why does the Maxi escape from the flack?

[doubleyeller]

The last ones looked quite sharp compared the earlier ones.

 

Same with the Allegro.....don't think you could say the same for the Ital or the Ambastardor unfortunately

[BeEP]

The last ones looked quite sharp compared the earlier ones.

 

Same with the Allegro.....

 

Each to their own; I far prefer the exterior and interior appearance of both the original (69-70) Maxi and the series 1 Allegro to what came later.

[martc]

I also heard that the Maxi was good for a night or two staying on a campsite, having seats that you could turn into a double bed. 

 

I suppose the only real rival when it was launched was the R16.......I wonder which was the more expensive?

 

From AR Online 'Its (the Maxi) price of £979, including purchase tax, is said to be too high in relation to its closest rivals… Renault 16 (£970), Ford Cortina Estate (£958), French Simca 1100 Estate (£959), Vauxhall Victor (£949), and Hillman Minx de luxe (£851)'.

 

https://www.aronline.co.uk/cars/austin/maxi/the-cars-austin-maxi-development-history/

 

And here's a comparison between the Maxi and Renault 16...

 

https://www.aronline.co.uk/reviews/tested-austin-maxi-vs-renault-16/

[SierraMikeHotel]

I also heard that the Maxi was good for a night or two staying on a campsite, having seats that you could turn into a double bed.

I'm fairly sure an ex of mine was conceived in a Maxi. Her dad remembered it with great fondness and always went a bit misty-eyed when he described the seat arrangement.

 

I was still a teenager and didn't find this awkward at all.

[Asimo]

I've mentioned this before; there was no car more likely to stop for this hitch hiker in the '70s.

 

They were very useful cars, the first widely sold hatchback here in GB and thus a trendsetter. I moved house with one, even the wardrobe.

All the gearchange talk is just noise from poor journalism*, endlessly repeated. I have driven both rod and cable change Maxis and the change worked well enough (in the context of 10 or 15 year old cars on their last owner)

 

 

[AMC Rebel]

https://youtu.be/265yh7UmF0w?t=52s

 

"put all the seats back and you can lie down - sideways I should think"

[holbeck]

As a child in the 1970's, a group of us kids were ferried to cubs, each parent taking their turn.

 

None of us 9 year olds wanted to go by Maxi.

 

The other car's were my dad's Triumph 2000, a mini van, Cortina, and an early 60's BMC dormobile thing.

But my personal  favourite of this motley car pool was an F reg  White FD Victor similar to Jeff Randall's TV car.

[Cleon-Fonte]

The Maxi was designed by Alec Issigonis after the years of the Morris Minor and the Mini, but in a time when he had become arrogant and out of touch, which meant that it was basically underdeveloped rubbish. Fortunately Lord Stokes arrived in time to kick him sideways and bring in Harry Webster before too much damage was done, so within two years a rod gearchange, a larger and more powerful engine and a better interior were introduced. I would think that the early cars soon disappeared, I don't remember any being about by the end of production  in 1981so perhaps unlike the Marina and Allegro, the memory of the first ones soon faded and the last ones (Maxi 2 HLS) weren't really all that bad.

 

It's easy to pin the blame for all BMC's ills on Issigonis (because a surprising amount of the time it's true) but I don't think he can be held entirely responsible for the Maxi's problems, if only because George Harriman and BMC's new army of ex-Ford cost accountants are equally complicit. It was the latter group, for instance, who decided that the Maxi should use the 1800's doors (despite the fact that the Maxi was supposed to be a smaller car than the Landcrab, but was now saddled with a near-identical wheelbase); Harriman also overruled Issigonis by forcing him to design in all those radical new features, but in true BMC style never provided the money or the time to develop these things properly.

 

Far from heroically solving its issues, the incompetent Stokes would have liked to have killed it, but unfortunately BMC had developed specifically for the Maxi a new engine and an eye-wateringly expensive, state of the art facility in which to build it. To keep the shiny new engine factory from sitting idle they had to put the Maxi in production, but rather than fixing its faults before it went on sale, the Leyland people dumped a half-finished product on the market and only reactively solved its issues after it failed to sell, just as they would do with all subsequent BL products.

 

Once the Maxi's issues were sorted the only thing that could really have held it back were issues around styling and image (again, not Issigonis's problem). Had BL not been run by idiots, they'd have saved themselves the ridiculous sums of money they spent on the ill-advised parts bin Marina project and instead given the Maxi an attractive, modern set of clothes. Rather like this Maxi styling scheme that BL had handed to them on a plate:

 

[John F]

^ That looks even worse than the Maxi IMO.

[holbeck]

^ That looks even worse than the Maxi IMO.

 

Disagree. It looks amazing.

[Slowsilver]

^ That looks even worse than the Maxi IMO.

 

Maybe now, but very futuristic for 1969.

A bit Citroenesque?

[doubleyeller]

 

A bit Citroenesque?

 

Looks like a Yugo Sana IMO

[sierraman]

I think all the BL stuff is great in a shite sort of way. Put it this way id be poring over one at a show for much longer than an e type put it that way.

[Dick Cheeseburger]

It's easy to pin the blame for all BMC's ills on Issigonis (because a surprising amount of the time it's true) but I don't think he can be held entirely responsible for the Maxi's problems, if only because George Harriman and BMC's new army of ex-Ford cost accountants are equally complicit. It was the latter group, for instance, who decided that the Maxi should use the 1800's doors (despite the fact that the Maxi was supposed to be a smaller car than the Landcrab, but was now saddled with a near-identical wheelbase); Harriman also overruled Issigonis by forcing him to design in all those radical new features, but in true BMC style never provided the money or the time to develop these things properly.

 

Far from heroically solving its issues, the incompetent Stokes would have liked to have killed it, but unfortunately BMC had developed specifically for the Maxi a new engine and an eye-wateringly expensive, state of the art facility in which to build it. To keep the shiny new engine factory from sitting idle they had to put the Maxi in production, but rather than fixing its faults before it went on sale, the Leyland people dumped a half-finished product on the market and only reactively solved its issues after it failed to sell, just as they would do with all subsequent BL products.

 

Once the Maxi's issues were sorted the only thing that could really have held it back were issues around styling and image (again, not Issigonis's problem). Had BL not been run by idiots, they'd have saved themselves the ridiculous sums of money they spent on the ill-advised parts bin Marina project and instead given the Maxi an attractive, modern set of clothes. Rather like this Maxi styling scheme that BL had handed to them on a plate:

It would appear that Citroen stole the design around 25 years later.

Citroen

 

Maxi*

[Cleon-Fonte]

Imagine the impact if the Yugo Sana had hit the market in 1973, though...

 

I'm not saying the restyled Maxi is perfect, certain aspects such as the headlamps and the rear end (of which I can't find a decent picture) could do with improvement, but ultimately it would have been an extremely cheap facelift to implement (sheet metal changes were entirely restricted to exterior panels, the structure was pure, undiluted Maxi). And imagine how competitive it would have made the Maxi in continental Europe, a market where it deserved to clean up but sadly never did.

 

Anyway, for comparison purposes here it is with the original. It looks like it belongs to a different century, let alone decade.

 

[The Old Bloke Next Door]

Great cars in their day, I owned a 1970 1500 for a couple of years in the early eighties until a Mk 1 Granada pulled out of a side road and damaged the near side front. although it still drove home.

 

Replaced with a 1977 1750 HLS, ran that for about another four years while keeping the previous one as a parts donor.

 

Never had any major reliability issues with either of them. A bonus was the ease of repair when something did fail. Clutch an absolute doddle to replace and removing and refitting the dash to replace the heater matrix took less than two hours. How many modern cars can be fixed that easily?

 

I never had a problem with either type of gear change mechanism, maybe that was luck. The 1500 was a bit slow, the 1750 seemed very rapid to me at the time compared to similar cars. Also mpg was about 30 local on both cars.

 

Add to that the space, ride quality, five speed box and the practicality of the hatchback design, it was years ahead of the competition. Pity they never did a diesel.

 

[Squirrel2]

I also heard that the Maxi was good for a night or two staying on a campsite, having seats that you could turn into a double bed. 

 

I suppose the only real rival when it was launched was the R16.......I wonder which was the more expensive?

My first car was an R16 and a fellow student and dinghy sailing mate had a Maxi 1750, both used to tow our racing dinghies to events. The R16 was always the more reliable and always got me and kit to our destinations but failed MoT every year for rust.  The Maxi however, suffered regular FTPs, often for ludicrous electrical problems. An example; late one night, we were all on the way back from the pub and were plunged into total darkness... not a spark, nor a glimmer of light, nothing, as it coasted to a halt in the road. Turned out to be the main lead from starter motor just fell off... worse, it had happened a couple of times before.

 

Squirrel2

[djimbob]

I liked my old Maxi back in the day, big boot, practical, reliable, like a big Mini, don't know what the fuss is all about, just another car of it's era that wasn't Japanese build quality

[flat4alfa]

I think this is just perpetuated bollocks. They ditched the cable change quick enough, but then what of the Mk1 and 2 Landcrabs that had cable change? Why didn't they knock them on the head sooner? 

 

This.  You never hear the cable-change mentioned in Landcrab copy.  Not even from FB experts who have never been near one.

 

 

I've only driven a rod change Maxi, and that had a pretty crap gearchange, but then again it had slop in the linkage. It wasn't too bad to find 5th if you knew where it was. It wasn't direct, but it was no grimmer than any A-series.

 

My 1970 rod changer had a good change.  Far better than some baulky Mondeos I've had the displeasure.

[RoadworkUK]

If you judge it on the basis of positive attributes, the Maxi was a good car. But as a whole, it amounted to less than the sum of its parts.

 

Open an Observers book of cars from the latter half of the 70s, and the Maxi (and frankly much of what BL had to offer) was thoroughly embarrassing compared to most of what Europe was churning out. Good grief, by the time the Maxi went out of build, the VW Golf had been around for five years.

 

There's a long history of this country kidding itself that its products are better than they actually are. And yes, as a Rover 800 owner, I'm at fault too.

[doubleyeller]

If you judge it on the basis of positive attributes, the Maxi was a good car. But as a whole, it amounted to less than the sum of its parts.

 

Open an Observers book of cars from the latter half of the 70s, and the Maxi (and frankly much of what BL had to offer) was thoroughly embarrassing compared to most of what Europe was churning out. Good grief, by the time the Maxi went out of build, the VW Golf had been around for five years.

 

There's a long history of this country kidding itself that its products are better than they actually are. And yes, as a Rover 800 owner, I'm at fault too.

 

In my experience Britain DOES produce the very best you can get in various areas of manufacture - and particularly in terms of clothing. But you have to pay through the nose for it which is something few people are prepared to do. The thing with BL of course is that the cars were always comparatively cheap (except the Maxi so it would seem!) 

[HMC]

We are all too aware of platform sharing these days, but with the maxi they famously did door sharing, borrowing from the 'crab, styling wise they just had to make that work, a difficult job whilst trying to make it look distinct from the 'crab. I quite like the styling of the maxi and prefer it to ''crabs. 10/10 for effort. Apparently harry Webster was appalled but it was too far ahead in development to be meddled with.

[forddeliveryboy]

 

...latter half of the 70s the Maxi (and frankly much of what BL had to offer) was thoroughly embarrassing compared to most of what Europe was churning out. Good grief, by the time the Maxi went out of build, the VW Golf had been around for five years.

 

There's a long history of this country kidding itself that its products are better than they actually are.

 

Maybe in the 70s when managememt and unions were in foggy, deluded worlds of their own when some of our mass produced cars were shit. The transition from protected economy to one which had to fight for itself in a highly competitive world wasn't easy, the Germans had nothing to lose yet nearly lost their own big motor manufacturer thanks to the crappy air-cooled range of cars - but came up with the Golf. VW started with a clean sheet, we were trying to rationalise a massive range of diverse products. Steamed and glued plywood versus turned hardwood offcuts held together with undersized brass screws.

 

But Maxis were perfectly good transport, if a bit unfashionable and nerdy by being roomy and comfortable. Far tougher than any Golf, too.

 

We've scarily good form on knocking our own products - the tabloids have been particularly good at this and sadly too many sheep believe everything they read.

[egg]

We've scarily good form on knocking our own products - the tabloids have been particularly good at this and sadly too many sheep believe everything they read.

 

See also the England football team, we're not world beaters, but the tabs love to stick the knife in during a tournament build-up. Boring and predictable.

[RoadworkUK]

There's a long history of this country kidding itself that its products are better than they actually are.

Yeah, I didn't mean universally, I meant in cars specifically. In Britain, as with the USA in the '70s and '80s, patriotism acted as blinkers that prevented thousands from realising just how advanced the foreign competition had become.

[forddeliveryboy]

The lack of speed limits on the Autobahn was a big advantage the German industry had over ours, our motor ways were only really getting going once the silly 70mph limit was imposed. Cars which would run free of excess vibration or noise at top speed and which could maintain that hour after hour, every day of the year had a huge advantage over our increasingly wheezing, rough lumps. Unless you were used to a top drawer English marque or a Jag, Alfa Romeo or boxer-engined Citroën, many German cars felt to have a turbine-like engine.

 

By the 70s in Germany, the benefits of an even-handed, high quality education system for all, with grammar schools and technical colleges equally well respected (set up by the British post-war) were shining through too. We suffered all the traumas our schooling still struggles with, largely on an ability to pay basis (if not for the education directly, then the relative ability to afford housing).

 

Add to that the (once again, British-designed) trade union system and lack of management arrogance which has helped propel the Germans to where they sit today, running the EU and much wealthier than us or any other European nation.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

It's easy to pin the blame for all BMC's ills on Issigonis (because a surprising amount of the time it's true) but I don't think he can be held entirely responsible for the Maxi's problems, if only because George Harriman and BMC's new army of ex-Ford cost accountants are equally complicit. It was the latter group, for instance, who decided that the Maxi should use the 1800's doors (despite the fact that the Maxi was supposed to be a smaller car than the Landcrab, but was now saddled with a near-identical wheelbase); Harriman also overruled Issigonis by forcing him to design in all those radical new features, but in true BMC style never provided the money or the time to develop these things properly.

 

Far from heroically solving its issues, the incompetent Stokes would have liked to have killed it, but unfortunately BMC had developed specifically for the Maxi a new engine and an eye-wateringly expensive, state of the art facility in which to build it. To keep the shiny new engine factory from sitting idle they had to put the Maxi in production, but rather than fixing its faults before it went on sale, the Leyland people dumped a half-finished product on the market and only reactively solved its issues after it failed to sell, just as they would do with all subsequent BL products.

 

Once the Maxi's issues were sorted the only thing that could really have held it back were issues around styling and image (again, not Issigonis's problem). Had BL not been run by idiots, they'd have saved themselves the ridiculous sums of money they spent on the ill-advised parts bin Marina project and instead given the Maxi an attractive, modern set of clothes. Rather like this Maxi styling scheme that BL had handed to them on a plate:

 

maxi_06.jpg

 

 

 

I'm not sure. 

 

Harriman was the problem; a thoroughly decent chap no doubt, but with no idea at all and unable to reign in Issitgonnawork who, having designed a big car that was unable to outsell crap like the A60, designed another clusterfuck, the Maxi. 

 

Maxi design started before the ex-Ford boys arrived but IMO, the styling wasn't the issue - after all, the Renault 16 is hardly pretty is it? The original interior wasn't bad either and looks remarkably similar to what Ford and Vauxhall were making. The price, the dismal performance and abysmal gear change are what spoiled it - I have driven one and the gearbox was appalling. Had BL held back and launched it as a 1750 with the better (but still ropey) gearshift and costing about £900, it would have done much better.

 

The E Series engine was a waste of time however. Compare the 1500 to a 1500 Golf motor for  the 70's.

 

The 1750 Maxi was a pretty good car and most period road tests said as much.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

The lack of speed limits on the Autobahn was a big advantage the German industry had over ours, our motor ways were only really getting going once the silly 70mph limit was imposed. Cars which would run free of excess vibration or noise at top speed and which could maintain that hour after hour, every day of the year had a huge advantage over our increasingly wheezing, rough lumps. Unless you were used to a top drawer English marque or a Jag, Alfa Romeo or boxer-engined Citroën, many German cars felt to have a turbine-like engine.

 

 

 

German cars of the Maxi era were horribly under geared though. A Golf was very busy at 75 and cars like the 316 and 518 felt like they would explode at 80+. They were also very late making five speed overdrive boxes - BMW didn't have one until 1980

[Cleon-Fonte]

Maybe in the 70s when managememt and unions were in foggy, deluded worlds of their own when some of our mass produced cars were shit. The transition from protected economy to one which had to fight for itself in a highly competitive world wasn't easy, the Germans had nothing to lose yet nearly lost their own big motor manufacturer thanks to the crappy air-cooled range of cars - but came up with the Golf. VW started with a clean sheet, we were trying to rationalise a massive range of diverse products. Steamed and glued plywood versus turned hardwood offcuts held together with undersized brass screws.

 

But Maxis were perfectly good transport, if a bit unfashionable and nerdy by being roomy and comfortable. Far tougher than any Golf, too.

 

We've scarily good form on knocking our own products - the tabloids have been particularly good at this and sadly too many sheep believe everything they read.

 

 

VW and BL in the 1970s are an interesting comparison, both having entered the decade in a remarkably similar situation: both were rigidly tied to a single dominant product line (Mini/ADO16 in BL's case, Beetle in VW's), although in VW's case this was clearly more chronic, with the Beetle accounting for over 70% of production; both companies suffered with uncompromising, often clueless management, openly pitted against their own workforce; in addition both had undergone traumatic changes of management in the late 1960s, the new management teams finding the new model development cupboards empty; both were beginning to suffer from increasingly sophisticated domestic and foreign competition - particularly from the Japanese - and both had fallen victim to vastly over-ambitious product planning investment, in VW's case the massive new factory at Salzgitter designed to produce the K70 in massive volumes (the K70 flopped badly).

 

If anything BL was in a better position than VW: whereas BL and its predecessors had the capability to develop brand new, often innovative designs, VW's product development resources were exclusively centred around making piecemeal changes to - or at best new derivatives of - the Beetle. Volkswagen hadn't developed a new model from the ground up since the Third Reich and lacked the ability to develop new products without outside help (hence the outsourcing of the original Beetle replacement programme to Porsche). On the other hand, unlike BMC et al, VW had enjoyed decades of unbroken high profitability and thus had the benefit of substantial cash reserves to fall back on.

 

VW's saving grace - aside from getting their workforce on side - was their reluctant takeover of the various component parts of Audi. Audi had been working on a complete range of thoroughly contemporary, water cooled, front wheel drive cars and when Rudolf Leiding became Volkswagen CEO in 1971 he simply binned off VW's own range of forthcoming new cars and comandeered the ready-made new Audis for the parent company, giving the world the Polo, Golf and Passat in one fell swoop.

 

This would be the key, defining point of difference between the two companies going forward: whereas BL maintained a rigid separation between the Austin-Morris and its Specialist Division, VW actively encouraged the sharing of technology between the main business and Audi, in the process creating a vast parts bin from which the best bits could be used on both ranges. This had a myriad of advantages, not least a substantial reduction in development costs. Imagine, for instance, if BL had not wasted so much money developing the Marina (which, despite being cobbled together from existing components, cost as much as the all-new Allegro to develop) and had instead offered a cheaper Dolomite-based Morris instead. Or, instead of piling on additional costs to the already ridiculous SD1 programme, they'd used the six-cylinder E-series instead of developing a whole new power unit (South Africa got E6-powered SD1s and by all accounts they were better than their European counterparts).

 

There are of course other factors to BL's downfall and VW's meteoric rise, but for my part I believe the British could have scraped through quite nicely had they not effectively burned literally billions of pounds creating new products and components where existing, often better substitutes already existed. The money wasted on parallel development programmes, new factories, multiple new engines and transmissions and the like could far more effectively have been ploughed into creating an appealing, cohesive and modern range of cars. Maybe then we wouldn't be complaining 40 years later how the Maxi, the SD1 and the like could have reached their full potential if only they'd been made by someone else.

[Cleon-Fonte]

I'm not sure. 

 

Harriman was the problem; a thoroughly decent chap no doubt, but with no idea at all and unable to reign in Issitgonnawork who, having designed a big car that was unable to outsell crap like the A60, designed another clusterfuck, the Maxi. 

 

Maxi design started before the ex-Ford boys arrived but IMO, the styling wasn't the issue - after all, the Renault 16 is hardly pretty is it? The original interior wasn't bad either and looks remarkably similar to what Ford and Vauxhall were making. The price, the dismal performance and abysmal gear change are what spoiled it - I have driven one and the gearbox was appalling. Had BL held back and launched it as a 1750 with the better (but still ropey) gearshift and costing about £900, it would have done much better.

 

The E Series engine was a waste of time however. Compare the 1500 to a 1500 Golf motor for  the 70's.

 

The 1750 Maxi was a pretty good car and most period road tests said as much.

 

I agree - Harriman was a major source of BMC's problems - he was the one who took a back seat as Issigonis came up with slowly more unsellable cars, he allowed BMC's structural problems to continue long after they should have been stamped out and allowed labour relations to sink to their ultimate, parlous level. He was also undoubtedly the man who started the British car industry's ridiculous obsession with Ford and its methods, which proved in the long run to be A Very Bad Thing.

 

The Renault 16 comment is an interesting one - if BMC had been French, selling to the French market where ugliness was tolerated - even celebrated - where it aided the essential function of the vehicle (see Ami 6), I reckon the 1800/Maxi would probably have done much better. On the fickle British market, though? I'm not so sure. Obviously there were other factors that held the Maxi back, but BL gradually fixed them over time (with varying degrees of success) which leads me to believe that it was largely an image problem, rather than anything fundamental.