My understanding is that in the 1970s and 80s most of the United Kingdom’s automobile marques (car brands) were gathered into a conglomerate called British Leyland. I was wondering if anyone could provide a complete list of all the brands that were once under the British Leyland umbrella and what eventually happened to them.
From http://www.team.net/www/morgan/history/linage.html
1944 Triumph and Standard merge.
1961 Merge of Leyland, Triumph, and Standard.
1963 Standard dropped. Begining of the Leyland Decisions?
1967 Rover-Land Rover join Leyland and Triumph.
Okay now back to my favorite part…
1952 BMC Which brought together Austin-Vanden Plas, Morris, MG, Wolseley,
and Riley. Can I say that this is when the Best British cars started?
1952 Austin-Healey division later the same year as BMC.
1966 BMH who bring Daimler-Jaguar into the fold.
Okay here it comes, the end of an Empire…
1968 British Leyland. This is now everything mentioned so far.
1969 Riley dropped
1971 Austin-Healey dropped
1975 Wolseley dropped This is like the domino effect huh?
1980 Vanden Plas dropped
1984 Morris and Triumph dropped
1984 Daimler-Jaguar sold
1987 Austin dropped
1987 Leyland sold. Again, I have no comment to insert here.
All the comments are from the website, not me.
As for what they’re doing now, they’ve either gone out of business or been taken over by big foreign companies.
Oops, MG-Rover are still going in British hands - BMW sold it a few years back, keeping the MINI and (I think) Range-Rover names.
Land Rover (which includes Range Rover) is now owned by Ford.
As is Jaguar, Aston-Martin and IIRC Lotus.
Lotus are owned by Proton.
What’s a “Lotu”? And how come Proton gets to keep all of them?
Stand corrected, Tuco
It’s like bloody Monopoly.
Soon they will all be owned by ‘The Car-Making Company, Ltd.’
So, let’s see here, taking in all English marques …
General Motors: Vauxhall
Ford: Land Rover, Aston-Martin, Jaguar, Daimler
Daimler Chrysler: McLaren
Volkswagen: Bentley
B.M.W.: Rolls-Royce, Mini, Triumph, Riley
Proton: Lotus
Phoenix: Rover, MG, Austin, Healey, Austin-Healey, Morris, Wolseley, Leyland (most of these marques remain unused)
Still independent: TVR, AC, Caterham, Westfield, Morgan, Marcos
Does this look right?
It’s not clear from that list whether you realise that Vauxhall and several other of those marques were never part of British Leyland. Anyway, in addition, there was also a whole family of marques that formed the Rootes group - Hillman, Humber, Singer, Sunbeam. Chrysler took them over in the 1970s, IIRC. All those brands are no more.
Then Chrysler sold out to Peugeot. The factories , mainly based in Coventry , are still used to produce some Peugeot models.