Failed attempts to crack the UK

[sierraman]

Just now, goosey said:

Being as it was Russian it might have had  a better heater than a 1ton LandRover😂

I don’t doubt that but my grandad had an Escort Van with The YEB, he said they specifically deleted the heater so that the engineers wouldn’t be sat in the van wasting time. 

[Split_Pin]

Yes I'm fairly sure they produced schoolbuses for a short time.

[sierraman]

Just now, Split_Pin said:

Yes I'm fairly sure they produced schoolbuses for a short time.

Bluebird, a name synonymous with school buses in the US had a crack at the UK briefly in the 90’s. 

[martc]

East Riding of Yorkshire Council bought a few BMC bin lorries, to replace their Dennis's. They didn't last long and soon started to look very tatty. They were replaced by Dennis's which they should have bought in the first place. False economy.

 

[Soundwave]

Tata Motors hovered around the fringes for a bit, but never seemed to get a decent foothold. Started off with the Loadbeta and Gurkha...





Which actually sold in OK-ish numbers, particularly the Loadbeta, being seen as a basic but cost-effective option for small businesses. Unfortunately build quality and rustproofing were lol-worthy, and most fell apart or disintegrated before they were a decade old.

They tried again with the Safari. Didn't go well.



Then they tried selling their Indica, but cunningly disguising it as a Rover. Again, nobody was fooled.




After that, Tata Motors as an entity haven't really been active in the UK, they're mostly notable nowadays for being the puppeteer's hand up JLR's arse.

[martc]

Anyone going to mention Lonsdale or SAO?

[Datsuncog]

4 minutes ago, martc said:

 I think Dacia/ARO did a lot better than people remember, it's just that they rotted so quickly that they disappeared almost immediately leaving few survivors.

A bit like the rest of the Eastern Bloc cars of the 1980s, I reckon part of Dacia's problem was that because they were cheap to buy new people didn't tend to take very good care of them - even less so once they entered the secondhand market.

Being very obviously a rehashed Renault 12 didn't exactly add to their appeal, though Lada and Yugo managed to sell their superannuated Fiats alright.

Here, have a terrible photo of the last 'old school' Dacia I managed to spot in the wild - a pickup in Norfolk, in summer 1996.

It didn't last much longer - presumed scrapped at six years old.

[Asimo]

4 minutes ago, martc said:

Anyone going to mention Lonsdale or SAO?

See above.

Those sad-sack Santana landrover clones were tried here briefly. As if we didn’thave enough trouble with the home product.

[JMotor]

Only one I can think of was the Verte Tempest.

 

[Datsuncog]

Proton did alright with their reworked Mitsubishi Lancer as the bargain-basement MPi, but I don't think the Persona/ Wira ever quite managed to live up to expectations:

Reader, it was no Cavalier.

[goosey]

20 minutes ago, sierraman said:

I don’t doubt that but my grandad had an Escort Van with The YEB, he said they specifically deleted the heater so that the engineers wouldn’t be sat in the van wasting time. 

now that is grim, 
A company I worked at had a brand new Daf CF 65 ? delivered that didn’t have a radio fitted, just a blanking plate . When the driver complained he was told “he’s paid to drive the truck not listen to music” 

[big_al_granvia]

proton managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, arrived in 88 with the saga which was a mitsi parts bin, had a good dealer network by tagging onto lada dealers, sold well to the lada buyers then lost the plot, the persona was worse, tried 2 attempts at btcc with the impian in 03/04 and through welch motorsport usin a shell to build to ngtc regs. dealer network collapsed. are they still in the uk... had they stayed at the budgget end they would have done alright like dacia bbut they tried to compete with the bbig boys with a shite product

[MiniMinorMk3]

Asia Rocsta, not seen one since y2k. 

 

 

And talking of Jeeps, Mahindra had a go with their CJ5 replica

 

[martc]

14 minutes ago, Datsuncog said:

A bit like the rest of the Eastern Bloc cars of the 1980s, I reckon part of Dacia's problem was that because they were cheap to buy new people didn't tend to take very good care of them - even less so once they entered the secondhand market.

That's it in a nutshell.

Years ago I went to look at a Dacia Denem which was being sold very cheaply for a 2 year old car... As usual the seller had 'just nipped out' at the appointed time, but his wife showed me it. From the front it was 'as new'. The rear window however was steamed up. I opened the hatch to be met by an overpowering smell of damp. The boot carpet was wringing wet and the spare wheel well full of water and already rotting. Obviously a seal wasn't sealing. The wife knew all about it but they didn't bother to get it repaired as 'it's a cheap car'. Even though the repair would have been free under warranty. I walked away.

[martc]

18 minutes ago, Asimo said:

See above.

Ta, I stand 50% corrected! Anyone going to mention Lonsdale or SAO?

[C1am]

Great Wall - had a go for a few years. 

[warch]

44 minutes ago, goosey said:

Being as it was Russian it might have had  a better heater than a 1ton LandRover😂

What? Even better than this?

[DVee8]

Nissan with the Infinity brand.

It just didn't work. There was even talk of renaming the factory and the roads around the factory.

The uniform did get changed to Infinity with the Nissan logo under it.

[PhilA]

On the flip side there's been a fair few attempts by the UK and Europe(ish) to gain a foothold in American car sales.

Volkswagen did well. I'm not sure why, probably because the cars were so simple they continued to run despite American maintenance. Yugo made a go of it and did moderately well, leaning on the "cheap shitbox" image to sell their cars. Fiat tried but the first Michigan winter and you're scraping the car up with the snow shovel. 

A few British marques tried and did moderately well because they punched into the correct place in the market. The 1100 sold well, but into the same niche as they would buy a golf cart. 

When manufacturers looked at the American market and said "we can change that and sell a car", that's where the failures tend to crop up. Austin Atlantic, the car that America wants. Nope. Renault 9, a perfect family car. Nope. Rover Sterling, the epitome of a high class, big car. Nope.

Fiat reintroduced the 124, which had a perky 1.4 turbo engine, a smart Japanese gearbox, superb Mazda Miata handling... It missed the mark. If they'd put in a 2.0 turbo it would have sold like hotcakes. Was on sale for about a year then vanished from the brochures. The 500 and 500x sold well, because retro cute.

Cars like the 500 just have to run and be able to keep up on the interstate. The 2.4 they put into the 500 here did that and people said ok, I can put my foot down and out-accelerate an articulated truck doing 80 mph, it's a good little car.

Put a small buzzy engine into a sports car and it won't sell to the masses. Nobody wants to sit on the highway for 8 hours at 4500 rpm.

The RAM ProMaster (Ducato) sells well because nobody here knows its heritage and it fits into "small cheap van". Ford Courier also because it fits the "cheap tiny city van" bracket for small businesses.

Somehow in all of this the Japanese have quietly been selling cars for decades and doing a good job of it... Even if they did a Mazda 121 style effort and has Ford badges stuck on their cars and vans for a while.

[PhilA]

21 minutes ago, DVee8 said:

Nissan with the Infinity brand.

It just didn't work. There was even talk of renaming the factory and the roads around the factory.

The uniform did get changed to Infinity with the Nissan logo under it.

Good cars, love mine. Resale value on the older models tanked because of poor reliability and cheap materials in the underpinnings and electrical system.

They corrected that but the damage was done.

That and they didn't explain what the car was about, I think it was a BLMC/ARG issue where we cannot have it outshine nor outsell the Nissan range so we'll cripple it just enough and not quite put it where it needs to be. 

They tried to make it "the gentleman's sports car" when instead it needed to be refined but an absolutely untameable beast when put into Sport. Instead it just gets a bit louder.

Instead of making it OMG THE NEXT BIGGEST THING THE SKYLINE WAS GOOD BUT WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE THIS and rake the money in from that avenue.

Then in 10 years REMEMBER THE SKYLINE? THIS IS THE NEW ONE AND OMG IT'S SO MUCH BETTER FORGET INFINITI 

[OM646]

1 hour ago, Split_Pin said:

'BMC is back!' was the slogan for these Turkish trucks in the 1990s. I'm fairly sure that even by then, the BMC name would still carry negative connotations.

Cummins engine and apparently troublesome wiring. One is reportedly still being used as a skip truck for a metals yard (not this one)

 

There are still some here too. One being used as a meat truck.

Fun fact: those are Audi 80 headlights!

[OM646]

And they kept this thing alive in Turkey for quite a while too

[sierraman]

55 minutes ago, C1am said:

Great Wall - had a go for a few years. 

The guy across the road from us had one of these, now replaced by a Ssanyong. Don’t know if they’re any good?

Can imagine be no problem nipping in the factors on a Sunday to pick up a service kit for a Great Wall no problem...

[sierraman]

5 minutes ago, OM646 said:

And they kept this thing alive in Turkey for quite a while too

How thin and double jointed do they expect someone to be to enter the rear doors? 

[Datsuncog]

38 minutes ago, PhilA said:

On the flip side there's been a fair few attempts by the UK and Europe(ish) to gain a foothold in American car sales.

Somehow in all of this the Japanese have quietly been selling cars for decades and doing a good job of it...

It took a few false starts, I understand - Toyota's first attempt to market the 1500cc Toyopet Crown in the US in 1958, priced in the same bracket as full-size Ford and Chevrolet models, failed hard. 

Reliability and comfort while cruising at highway speeds just weren't there, it was seen as overengineered and underpowered, and when the Big Three US manufacturers launched a raft of their own compact models in 1959 to challenge these imports - Ford's Falcon, Chevrolet's Corsair and Chrysler's Valiant - the writing was on the wall, leading Toyota to beat a strategic retreat from the passenger car market in 1960.

After switching their focus to selling Land Cruisers and growing their dealer network that way, the compact Corona RT40 was introduced in 1964 and, once fitted with an automatic transmission specially developed after intensive research on the US market, sales finally started to take off.

TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION GLOBAL WEBSITE | 75 Years of TOYOTA | Part1 Chapter2 Section9 | Item 5. Passenger car exports suspended (toyota-global.com)

Crown sales in the US picked up a little from the mid-60s, when the S40 version began to be imported. This drew heavily on both the Falcon and Valiant's styling, in an effort to make the cars appeal to American buyers.

So yes - carefully tailoring their offerings to the target market is what laid the ground for Toyota's eventual success, whereas other European manufacturers trying to flog their wares stateside seemed to think that a new set of badges and some fake wood should be good enough.

[martc]

The Russians tried to market their heavy lorries and other plant in the UK under the catchall name of  'Belaz' rather than under the individual factories names. I don't think they bothered the market much, probably with the exception of the 256 - they sold a few of these to quarry operators. Some details here - https://www.trucknetuk.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=159368

  

Note the UAZ Buhanka - I think this was an earlier attempt to sell it, I'm reasonably certain that the Trekmaster enterprise came later...

[chaseracer]

1 hour ago, sierraman said:

Bluebird, a name synonymous with school buses in the US had a crack at the UK briefly in the 90’s. 

Staffordshire County Council bought several.

[catsinthewelder]

A chap at a car show told me he'd worked for a Dacia importer's trying to sell the pre facelift 1300.  The main problem they had was spare parts, they couldn't get anything from Romania so were reliant on Renault 12 parts.  If they couldn't get the part from Renault they had to adapt something else.  By the time they gave up they had a unit full of brand new, half stripped 1300s.

[egg]

1 hour ago, martc said:

Ta, I stand 50% corrected! Anyone going to mention Lonsdale or SAO?

Yes, Mr Bickle has the last one right?

[RayMK]

Tatra.  I saw a RHD Tatraplan in Reading in the 1960s but assume it was a South African import or perhaps an embassy car.  In the late 1990s, Tatra had a go at the UK market with the 613.  The concessionaire was about 4 miles down the road from here and I have a brochure. It made a good impression on the motoring press and even had an ok review on Top Gear.  I gather that very few were sold because of the diminishing support from the parent company which was concentrating more on its commercial vehicles.  By the time the UKised product was ready, Tatra's policy had moved on.

FSO did fairly well for a few years with their 125P.  I looked at one in a dealers near Bletchley.  It was cheap but that was about it.  The original Fiat 125 was so much nicer, as was the Fiat 124 which became the rugged Lada version.  Later, the Polonez did ok for a while until durability and throw-away cheap car mentality issues made them mostly disappear a decade or two ago - even the pick-ups.

Wartburgs have been mentioned a few times already.  They were remarkably popular once the Knight made it to these shores.  In the 1980s and 90s, there used to be loads in attendance at IFA and similar club gatherings when they were held at Stanford Hall.