BY NIALL McCRAE

My first car was a Morris Marina 1800 Super. There was nothing super about it; merely seven years old, it was fit for the scrapyard. Having replaced the Austin Cambridge / Morris Oxford in 1971, the top-selling Marina came to be regarded as the worst British car ever. Although the 60s cars appeared antiquated, they were much better built than the products of strike-torn British Leyland in the following decade.

Trade union militancy and poor workmanship are not fully to blame. Cars were designed to lose their lustre after a few years, even with regular servicing. For the motorway age, the lighter-bodied Marina gained 10mph on its predecessors – but rust-prone panels were a designed malady to necessitate replacement. Corrosion was a visible sign that the motorist was not keeping up with the Joneses.

The Americans started planned obsolescence in the 1950s, to the chagrin of consumer rights advocate Vance Packard. In The Waste Makers (1960), Packard decried the deteriorating quality of Detroit output. Despite (or because) the industry spending millions of dollars on research and development, longevity was declining and garage costs increasing. Annual revisions, mostly cosmetic, encouraged drivers to trade in for the shiny new model, heavily promoted in mass media. The 1958 Chevrolet sedan (pictured below) was proclaimed as a tremendous advance on that of the previous year, only to be treated similarly by the 1959 version. 

The strategy, as Packard explained, was a threefold balancing act: increase the price, sell to as many as possible, and ensure future sales by limiting the life of the vehicle. This was largely achieved by bodywork. While engineering gradually improved (much due to lessons learned the hard way in stock car racing), fascia and upholstery were tuned to capricious fashion.  Wings and fins on late 1950s cars, marketed as aerodynamic features, were stretching from the absurd to the obscene.

Packard quoted from his conversation with Laurence Crooks, motoring expert at the Consumers Union, who said that ‘few cars today are as solidly and sensibly built as the post-war Hudsons’. Until the mid-50s, cars were made ‘honestly’ (obviously not a good business plan). By prioritising body features, manufacturers were weakening structural rigidity. According to Crooks, ‘nothing makes a car seem old faster than rattles’, and the rattling was getting worse.

Frequent re-sculpturing made cars vulnerable to rust, exacerbated by increasing use of salt on winter roads. This cancerous growth was inbuilt euthanasia, reducing resale value and curtailing the second-hand market. Another purposeful perishability was the interior décor, which looked impressive in the showroom but frayed after two or three years of family use.  

A growing parts industry replaced tyres, brake pads, springs and mufflers, but once the car had forty thousand miles on the clock, the owner had an uphill battle. Packard lauded the Citroen ‘Deux Chevaux’, a basic car that ‘often runs 100,000 miles over all sorts of roads with practically no maintenance’, and ‘an eighteen-month waiting list of eager Frenchmen’. The tortoise indeed beats the hare. Of similar durability was the Volkswagen Beetle and the Morris Minor.

For Packard, the most rugged motor car was built in the 1920s – the Model T Ford: ‘many hundreds of these four-bangers are still getting daily use in North America…they have been used to tow cars two decades younger to the scrap yard crushing machines.’ But as Packard described, one type of car (not produced by the Big Three of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors) showed that lasting reliability was still possible. The yellow Checker cabs in New York weaved through city traffic for at least ten years without any major repair.    

The American motor industry continued its tremendous growth in the 1960s, with fatter and faster products. However, the ‘muscle cars’ was the swan song of Detroit. The oil crisis of 1973 put paid to gas-guzzlers, as the more economical and reliable Japanese imports gained a foothold.

In Wheels (1971), the contemporary fiction of Arthur Hailey, the production lines of Michigan faced an uncertain future. Tens of thousands of black people had migrated from the South, for well-paid, unionised employment. Motown had a vibrant culture. But market forces began the process of relocating for cheaper labour.

Meanwhile design teams, having focused on safety features in the 1960s, were now looking beyond the internal combustion engine. A carefully-kept older car would be perceived not only as unfashionable but also a choking pollutant. Many motorists in London will soon be charged £62.50 per week just to take the kids to school.

Modern cars are practically untouchable under the bonnet. The days of young blokes dismantling and repairing parts on old bangers are gone. Every component is computer-controlled with a precise lifetime. In the near future, will ordinary people have cars at all? An electric fleet of taxis may be the mode of travel as driveways are emptied by Net Zero totalitarianism.

The message here is not only about motoring. Corporate consumerism is making us more dependent and less resilient, as we are at the mercy of producers whose last interest is our financial welfare. An acquaintance of mine has ceased in business as a bathroom fitter, because his customers were frequently calling him back to fix leaks or other problems. A man who takes pride in his work found that the quality of fixtures and fittings had become so poor that a bathroom refit was never finished. What appears as chromed metal is actually flimsy plastic, readily cracking. All made in China, parts are difficult to replace.

Such unethical practice is verging on extortion, but there are no real consumer champions in government nowadays. When the salesman says ‘see you soon’, he isn’t just being polite.   

Niall McCrae is a Registered Nurse and officer of the Workers of England Union.