Aaaah! My eyes! The goggles they do nothing!
TheLoadedDog: Interesting article. (I was put off at first that the ‘rest of the article’ had to be purchased, but I did a google search and got the rest free from the same site. 
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Hm. Okay, it’s one of the ugliest cars I’ve seen. On the other hand, I have an affinity for quirky-looking things. My first motorcycles were two-strokes, and I rather like the sound of that kind of engine. While slower than my Yamaha 250 Enduro, the Zeta (according to the article) got 40% to 50% better gas mileage. And hey, it did finish the rally!
Disaster it may have been, but I think I like it! 
Remembers Cadillacs V-8-6-4 engine? This attempted to be a fuel saving variable displacement engine in the early eighties. I think Cadillac had to recall every one of them and replace the engine with the conventional one. It was a good idea, but the technology wasn’t there yet. Chrysler, for one, uses it on their new Hemi motor.
That car is so ugly it’s cute. Along the lines of the Goggomobil and other bugeyed cars.
Rear engine, swing axles. So unstable that during WWII Wehrmacht officers were forbidden to ride in them.
The X cars are another case of not-really-that-bad. They were reasonably competent cars. My wife’s Omega was well turned out and reliable. She sold it to her sister at about 87,000 miles, and she drove it for another 60,000. My brother barrel-rolled his Citation off I-69 into a snowbank at 30,000 miles (the damage? a small crack in the windshield.) He drove it for another 100,000.
They weren’t as good as the Toyotas and Nissans of the time, but no US car was. I’m a General Motors retiree, by the way, but it didn’t blind me to the cold truth.
GM was trying to compete with the Japanese with these cars, but they forgot one thing that’s important to a lot of people - the damned things were hideous. Slap on a couple of warp engines and you’ve got a Federation shuttlecraft after a few trips through an asteroid belt.
I read an interesting article once about the Mini. The title was a date, can’t remember it exactly, but the date the Mini was introduced; and it said that was the day the British car industry died. Which was a rather odd way to describe it, but the point was that the car was an engineering masterpiece (everything that would put Honda and Datsun on top of the world in the '70s was on the Mini in the '60s), and revealed that every other part of the industry was a disaster. No effective dealer network, no service or parts distribution, etc.
I mentioned this in another thread, but the Trabant was pretty much a disaster. Surprisingly, however, there’s a US dealership.
I’m totally digging the limo.
The DeLorean. A cool looking car, but various engineering compromises led to it being underpowered (130HP, 0-60 over 8 seconds), and the stainless steel body was beautiful but a nightmare to maintain. A fender-bender in a regular car can be fixed by pulling the dent, smoothing it with bondo and a grinder, and a little paint. A stainless, unpainted body required special tooling and usually an entire panel replaced if it gets dinged. Stupid design decision.
Not automotive, but here’s to the 1970s Triumph Bonneville motorcycles! Triumph had converted from Whitworth fasteners to SAE and then to metric; the supply line was poorly managed and some bikes had all three types of bolts holding it together… and (IIRC) they still used a zener diode voltage regulator that burned out all of the lights when it blew!
Also, here’s to Norton! In the face of competition from the Japanese four cylinder bikes, they retired the dated but still powerful and sexy-looking Commando and replaced it with a rotary that… well, it wasn’t good looking and the press was polite about how it performed.
Johnny L.A., wasn’t the TR-7 also damaged by a poorly timed strike by British-Leyland workers, or was that the Stag?
The Mini cost too much to manufacture. Ford UK took one apart and figured out tit was losing money putting them together in the first place.
I think the latter part of your post would refer to all the BMC/BL company. It seemed to own several car marques that would compete for sales, but share no common components for much of their lives.
Ironic I suppose that the Mini (and the larger 1100/1300 car) were examples of saving money by rebranding one car with different marques and trim.
And speaking of the British Car Industry (what little is left) what about the MG SV? How MG Rover found time to buy up another low volume sports car firm, take one of its models and drape it in carbon fibre so it would cost tens of thousands more than a TVR or Corvette (either one of which could apparantly give it quite a run for its money) whilst staring into the abyss into which it has now fallen, is beyond me
The British car industry were always having strikes, it seems. As for BMC/BL… Well, it’s a bit complicated. I haven’t had enough coffee yet to remember it all, but I do have some books that describe the mergers. Several car companies got their bodies from Pressed Steel. BMC bought it, and their rivals were now buying bodies from a BMC company! Triumph and MG were always rivals. When BMC (who made MGs) bought Triumph (which was a separate company from the motorcycle maker – Standard bought the Triumph automobile line and name in the 1930s, IIRC) one company was selling competing sports cars. BMC were bought out by the small truckmaker Leyland in 1968(?), and Leyland thought Triumph had more prestige than MG. So while MGBs, MGB BTs and Midgets were still made, they remained stagnant except for changes to meet U.S. emissions and safety regulations.
The TR6 was a good six-cylinder car that pretty much killed off the Austin-Healey (also owned by BMC, IIRC). The TR6 was a nice car, but there were reports of shoddy workmanship. Datsun introduced the 240Z in – what? 1970? The Datsun was a nicely made car, and it also outclassed the aging TR6.
In order to ‘compete’ with the Z-cars, Triumph came out with the TR7. There was a belief that convertibles would be regulated out of existence in the U.S. (BL’s largest market), so the TR7 was introduced as a coupé. Not only that, but it only had a four-cylinder engine. So they were trying to compete against a well-built, sexy, six-cylinder car with a car that was less powerful than the car it replaced! MGBs and Midgets were still selling well, and they were practically the only convertables available on the market. (The Spitfire, which was in the same class as the Midget, continued until 1980 though.) In spite of their superior sales, MGs were left undeveloped. The promised O-series engines never materialised, and the B-engine was strangled by the emmissions equipment that it was forced to have. And yet, BMC insisted on pouring money into the TR7. By the time the TR8 came out, it was too little, too late to save the company.
Incidentally, the MGB V8 was a good car – unlike the nose-heavy (V6) MGC. In addition, the V8 got nearly as good fuel economy as the four-cylinder MGB. But after the 1973 oil embargo, there was a stigma attached to cars with V8 engines. I’d have to look it up, but I think the MGB V8 was never sold in the U.S.
So I think what killed the British car industry in the U.S. was a combination of things. First, BMC et al were chronically short of money. They tended to ‘make do’ with cheaper solutions while better solutions were discarded because they would have cost a few dollars more. A recession hurt sales. The oil embargo made them stay with less powerful cars. Workers went on strike. U.S. regulations strangled powerplants and caused changes that adversely affected handling. BL had several marques that directly competed against each other.
And then there was the TR7 debacle. Rather than develop the O-series engine for the MGB, they poured money into the Triumph; which, as I have said, was less powerful than its predecessor. The TR7 seems to me to have been their last effort to bolster sagging sales. Unfortunately, they didn’t back the winner they already had.
MGB GT (I don’t usually fuss over typos, but this is personal.)
Never officially sold here, and even in England it was only available as a GT, but there used to be a couple in the Seattle area MG club. One guy had a V8 GT that he brought over from England. (I don’t know all the legal hoops he had to jump through, but versions of that engine were in a lot of other cars and probably got federalized somewhere along the line, and it was originally a Buick engine anyway.) And there was another guy who had a roadster that the factory had used as a testbed when they were developing the V8 version. Interesting guy; he was a Spitfire mechanic in WWII, and when the MG club in England (I don’t remember which one) computerized their records they lost track of him because his membership number was too low.
Olds/Buick 215 V8
The disaster was that we sold it to the Brits. Bitchin’ motor, expandable to 300 cubic inches. True, they did some good stuff with it, but a loss to US hot rodders.
Agreed. One of the most worthless pieces of crap I have ever owned. We had nothing but trouble with it from day one.