lack of focus on building larger more profitable cars, coupled with a failure to make any real headway into new export markets. It seems there was a culture of head-in-sand amongst the top management, with Issigonis at the heart of it. He had the ear of chairman Sir George Harriman, and their mutual backslapping created an environment where the various departments were left to get on with things without any real scrutiny or consolidated planning. Issigonis had become out of touch and hadn’t capitalised on his success with the 1100. The 1800 Landcrab hadn’t made much impact and the forthcoming Maxi would appear to be too staid and austere compared to where Ford were taking the Cortina, let alone hatchback equipped rivals from the Continent. Issigonis was so resistant to change and so repelled by any suggestions that perhaps Ford’s market research machine was leading the way in tapping into customer aspirations that he dug his heels in, even refusing to ditch the Mini’s draughty sliding windows in favour of wind-up ones.
In 1967 Issigonis was appointed Head of New Car Development and busied himself with future technologies, but things had to change at BMC on an organizational level to prevent the whole ship from sinking. Sir Donald (soon to be Lord) Stokes took the reins from Harriman in 1968 and it’s telling that one of his first actions was to sideline the egotistical designer. When Issigonis was pensioned off in 1971 a small ceremony was held to see him on his way. Stokes was conveniently away so unable to attend. Stokes’ time at BL was ultimately doomed as the rot had already set in too deeply and BMC hadn’t made hay while the sun shone. Although new post-Issigonis products were developed, they were rushed to market and had to be compromised on the grounds of cost. The bastardized production version of Harris Mann’s Allegro is one such example, but it’s still a better drive than Issigonis’ 1100 as long as you’re not pretending to be in a Grand Prix (don’t look at me like that, it just is).
Following his supposed retirement in 1971, Issigonis didn’t entirely disappear, but continued working on a consultancy basis for British Leyland. It was during this period that he occupied himself with some of those future technologies that may have seen the light of day had he remained as Head of New Car Development. Foremost was the 9X, a badly needed reinvented Mini for the 1970s. Surprisingly, given the character assassination I have dispensed above, the 9X was genuinely forward-thinking with an eye on making money. It had conventional coil springs with McPherson struts at the front and a beam at the back, which were cheaper to produce than a Hydrolastic system. The A series engine was ditched and an all-new unit called the DX was developed, boasting an aluminium cylinder head and around 60bhp from a 1-litre capacity. Most boldly, Issigonis planned to ditch the manual gearbox entirely, and produce a gearless car for 2 pedal driving. The 9X even had a hatchback, which Issigonis still didn’t like but realized was now a necessity. It could have been quite something, but by that point BL had to reprioritize and focus on medium and large car development, and so couldn’t afford to pursue the 9X. The requirement to shelve 9X development was a direct result of Issigonis and Harriman taking their eye off the ball during the previous decade. Issigonis kept refining the principles of the 9X at home, in particular gearless transmission, but he gradually lost the ear of the management. In the end, Graham Day terminated his consultancy agreement in 1987.
Given Issigonis’ undoubted talents, the ending is all the more poignant. Unfortunately, rather than evolve, his ego prevented him from listening to reason or adapting his ideas to what the market actually wanted. Production costs outweighed profit, and he didn’t see the light until it was too late. The butterfly effect of Alec Issigonis was felt for a long time, and whilst I don’t lay all the blame for the demise of the British car industry at his door, he should have known better and stopped to view the bigger picture. Perhaps it was a trait that ran in the family. Issigonis’ first cousin once removed was Bernd Pischetsreider, responsible for steering BMW’s ill-fated acquisition of Rover Group. He should have listened too.
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