Solihul ... How times have changed

[Rosco]

I was watching part of a DVD last night on Len Beadell, the bloke you are no doubt aware, was responsible for surveying the Gunbarrel et al. Whilst his story in itself was fascinating, there was one point of particular interest.

The whole story was made recently with him as a senior gentleman, recalling events as they unfolded.

Anyway, he made the comment that he started out using Jeeps, until the first Landys arrived, at which time he switched over to them.

Some time soon after, he was talking to the boffins from Solihul. If I recall, he was over in the UK at the time, but not sure as I was starting to dose off .. :angel:. They asked him for his comments and he told them about quite a few modifications he had made to his first batch to make them more suited.

Lo and behold, when his next lot of new replacements arrived, they incorporated all of his suggested modifications. He was later advised they took great interest in feedback from Aus and African users and took all the comments on board.

When I read here all the gripes about this very issue, I can't help but wonder where along the road to developing this marque, that they so badly lost the plot.

P.S. The DVD is excellent and his dry sense of humour very entertaining.

Cheers

[dobbo]

What is the Title of the DVD?

[Rosco]

What is the Title of the DVD?


"Too long in the bush - Len Beadell looks back"

[Narangga]

Must have been an old video as I heard him speak to our school 30 years ago and he was at least 70 then!

Yes the humour was like the country he worked in - very dry!

Yep in days of old when vehicle manufacturers had ears rather than advertising departments :angel:

[numpty]

Must have been an old video as I heard him speak to our school 30 years ago and he was at least 70 then!

Yes the humour was like the country he worked in - very dry!

Yep in days of old when vehicle manufacturers had ears rather than advertising departments :angel:

:eek: Len was actually 73 when he died in 1995.

[Rosco]

Must have been an old video ............

It was a collection of footage. Some old, some not so old. Where he re-visited the area, he was driving an early 90's Disco.

The DVD is Copyright 2007, so must have been put together quite recently.

[disco2hse]

:eek: Len was actually 73 when he died in 1995.

:lol2:

But remember, to kids anyone over 18 is old, anyone over 25 is ancient and if he had grey hairs then, he must be way into his 70's --- he's like, sooo old :eek:

:D

[disco2hse]

But seriously, I think they lost the plot when they got a dose of managementitis, otherwise known as British Leyland. Up till then they were boffins trying to make great vehicles, after then they became a production facility; working to a budget, with performance criteria, and battling with the enemy of budgets and performance outputs - customers and unions.

[Redback]

It was a collection of footage. Some old, some not so old. Where he re-visited the area, he was driving an early 90's Disco.

The DVD is Copyright 2007, so must have been put together quite recently.

I have this DVD, i watched it and thought the same thing about them losing the plot.


But seriously, I think they lost the plot when they got a dose of managementitis, otherwise known as British Leyland. Up till then they were boffins trying to make great vehicles, after then they became a production facility; working to a budget, with performance criteria, and battling with the enemy of budgets and performance outputs - customers and unions.

Did British Leyland ever make a good car, not that i recall and was probably why Len went too Toyota around that time, along with countless others.

Baz.

[disco2hse]

Did British Leyland ever make a good car, not that i recall and was probably why Len went too Toyota around that time, along with countless others.

Kind of the point really. BL is responsible for some absolute rubbish, and I mean total :eek: Our family got a Morris-Austin-Leyland Marina van in the early 70's that lasted 6 months before it rusted out from under the doors and mud guards and basically fell apart. But I am sure it made the performance criteria on the production line and was built within budget.

[Rosco]

Did British Leyland ever make a good car ..............



Hey .. :o

How about the P76 ...

BWAAAAAHAAAAHAAA


:Rolling::Rolling::Rolling::Rolling::Rolling::Roll ing:

[2 rocks]

Hey .. :o
How about the P76 ...
BWAAAAAHAAAAHAAA

:Rolling::Rolling::Rolling::Rolling::Rolling::Roll ing:

Yeah but their motors made a good transplant for the Triumph Stag... :o

[disco2hse]

In fact I've seen more P76 motors in other things and running than in the original cars,..... and running ;)

[martinozcmax]

Never saw a good BL car. Had a Marina estate that was total crap. New company car so they coverd all the expenses but oh so unreliable. Design faults included washer and wipers that every time used would leave the remnants going across the screen directly in front of the driver. Very hard car to love !

The good news is they make my old disco seem very nice and reliable !!! :cool:

[Narangga]

:eek: Len was actually 73 when he died in 1995.

:eek2:


:lol2:

But remember, to kids anyone over 18 is old, anyone over 25 is ancient and if he had grey hairs then, he must be way into his 70's --- he's like, sooo old :eek:

:D

:Rolling: Beat me to it! I don't have his books with me so I couldn't check but I read them before I saw him in about '77. I honestly thought he was well past 60 by then. :angel:

[George130]

Hey My mum drove a P76! Loved that tank. Only down side of ours was the cops knew and whel book mum would also tell her she was late to pick us all up:angel:.

[JDNSW]

Rover started (under a different name) making sewing machines in the middle of the nineteenth century. By the late 19th century they were also making bicycles, and one model, called the Rover, was so successful it changed the name of the company. By the beginning of the 20th century, Rover had started to make cars, and by the mid twenties were a successful and innovative company. They nearly went broke in the depression, but recovered by good management (imposed by their bank) and good design, and were sufficiently successful by 1939 that they were given one of the shadow aircraft factories to run. During the war they did extensive military work, including jet engine design and development, and were in a good position at the end of the war.

Except that steel supplies depended on exports, and they had never been big on exports. The Landrover was designed as a civilian Jeep replacement for the Sterling area (including Australia), with the design being intended to use a minimum of rationed steel (hence the use of unrationed aluminium), and, since it was intended as a quick fix for short term production, with a minimum of tooling - which resulted in the meccano like construction, unlike the Jeep which was built using conventional mass production car methods.

Arriving in Australia (and other sterling area countries) in 1948, the only competition was the war surplus Jeep, only available in limited numbers. And there was pent up demand for all cars due to no production during the war. Throughout this area it was so successful that until the mid seventies supplies were never able to meet demand. Rover soon found that it was not going to be a short term project as planned, and collected all the ideas they could from users, and these resulted in the 86"/107" Series 1.

By the time the Series 2 was introduced in 1958, outside the dollar area there was nothing to touch the Landrover - but Rover had serious problems. It was only a small company, and was struggling to meet demand, plus they really wanted to introduce new models (in the ordinary car line), and what was to become the Rangerover was already being planned - they needed more capital. In 1967 they agreed to a merger with the truck company, Leyland, on the basis that there were no competing models. Unknown to Rover, the bean counters at Leyland had a plan to take over the entire British car industry. Essentially, they managed this, and destroyed it in the process.

By the early 1970s, Landrover was the only part of the vastly expanded empire that was actually making money, which instead of going into product development or increased production facilities, went into trying to prop up the whole ramshackle empire. This meant stagnant design, poor quality materials, and, probably most damaging, continued inability to meet demand.

In the Australian context, this was disastrous for Land Rover. In the mid 1960s, the army re-equipped with Landrovers; this took virtually the entire Australian quota for several years - if you were a civilian, you just put your name down on the waiting list. Needless to say, some were not happy to do this, and one, Les Theiss (an earthmoving contractor), imported an unheard of competitor from Toyota - whom nobody had ever heard of either. He not only used them, he started selling them (and later other Toyotas). Although the early models had a lot of shortcomings, Toyota listened to their customers, where Landrover, able to sell everything they could make, were no longer inclined to do so - and by 1970 were no longer allowed to by their new masters.

As far as the Australian civilian market was concerned, by the time the Series 3 was replaced, Landrover had already lost the market, and their new competitors had the advantage that they had rising sales of other vehicles to enable them to maintain dealers everywhere, where sales of Leyland cars and trucks, crippled by the company's financial woes, poor design, and industrial strife with resultant quality and delivery problems, were in a downward spiral, losing dealers as the sales disappeared. By 1980, Leyland had realised the problems, and Landrover, now a separate division, had funding to improve the design, making improvements that should have been made ten years earlier, and at last able to deliver - not that it mattered as far as Australia was concerned - the sales of Landrovers had disappeared.

However, the sales of Rangerovers, with no real competitor, were booming. So it is hardly surprising that JRA transformed itself into a luxury car organisation, with, particularly after the end of the Perentie project, little interest and a bit of embarrasment about the Landrover. The Rangerover moved rapidly up market, and in 1991 the widening gap between it and the top line 110 was filled by the new Discovery, and, somewhat with relief, the 110 and 120 were dropped. Noisy customers eventually resulted in the reintroduction of the Defender a couple of years later, but it has never really fitted the company's image as a seller of luxury cars.

John

[disco2hse]

Excellent round up John :) Much appreciated.

That ought to go into the FAQ or whatever.

[Pedro_The_Swift]

or in Dullbirds Calender?
:wasntme:

[Narangga]

John my Aussie history isn't fantastic but Theiss used the first Landcruisers on the Snowy scheme didn't he?

[djam1]

I knew Len well my mum did better than me but I recall him being asked if a Toyota would have been better in the early days.
He thought for some time and said the Land Rover was so much smaller for that type of work.

[JDNSW]

John my Aussie history isn't fantastic but Theiss used the first Landcruisers on the Snowy scheme didn't he?

I don't know for certain the answer to that. Certainly they were involved as a contractor in the Snowy scheme, and almost certainly the first company to use Toyotas there. But they were a Queensland company, and it is pretty likely that they would have first used Toyotas on their home ground. Also, I have no idea of the relative timing of their Snowy involvement and their import of Toyotas. I seem to remember that their first Toyotas were imported in about 1958, possibly a year or two earlier, but I have no idea when they started Snowy work, could have been earlier or later - the scheme as a whole started right after the war.

John

[Lotz-A-Landies]

John my Aussie history isn't fantastic but Theiss used the first Landcruisers on the Snowy scheme didn't he?
"More than 390,000 LandCruisers have been sold since the vehicle's first appearance on the Snowy Mountains construction in 1959.

Sir Leslie Thiess, head of Thiess Constructions, was impressed by a privately imported LandCruiser working on his Tumut Ponds site." Toyota Landcruiser Celebrates Snowy Mountains Anniversary newsarticle (http://www.autoweb.com.au/cms/A_51038/title_Toyota-Landcruiser-Celebrates-Snowy-Mountains-Anniversary/newsarticle.html)


..., they incorporated all of his suggested modifications. He was later advised they took great interest in feedback from Aus and African users and took all the comments on board.

When I read here all the gripes about this very issue, I can't help but wonder where along the road to developing this marque, that they so badly lost the plot.

Cheers
What happened was British Leyland. The control was taken out of the hands of the people and engineers who had developed the marque and handed over to Lord Stokes, a Triumph man. The automotive megalith was so diverse they stopped listening to the customers outside the UK and the rest is history.

Just this week a stallwart of Land Rovers in Sydney and owner of a number of series vehicles is getting rid of his L322 RR and looking at a LandCruiser 200 series. All because of reliability and servicing issues.

Diana

[Narangga]

Thanks for that Diana - I thought I remembered the advertising shots of the ol' 3 speed cruiser at the Snowies.

[Frenchie]

I'm sure that Land Rover listen to the feedback of their main customer base and incorporate good suggestions into future models:

"I suggest a greater range of colours for the leather seats, perhaps with contrasting piping..."

"Some more cupholders would be good, particularly for the 3rd row passengers...."

"What sort of paint protection do you offer? I can't stand my Range Rover being dirty!"

:D

[Lotz-A-Landies]

...."What sort of paint protection do you offer? I can't stand my Range Rover being dirty!"

:DFrenchie, You forgot to add the American twang! ;)