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Why Brexit Could Help Bring Back the British Auto Industry
I'll admit that I stayed up late last night to find out whether the United Kingdom would vote to leave the European Union. I'll also admit that I was cheered by the result. Not because of how #LeaveEU affects particular issues like border control or whether seven-year-old children are allowed to blow up balloons without close supervision, but because the citizens of the UK have voted for local government and local responsibility. The European Union's model of governance by unelected mandarins operating secretly in a faraway country is incompatible with the rights that we, as Americans, hold to be self-evident. I wouldn't want some bureaucrat in Paraguay making decisions about how I live my life, so I understand the English desire to be free of Brussels. It might cost them a few bucks in the short term, but as any devoted student of history knows, the American Revolution was also a financial disaster for a lot of people, for a very long time.
The next question is whether our British cousins, having shown their willingness to take control of their own national affairs, are ready for an even more daunting challenge: taking control of their own auto industry. For thirty years after the end of World War II, the "export or die" policies of the British government essentially created the idea of American automotive enthusiasm as we know it. Cars like the original MG Midget, the Jaguar E-Type, and the Lotus Elan lured hundreds of thousands of Americans out of their massive, sleepy sedans. Not incidentally, they led to the founding of this very publication; I doubt we'd have ever launched Road & Track if the Nash Ambassador had been the most sporting vehicle available in the United States circa 1950.
I doubt we'd have ever launched Road & Track if the Nash Ambassador had been the most sporting vehicle available in the United States circa 1950.
Today, there is effectively no British automotive industry. There are plenty of manufacturing plants in the UK, but virtually all of them are owned by foreign companies. MG is a Chinese brand. Jaguar and Land Rover are directed from Mumbai. Mini, and most of the intellectual property that was once part of British Leyland, is in the custody of BMW, as is Rolls-Royce. Lotus is under the Malaysian Proton umbrella. Bentley belongs to Volkswagen. Aston Martin is owned by a multi-national consortium of investors. The only automaker of any size under both British ownership and British control is McLaren.
This is a dismal state of affairs, and it could be remedied one of two ways. The first one would be for enterprising British investors to purchase existing brands and bring the ownership back to that scepter'd isle. There's a lot of capital in London, although we're now told that it will all flee the City and return to Europe. Somehow, I doubt that. Let's say, however, that the EU makes it significantly more difficult for the English banks to invest and operate on the Continent. Why not extract an ornament from that inconvenience, as a great Englishman once wrote, and bring Jaguar, Rolls-Royce, or Mini back home?
As a former Jaguar owner, I have to say that my personal interest in owning another Jag would be significantly enhanced were the firm to return to the UK. I don't have anything against the Tata Group, but the British-ness of Jaguar is part of the romance and until the company is in British hands all of those James-Bond-ish advertisements and marketing stunts ring a little hollow for me. The same would hold true for all of the defunct brands currently under the British umbrella. Give me a new Triumph Stag, why dontcha? And make it properly English, from the balance sheet to the rear differential. If you don't know how to do it, ask John Bloor; he's made Triumph bikes absolutely brilliant in the Hinckley era.
As great as that would be, however, it's all a little backwards-looking. The British auto business is at its best when it looks forward. Cars like the Series 1 Jaguar XJ6 and the original Austin Mini might be "heritage" touchstones now but at the time of their conception they were thoroughly radical. The UK was once the global center of automotive engineering, and in some aspects, such as Formula One and sports prototype design, it still is. A recent issue of F1 magazine had Franz Tost, the chief of the resurgent Scuderia Toro Rosso team, admitting that there were a lot of UK license plates in his parking lot. The English philosophy of engineering is innovative and iconoclastic. True, sometimes that gets you stuff like the air suspension in the P38-generation Range Rover, but sometimes it gets you world-changing ideas like the transverse front-wheel-drive engine/transmission package, a Mini innovation that utterly defines the modern automobile.
Like it or not, the automotive future is very likely both electric and autonomous. Which means that in order to perform the export miracle of the Forties and Fifties all over again, Britain will need a new-generation auto industry. To put it plainly, there should be an English Tesla, and sooner rather than later. There's certainly precedent; the first Tesla Roadster was essentially a Lotus Elise with some battery packs strapped to the floor. How is it that Elon Musk can make an electric car out of a Lotus but nobody in the UK can manage the task?
I'm thinking here of a company that meets Tesla on equal terms but which espouses English virtues. The Tesla Model S is a dragstrip superstar, in true American fashion. It's big and brash and heavy. So there's room for an English electric car that plays MG to Tesla's Packard. Light, agile, engineered to charm rather than intimidate.
A product like that could create a whole new generation of British-car enthusiasts on these shores. Imagine it: the era of flat caps and string-back driving gloves could return, accompanied by the turbine whine of an electric motor instead of the unsteady rumble of the BMC A-Series engine. The same young people who currently go crazy about Chinese stuff like the iPhone and the latest tablet computer might become dyed-in-the-wool Anglophiles. The Union Jack would once again fly over the autocrosses and road courses of this country. No reason why it couldn't happen. In the brave new world of the electric car, Britannia could, once again, rule.
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
