Probably the best automotive country in the world........

[Uncle Jimmy]

Frankly the Avenger stands up pretty well against the Fiat 124...

That and the photo of the Allard Clipper would be about ten years earlier than that of the Multipla.

[Tamworthbay]

Italy. No other country quite got the motor car in the same way that Italy did. Sure you can point to many cars from Ferramboisoaserti but these were built in tiny numbers and made a great deal more noise than they should. No, what you need to marvel at are the Fiats, Lancias and Alfas that were given delicate watch-winder engines, sharp body work and innovative interiors. You may point to the fact that these cars tended to be a little fractious and weren't built for the long haul but that matters not. No other country did it quite like Italy. Why? I believe one of the major factors was that many Italians know how to dress.

 

Look at this picture of an Allard Clipper. Now, while it is hard to imagine a car more tragic than a Clipper try to drag your eyes away from the sorry mess of fibreglass and pity (FFS the front tyre is flat!) and look at the proud design team standing behind it. I know that this was not that long after the war and Britain was still a mess of demob and austerity but even by our low standards of the time these are not the best dressed people in the world.

 

 

Now look at this street scene complete with a Multipla. I think you will agree that there is some pretty sharp suiting going on there.

 

 

 

Now, I am not suggesting that because design teams are well dressed they build nice things. There are many, many examples of Britain making crazy apeshit bonkers stuff being designed by people who looked like they had escaped from the lost property bag in the PE department. We just built dreary cars. Why? Why did someone who worked at English Electric sketching away at a Lightning finish for the day, walk out to the car park and climb into the worst car ever built in the entire world (Standard 8 since you ask)? It is because (i) Britain was about a pride in engineering and (ii) we didn't care about how we dressed.

 

These sound like good things and they are for the most part but they can have unintended consequences. One is that your chap at English Electric would tend to mend his own car. Because of that we needed simple and we needed no surprises. We liked things that didn't change too much and that we could understand. Again, this sounds good but it makes things stodgy and slow to change.

 

Now your Italian was much more about sharp suiting and the national pastimes of eating nice food, drinking nice wine, having very long lunches, enjoying the company of women, having longer second lunches, getting over excited about minor infractions of local traffic law and having dinner. There was little time left to mend your own car and as a result most cars were mended by garages (I've got figures to back this up, by the way. I'm not just talking off the top of my head). As a result there was less concern about the complexity of keeping a tweaked twin can with four Weber chokes in balance because someone would keep that right for you. As long as it sang sweetly then everything is right with the world.

 

The upshot was that they got the Fiat 124 and we got the Avenger. This, I am sure everyone will agree, was not fair at all but it was our fault because we simply refused to dress properly.

 

It's all different now. Tailoring became less important in Italy, the car industry became more globalised and eventually they ended up with the Fiat Regatta so that meant we could laugh at them for once.

In your Italy pic the guy in the trench coat appears to be pleasuring himself.

[Uncle Jimmy]

Nowadays the answer has to be Japan.

[Tamworthbay]

Still nothing much from Japanese manufacturers that floats my boat, years ago you had the Celica, supra, Celeste, GTO, Silvia, RX7 etc etc, what is there now? Dodgy styling and bland interiors. Reliable, yes, worthy? Hmmmm

[loserone]

Does it? Why? I would have said the Koreans are in a better place than Japanese car manufacturing. What is good coming out of Japan?

[JimH]

The best automotive country in the World today? That would be either China or India.