AUTOS: Under the Hood

Great Britain’s bumbling auto industry was so slow getting out of the garage that the House of Commons took a look under the hood. One angry member described what he saw last week as “a national scandal.” After eight months of trying, the industry could still produce no more than 3,000 cars a week; it would be lucky to achieve even half its original 1946 goal of 400,000.

Britain was not going to use its cars for weekends in the country: it was going to export most of them to build up its sagging foreign-trade balances. So Laborites and Conservatives found common cause for crying “How now?”

Laborite C. N. Shawcross was more specific. Said he: British automakers, “intending to go back to 1939 instead of going ahead to 1950,” have done little to improve methods used before the war, when the U.S., with only twice as many workers, turned out 15 times as many cars. Compared with more powerful, lower-priced U.S. models, said Member Shawcross, the smallest current British model is “a joke, a glorified, expensive toy.”

Stung by this indictment, automakers sputtered that their critics in Commons were “ill-informed.” They had their own troubles: 1) high steel prices, 2) huge purchase taxes and operating-license fees based on horsepower ratings, 3) too many labor disputes.

What’s Wrong with the Engine. But Britain’s motormakers could not deny that, by U.S. lights, they still had much to learn about mass production. Hit-or-miss assembly-line techniques, short production runs and poor standardization of parts (the basis of mass production) keep unit costs up, output down. Most serious handicap of all is an antiquated supply system. Big British manufacturers depend on as many as 300 little independent firms for parts and materials. Lack of vital supplies held one recent week’s production of Hillman Minxes down to eight cars—each of which, by company estimates, cost a staggering £200,000.

Slightly annoyed by slowdowns but unhampered until last month by such outright strikes as paralyzed U.S. auto reconversion, British manufacturers seemed at first to have got off to a fast start in the race for postwar world markets. Early this year they even managed to ship a driblet of cars into the U.S. itself. But, with reconversion nearly complete, the British were now waking up to the fact that their auto production system was not up to the American model.

Now their chief hope was that U.S. manufacturers would be too busy filling piled-up domestic needs to bother much with exporting for at least another year. By then some of the British production kinks might be ironed out.