Austin Princess

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

Drive around in an immaculate TR7 FHC in original factory condition and in a proper Leytastic colour (Java green, Inca yellow etc) and your shit won't stink - it will get more looks and favourable comments than any modern shite.

[Vin]

My mother hated her Princess. I never 'gelled' with it either...now the Renault 20 that replaced it was ace though. She had a couple of them.

[Pete-M]

My mother hated her Princess. I never 'gelled' with it either...now the Renault 20 that replaced it was ace though. She had a couple of them.

The R20 was a good car, one of the best family cars of the time. The Princess was never a good car, no matter how many pairs of rose tinted specs people try to adjust history with.

[fred]

Marinas , Allegro's etc.....are climbing in price now, lasted this long so why not? Not so bad as folk said they were

Good for them, about time the unloved underrated sorts got some recognition

[warren t claim]

Paying upwards of three grand for wedge shaped brake calliper donor vehicle is insane.

[Taff]

 The Princess was never a good car, no matter how many pairs of rose tinted specs people try to adjust history with.

 

/\ this

 

Paying upwards of three grand for wedge shaped brake calliper donor vehicle is insane.

 

/\ and this.

 

My dad insisted on repeatedly buying the damn things and Ambassadors too. 5 of them, I think, including a shit brown 1700 that wouldn't pull a fat bird off a skateboard and an orange 2200 Wolsley auto variant that was allergic to it's own ATF. Dire cars. His last one (a lime green 1700) which had the sole advantage of not having it's performance altered in the slightest by having a trailer and my Trans-Am attached, expired due to rusty spheres at 17 years old. It got weighed in and all I kept was the front callipers.

[warren t claim]

I can normally see some good in most cars but other than interior space and clever drivers seat adjustment I fail to see any merit in the Princess. Other BL products of the same era like the SD1 and Triumph six cylinder saloons at least have some driver appeal.

[Pete-M]

I can normally see some good in most cars but other than interior space and clever drivers seat adjustment I fail to see any merit in the Princess. Other BL products of the same era like the SD1 and Triumph six cylinder saloons at least have some driver appeal.

Jaguar Rover Triumph all made appealing cars even in the dark days of BL, Austin and Morris didn't.

 

The Princess was one of those cars that at launch time people had high hopes for. Futuristic looks, velour trim, strange suspension. Like a British Citroën CX for less money. My dad sold a few new Princess but they always returned within a few weeks or months, normally with the front suspension on the deck. A year later they'd be back for rust repairs.

 

The Princess is a great snapshot of the 70s. A four wheeled Space Hopper with a polyester kipper tie. Badly made pseudo futuristic tat.

[vulgalour]

The Princess is a great snapshot of the 70s. A four wheeled Space Hopper with a polyester kipper tie. Badly made pseudo futuristic tat.

True. But I still like them.

[plasticvandan]

The problem with the Princess was that it replaced the landcrab,a car which didnt sell well or have much of a reason for being.

[warren t claim]

The problem with the Princess was that it replaced the landcrab,a car which didnt sell well or have much of a reason for being.

Which asks the question of what exactly is the point of the Princess and who was their target market? BL had the Marina to compete with the Cortina in the fleet car market and the SD1 to battle with the Granada. I can't help but think that if they'd of taken the wedge design and production budget and split it in two and spent half on making the Marina a better driving car and the other half on SD1 quality control then BL could of been more profitable.

 

Also I think we've forgot that plenty of wedges were sold with vinyl seats and base spec, it's just that the only survivors are giffer owned, HLS models used for the Sunday morning church run.

[warren t claim]

 

The Princess is a great snapshot of the 70s. A four wheeled Space Hopper with a polyester kipper tie. Badly made pseudo futuristic tat.

If you want a snapshot of 70s Britain then donate 85% of your wages to the Labour Party and crack one off over a Confessions film . Both of which will give you less long term misery than buying a wedge for £4.5k.

[plasticvandan]

£4.5k would buy an extremely nice Rover P6 V8 and leave change for fuel for a year

[Bear]

Which asks the question of what exactly is the point of the Princess and who was their target market? BL had the Marina to compete with the Cortina in the fleet car market and the SD1 to battle with the Granada.

 

And yet, the Triumph Doledo and 2000/2500 platforms suitably updated would have been significantly better at combating both. Compared to a Cortina, the Marina was just horrible in every way and seriously outclassed; compared to the Granada (ignoring build/reliability) the SD1 was a class above, far more advanced in thinking apart from the live rear axle. And that's one of those "WTF" moments, given both of the SD1's parents had IRS. SD1 front end is so clearly Triumph thinking it's crazy, but the rear may as well have been nicked from a Sherpa.

 

The Princess was a good car to compete against the Cortina and lower-spec Granada, and also face down a few imports, except it wasn't very well made and some of the engineering (gearbox) was lagging behind. If that car had been designed and built by VW or Renault - think "411" and 20/30 - it would have been an incredible success.

 

It's crushing how dumb, short-sighted and inexplicable some of the decisions made with BL/BMC are. Lots of great tech lost, lots of brand equity squandered for bizarre vanity of individual managers, and all the concepts to show the right ideas were there and then shot down.

[warren t claim]

£4.5k would buy an extremely nice Rover P6 V8 and leave change for fuel for a year

£4.5k would get you an ounce of cocaine, a couple of decent working girls and a penthouse apartment for the weekend and to be honest I'd rather wake up on Monday with a sore cock and nose than open my curtains everyday and see a Princess looking back at me for eternity.

[Bear]

See also: WTF were Jaguar thinking killing off the lovely Daimler V8.

[Bear]

The problem with the Princess was that it replaced the landcrab,a car which didnt sell well or have much of a reason for being.

 

Thing is, the Landcrab sold well, had a great reputation for strength, despite looking fugly. Therein lies the problem - those Aerodynamica designs for BMC encompassed three different cars - the ADO 16 1100, the landcrab-based 1800, and a Mini-based one that used the van wheelbase and would have been one of the most futuristic and prescient superminis of the 1970s.

 

Imagine if BL had collectively gone "Fuck this, these are all going to be Austins and we're canning the other midrange brands apart from Triumph and Rover; we'll move Rover upmarket, we'll make Triumph the sporty RWD executive offering, and we'll keep MG going for roadsters." - and had then overruled all of the micromanagement by saying "all factories will be retained for 3 years, we'll identify centres of excellence, and then allow natural redundancies to bring everything to a sustainable level". A family look appealing family car range - which they had managed with the ADO 16 and Landcrab beforehand - and some aspirational brands (including Jaguar who really didn't need much messing with, and Land Rover) to build profit and growth on.

 

You couldn't give BL's management or workforce a free pass to the future without then arguing it into mediocrity. I bet even armed with all the books, websites and videos showing what became of them, and a time machine, they'd STILL argue that each factory and brand had to remain distinct and that yes, four sodding brands on one car was perfectly sane.

[warren t claim]

Four sodding brands on one car works well for VW, Seat, Audi and Skoda.

[Bear]

Only because they have a proper global market and proper shared platforms. Each of those brands has a geographical as well as demographic identity.

 

If BL had retained Innocenti in favour of killing off Wolesley and Morris cleanly, then it would make sense to have had say, the Maestro and an Innocenti, Italian-designed car on a Maestro platform, and offered both types. BL's brand management served to divide up a small UK market and resulted in poor understanding of export markets - where they really did throw away some great opportunity in America by not investing in manufacturing there, but doing stupid things like fibreglass Minis in South America and six-cylinder Marinas in South Africa.

 

To make a VW-style exercise work in the UK, the engine range and platforms would have needed extensive rationalisation. One scalable RWD, one FWD.

 

Plus, they made some pig-ugly cars. The Maxi is almost impossible for my brain to get around the idea that someone drew it and then said "Yep". I know the tail has hints of Peugeot 204, and the front may as well be a Mk II Cortina, but somehow it lacked the finesse of any of them, looking dumpy & frumpy.

 

I think the Capri really sums up what BL got wrong after BMC. Ford took shit engineering (technically) and made it look good, and it became an aspirational thing. BL seemed incapable of keeping a styling concept cohesive and well proportioned, from the Allegro's stupid humped bonnet because the E-series was too tall (apparently) to the Ambassador gaining a hatch but losing any of the flair of the Princess, to the Marina's WTAF dash with the radio curved away from the driver.

Even with a wide-ranging global presence BMC/BL simply didn't get marketing right. Only the Australian arm managed to understand their market well, and BL completely ignored the better looking, appealing and practical models down there. Look at a Tasman or Kimberly and tell me that's not a car that would look right at home alongside Cortinas, FD Victors and the like.

[captain_70s]

Four sodding brands on one car works well for VW, Seat, Audi and Skoda.

It only works if the cars you build have a reputation other than being utterly shit. The VAG group have managed to gain a "German engineering is excellent" reputation even if it isn't entirely true and applied it to their Skoda and Seat brands.. the British car industry gained a reputation for building crap cars the world over which tarnished everything that managed to roll out of the factories.

 

The only cars BL didn't completely fuck up were the ones from the BMC days that they couldn't afford to update. The Dolomite and T2000 looked fucking ancient by the time they went of production, and even then you had to deal with the crap materials and shoddy build quality.

[MarvinsMom]

the point of the maxi was that BMC identified that they needed a car to sit inbetween the ADO16 and the Landcrab.

 

in the mid sized cortina market in the late '60's all they had was the oxbridge farinas, which were well and truly passed their best.

 

so in designing a 1500cc car they would be plugging a gap in the model range.

 

sadly someone decided that they needed to use the same doors as the landcrab/austin 3 litre to save time/money.

 

then the new e-series engine sat on its gearbox sits taller than was hoped, so the whole thing ened up been a bit of a pig in a poke....

 

similar thing happened with the allegro, instead of doing a ford, and using the floor off of the ADO16, they started again. someone wanted to use the ADO16 glass, and then later on it was decided to use the e-series as well as the a. this was due to the then new mark 3 'tina been a damn sight bigger than the outgoing model.

 

so instead of been a sleek, lithe looking thing which harris mann had in mind at the start, it ended up been the lash up that the allegro was. 

 

a better idea would have been to follow the same lines as Authi/Leykor had gone down with the Austin Apache/Victoria. use the ADO16 middle with a new nose and a proper boot, they used michelotti so the end result was a hansom triumph dolly look a like.

 

not thbat it would put me off of an allegro.

 

i like them. but i'm odd....

[warren t claim]

I don't have any issues with how the princess looks, just how it drives. It's like the designers deliberately engineered every bit of driving pleasure out of it from the gear change to the steering and ride.

[Asimo]

They looked fantastic when they first appeared, and they still do despite some of the chintzy detail. They were hugely popular for something so off the wall and so badly put together that could never be divorced from the permanent shit-cloud that hovered over BL.

The drivers who liked Cortinas and Alfasuds didn't like them at all of course and pub bores moaned that they weren't 5speed hatchbacks, but all I really disliked about them was how cramped they were inside compared to the Landcrab.

On bumpy B roads a Cortina couldn't get near a Princess driven by someone who understood it. The trapezoidal headlights were really good for the day, much better than those miserable pairs of 5" round jobbies that seem most popular amongst wedge-fanciers.

And I even made money on my Ambassador! (Not as pretty, but the hatch was so much better than the boot.)

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

The Princess wasn't a bad car, just an unfinished project From Leyland Cars With Supercover. The Marina was a pretty dire thing, a car with almost no redeeming features. Early 1800 Princesses were pretty grim, but once the O Series had been fitted it perked up and became half decent. But they always had the same basic problems - the hissing power steering, drop gear whine and that general 'this could be a lot better' feeling. The Ambastardor was a much better car really, shame it was so ugly. But like the Princess it was a bit too big, a bit too slow and whilst could be hustled along country roads quite quickly (witness father Bluejeans at the helm of his 1700 HL company car - jaaayzus    ) it was never a car with a lot of driver appeal. Bloody amazing tow car though.

 

I like them and like to see them on the road and at shows. 

 

 

But £3000?

 

 

No.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

 the then new mark 3 'tina been a damn sight bigger than the outgoing model.

 

 

 

 

The Mark 3 Cortina was near enough the same length as the Mark 2 - it just looked bigger and you sat lower in it to reinforce the feeling of extra size.

 

The problem with BL was that it existed at all. Back in 1952, just as Len Lord and Bill Morris were about to sign on the dotted line someone should have said STOP!! It was a cataclysmic mistake. Both Austin and Morris were big companies doing different things. Austin was another Ford, churning out hundreds of thousands cheaply engineered cars for folk who didn't know any better and Morris made the nicer stuff with far better engineering. Both could still be going today had they not joined and the same goes for BL.

 

BMC could have been saved back in 1968 under Joe Edwards, a BMC manufacturing bloke who knew what the problems were. But he wouldn't work for Stokes and so he left, taking BL's last chance of recovery with him. The appointment of Michael Edwardes was basically making a new suit for a dead Man. It should have been wrapped up in 1977, Longbridge closed and anything worth selling sold off.

[rovamota]

£5000 seems a perfectly reasonable amount to pay by someone who wants a nice example of a classic Princess compared to people who, for example, pay £30,000 for a new BMW i3 and then shout about how cheap it is to run after being on charge all night.

 

I'd say the latter are the misguided fools.

[Bear]

If the classic car is absolutely spot on, I honestly think anything under £5K is a bargain no matter what it is. There's a logic to this.

 

If the car is truly perfect - fantastic healthy engine and gearbox with good fluids, no rust, good paint, all interior and glass clean, intact and functional - then if you are determined to own one of those cars, it's going to be cheaper than welding, spraying and rebuilding a rough one. That rule almost applies to any banger - I said elsewhere, take away my time, tools and space to DIY and my SLK (cost £2250 when I got it, looked good, needed some unexpected work) would have run me to over £5K. From ditching shitty wrong-offset wheels, to knowing the front wings need repairing or replacing and repainting, a pristine, low mileage one with no issues would be worth the £5K if I had it to spend. Yet any 1997-2000 SLK up at that money would be laughed at - they're about for £1K.

 

Tying in to the Payday thread again - when I did leasing, I decided after two years with a New Beetle Cabriolet that was crap on fuel and leaked that I would throw money at restoring my XR4i and lease a super-cheap Yaris or something. One of those £99/month jobs.

 

Except there were none. Restoring my XR4i was estimated to run into £4,500-5,500 - it was smoky and low on compression, the box was a little noisy (Type 9, IIRC, I'd already had one go in an XR4x4), the inner rear wings, sills, rear arches, doors under the skirt and front inner - but oddly, not outer - wings all needed doing). The leasing firm quoted £188 for a Yaris. Then in the next breath, they said £199/month for an RX8.

 

I bit their metaphorical hand off - and never regretted it. The RX8 wasn't much worse on fuel than the Beetle, the only way to enjoy one really is with a warranty, and overall it cost £2,500 less than if I'd bought it for cash new and sold it 2 years later.

All of these equations also don't take into account time spent hunting for things. Like last weekend - I devoted two days to making lowball offers on iMacs because I really wanted a new music computer, but didn't want to spend more than I'd get selling two of my old machines. It paid off - Sunday evening I was off to Chelt to collect a 2013 model (my old one was 2007) with a better spec than most of the ones I'd been knocked back on - but if I think of those hours I spent searching, calling, emailing, haggling. If that was working time I could have earned the value of a new iMac in that time.

 

Now make it something like Princess displacers, or rear arches for FE Ventora, or unbroken trim and door handles for an Audi 100 C3, or "anything remotely useful" for a Citroën over 15 years old.

 

Daft thing is, I'm at it again. I really want mudflaps for the SLK. Has to be early style - later ones, which I have found, won't fit due to the reprofiled sill. I will waste hours in the evening trying to find them, but last pair I saw I baulked at £35 asking price, made a stupid offer, then missed out on them.

 

It's not the AS way, perhaps, but if you've got a really clean, good example of a car, stick to your guns. In some ways it would be great to see the values of used cars rise a little to inspire owners to take more pride and care in ownership and do the environment a favour by not scrapping cars that are entirely saveable, just because they're worth too little to fix.

[Bren]

Some people do like the princess. Others do not.

 

The whole point of this site is that we love the lost causes of the motoring world, no matter what they are.

[Bear]

I may find it hard to back up the above argument for a Daewoo Espero.

 

But for a Tagora, absolutely.

[artdjones]

The Princess had better roadholding than most other cars at the time.Probably due to the wide(for the time)185/70/14 tyres.The weekend I first met my future in-laws we we driving in my 2.0HL down a country lane in Dorset when I almost missed my turning. I just threw the car around the corner to the accompaniment of much screaming from the back seat.Then silence followed by future father in law saying"my Cortina couldn't have done that ".I always felt it was a car that gave a great feeling of stability and confidence.