Brits vs. Z's

[Carl Beck]

Alan hit the nail on the head. It's not the British cars that are the problem, but typical American owners.

Interesting perspective. It is the fault of the customer that something intended to be used for sport or fun happened to require maintenance uncommon to the automotive market in which they lived.

Instead of damming the darkness of automotive abuse in America, the Japanese light a candle. They design and built cars that could not only survive the ugly Americans mistreatment, they thrived on it.

For Nissan's part, when they realized that their domestic models were not up to the riggers of life in the fast lane here in the U.S.A - they didn't keep sending the same failures. They redesigned and upgraded their products based on their target customers requirements. It's all sour grapes for the British and Italians of the day.

The DATSUN line of small cars, pick-up's and sports cars evolved as necessary to survive in this market - the result was a line of vehicles delivered to their customers in America that took everything their American owners threw at them, and which are still on the roads in great numbers today - taking even more.

The word reliability is a watch word for the Datsun 240-Z, and it's a joke for British and Italian Sports Cars. There is a sound reason for that situation, and it isn't to found with stupid owners.

With enough care and coddling it is possible to keep a Yugo or Vega running, but why bother!!

FWIW,

Carl B.

[Oiluj]

I figured out early in my car experience that long term British car owners came in three varieties:

1) Those who loved to tinker far more than to drive.

2) Those who were in denial(and ever hopeful), but had money.

and

3) Those who knew that a show car does not have to run, if you have a winch in your trailer, and something else to pull it with!

Will

Well said. I fit category #1.

The one caveat is that if you stay on top of maintenance, those old british ragtops can be very reliable. Just not as relaible as more modern cars.

My 1960 MGA didn't even leak oil because I replaced engine & tranny seals with modern elastomeric ones. The original main seals were actually made of felt!

She never failed me away from home, though I did have a time or two locally where the brakes overheated before I figured-out the problem.

Longest drive I took in the MGA was to to San Luis Obisbo , (4-1/2 hours each way), one summer weekend.

She was pretty, but the seats were not very comfortable for extended drives and it lacked luggage space, not to mention the sun & wind burns!

[Arne]

Interesting perspective. It is the fault of the customer that something intended to be used for sport or fun happened to require maintenance uncommon to the automotive market in which they lived.

Instead of damming the darkness of automotive abuse in America, the Japanese light a candle. They design and built cars that could not only survive the ugly Americans mistreatment, they thrived on it.

Very true, Carl. The Japanese manufacturers realized that to truly make in-roads into the huge US market, their cars needed to survive under typical American conditions. And that included under-maintenance. The British (and to a lesser extent, the Italians) apparently assumed that the type of people who want a sports car would be willing to (and probably enjoyed) keeping it maintained. In a few cases, that was true. But in many cases that was false, and their reputations here suffered from it.

But in my mind, that's no reason to perpetuate that bad reputation. Because even here in the USA many of those cars are now owned by the type of people they were designed for, and the lack of reliability is no longer a big issue.

[hls30.com]

...

Maybe you need to add: ".....in the USA".?

I wonder if one of the weak links in the chain here are actually those USA-based owners? Judging from some of the British-made 50s/60s/70s cars that I have seen being re-imported to the UK over the years, 'regular maintenance' seems to mean something less than what would elsewhere be described as necessary for even basic safety. Suspension, steering and brake componentry in particular seems to be frighteningly neglected. I've seen the same thing on 'daily driver' 240Zs that have been imported from the USA too. Some of those cars looked to have been 'maintained' in Cuba..........

When I was living in Japan, a friend of mine there started importing cars from the USA with a view to selling them. He was aiming at mid-market priced examples ( not the cheapest, for obvious reasons ) and yet he still found that - without fail - the braking, suspension and steering systems on the cars exhibited little sign of having ever been looked after. The general conscensus was that safety inspections for such vehicles must be extremely lax. Wiring was - almost without fail - full of Scotchloks and Sellotaped additions.....

DO'oh, caught again! Given the necessity of maintenance, anything will last when it is provided, but as far as I know the first group included those that like to maintain their cars. Here in the USA I must admit the one friend I knew in Highschool with an MG could hardly get gas in the car, but he did love it-fortunately what he lacked in mechanical ability(he used wrenches as paperweights), his parents bank account made up for, It seemed to me that car was tuned up every 500 miles or so-the valves just wouldn't stay...but that could have been a "smart" mechanic...

Another experience from that time frame I had to draw from was neighbor who had 8 old Jags, all of which I rode once in, none of which started twice in a row...he finally got fed up and told me:"you know if I put a buck on the front seat of each one and rolled them in the river, I'd miss the $8." They all were bought by the Rayhal family, and most of them are in pieces in a storage unit to this day-the building is rotting away, but the parts are still in it-I'll have to make them an offer!

in College, I had a friend with an aluminum MGB, He drove it for a year, and then had it all over his rental for three years...

This was the total of my British car experience-other than consistantly over the last 30 years visiting an old car lot in Maggie Valley, NC where several old Jags(as well as a good many other once beautiful and not for sale cars) are slowly rusting away to nothing...

But, then the same thing is true of the Italian cars I have owned-USA POs do tended to drive the cars until they fall apart...and then sell them.

WIll

Edited August 7, 2008 by hls30.com

[m4xwellmurd3r]

That seems to be the american logic when it comes to car's "There's nothing wrong so I must not have to do anything to it!"

then something breaks and they probably think "Oh, that part must've worn out, I guess I should replace it now"

so after so many year's the car's basically falling apart due to neglect. I had a friend that NEVER put water or oil into his car, and one day he was late for class, his reason was "My car overheated so I had to put more water in it" another time, he was late, because his OIL light came on, so he had to put oil in it.

If nothing SAYS anything is wrong, people will just drive their car's till the rotors are worn down to the vanes, and their drums fall apart.

Or till the oil light comes on, or their car overheats to the redline.

[Danglybanger]

...So I own a Lotus Esprit (please contact me about remedying this, ), as well as a Triumph TR7...

Maintenance on the Lotus is scarily expensive and scarily manditory, and the threat of something breaking (and the price of that) is so great that I'm forced to sell, though there are many aspects of the car that I love... Though come to think of it, nothing horrible ever really HAS happened to it in terms of reliability, or things breaking.

One time a light switch DID melt itself together though

The TR7 has never run while I've owned (inherited) it, but is probably an FI scrubdown away from doing so, amazingly it has NO rust (thank CA), and EVERY electrical component in the car still works. Headlights. Fans. Lights on the dashboard. I mean wow.

Of course it's powered by whatever made Donkeys run in the old testament.

Really I think it depends on the amount of sympathy any car is given... Though granted it seems like things like the small block Chevy (or L series 6 cyl) are far less sensitive to things like that...

[HS30-H]

Interesting perspective. It is the fault of the customer that something intended to be used for sport or fun happened to require maintenance uncommon to the automotive market in which they lived.

First of all Carl, you are comparing 'reputations' built through two quite different periods, and with quite different circumstances behind them. The British 'sports' car invasion of the USA market ( along with the German and Italian 'sports' car invasion ) started a good ten to fifteen years before Nissan built the HLS30-U. The products of that post-war period were designed and built to a quite different brief than that of the HLS30-U, and with - arguably - materials and machine tools that were not as up to date as they perhaps should have been. But this is quite understandable when you consider the state of Britain, Germany and Italy so soon after the devastation of war. Even if the designers and engineers did come up with more modern solutions, they would be unlikely to be able to lay hands on the necessary level of materiel, their factories would struggle to make them and their domestic customers would struggle to afford them.......

Instead of damming the darkness of automotive abuse in America, the Japanese light a candle. They design and built cars that could not only survive the ugly Americans mistreatment, they thrived on it.

"...ugly Americans..."? Huh? That's your quote I believe, not anybody else's.

I believe the cars were sold with servicing schedules and instructions, and if these were not followed ( for whatever reason - including the sheer scale of the territory concerned, and the logistical problems that come with that ) then who is to blame? The likes of Austin-Morris and Standard-Triumph, Porsche and ALFA Romeo were hardly in a position to be setting up chains of official factory-type dealerships across the USA and Canada during that period. Volkswagen pretty much pioneered that 'you take the cars, you take ALL these spares too' philosophy for new car sales combined with a support network in any territory that they moved into. They blazed the trail for what came after.

Nissan jumped in on the north American sports car market at a seminal time, when the first Import Sports Car wave had started to wane, when new legislation had started to take a greater influence on auto design, and when industrial disputes had started to take a grip in the UK and Italy. The Japanese sports cars did not kill off the British sports cars; it was a far bigger and more complex scenario than that. It makes a nice triumphalist quote though doesn't it?

For Nissan's part, when they realized that their domestic models were not up to the riggers of life in the fast lane here in the U.S.A - they didn't keep sending the same failures. They redesigned and upgraded their products based on their target customers requirements. It's all sour grapes for the British and Italians of the day.

This is the usual 'Gospel According to St. Katayama' USA-centric nonsense, mixed up with blather and flannel from Nissan's USA marketing campaigns - which people appear to have swallowed whole over the years. It does not stand up to even the most basic scrutiny, but I guess if the same old lies keep getting repeated then quite a few people end up believing it.

The fact is that Nissan ( along with just about every other product producing concern in Japan ) were incrementally improving their wares during the post-war period. Their main focus of attention - and this is still true today - was their own domestic market, and the needs, dreams and aspirations of this market were no less important than any export market - no matter how big the potential of that export market. Do you honestly believe that their Export product was superior in design and manufacturing quality in comparison with the own domestic market models? The truth is that Japan was rapidly rebuilding itself post-war and during the Sixties quantum leaps were being made in this respect. Japanese buyers were demanding better, and Japanese engineers and designers were challenging themselves to provide it - whilst keeping a weather-eye on their nearest competitors ( in Nissan's case this was Toyota ). Anybody that thinks it was Export product that was leading the way cannot possibly have a handle on what was happening in the Japanese marketplace during the period concerned.

It was true then just as it is today; Nissan's Japanese market dwarfed all of it's individual export markets, and was unavoidably the main focus for the company. To imply that export markets were the sole driver for styling innovation, manufacturing quality and technological improvement is to completely misunderstand what was happening in Japanese society at that time.

Alan T.

[26th-Z]

Carl,

Your statement' "For Nissan's part..." refers to vehicle design, not mechanical design or reliability. And, yes, I believe anything used for "sport" requires maintenance exceeding what might be considered normal. Dauhh!

I spent my college summers working on British cars in a shop in Gainesville, raced a British car in SCCA, and drove a British car daily. I have fond recollections of packing everything I owned in an MGB when I left home for school. The first real race car I ever owned was an Alexis. This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the finest race car manufactuers in the world - a British Company. There is nothing wrong with a British sports car; all jokes about the Prince of Darkness aside.

British cars were never marketed very well in America. They sold to a small niche in the automotive market and didn't build a service industry. The "Japanese invasion" was every bit marketing as it was reliability. And frankly, it was more economy than anything else. Toyotas, Subarus, Hondas, and Datsuns were far less expensive to purchase than the limited offerings from Britain. The Japanese provided far better service for their vehicles including ready availability of parts. Those are the sorts of things we can thank Mr. Katayama for. I'm convinced that the Japanese persuaded the American public to buy their cars more than anything else.

[sblake01]

That seems to be the american logic when it comes to car's "There's nothing wrong so I must not have to do anything to it!"

then something breaks and they probably think "Oh, that part must've worn out, I guess I should replace it now"

so after so many year's the car's basically falling apart due to neglect. I had a friend that NEVER put water or oil into his car, and one day he was late for class, his reason was "My car overheated so I had to put more water in it" another time, he was late, because his OIL light came on, so he had to put oil in it.

If nothing SAYS anything is wrong, people will just drive their car's till the rotors are worn down to the vanes, and their drums fall apart.

Or till the oil light comes on, or their car overheats to the redline.

That's neglect as opposed to inadequate maintenance.