nick2008:
so its assembled in Britain then not really built
Rikki-UK:
Almost every western truck maker uses bought in components wether it be a ■■■■■■■ engine, fuller gearbox or Renault cab.
isn’t that what they all do? assemble parts , don’t think any of them carve them out of a lump of iron any more 
Yes, it is a very good day out to the DAF assembly plant at Leyland and fascinating to observe how the trucks are assembled. When I went just over 12 months ago they were assembling approximately 60 per day. Looking back to when Leyland was in its pomp it took them several factories in and around Leyland / Chorley to manufacture fewer numbers than that with several times more employees. One Leyland innovation carried over to today’s methods was to start building the chassis upside down and then turn it over part way along the production line. This factory is a largely unknown, un-publicised British manufacturing success story.
I was recentley reading we built almost as many cars in the UK last year as we did in the early 70s.
I was going to say Merc. Such a shame we have no home grown car or truck manufacturer anymore. Should’ve re-nationalised rover & jag & made em make better cars with a Shilelagh, rather than the Jerry’s & the the Indians makin’ them do it right.
Silver_Surfer:
I was going to say Merc. Such a shame we have no home grown car or truck manufacturer anymore. Should’ve re-nationalised rover & jag & made em make better cars with a Shilelagh, rather than the Jerry’s & the the Indians makin’ them do it right.
What like British Leyland? Who were the reason Leyland trucks didn’t have aot of funding as the money was propping up a useless car builder.
kr79:
I was recentley reading we built almost as many cars in the UK last year as we did in the early 70s.
The difference being that today’s capacity is all about ‘assembly’ of outsourced components mostly manufactured in a system that prioritises volume production.IE you’re confusing ‘building’ less production friendly cars with assembling cars in which the assembly operation is just one small part of a massive globalised production chain.
As opposed to the days when factories like Ford,Triumph,Rover and Jaguar were making affordable rear wheel drive cars often on a more in house major component manufacturing basis.Certainly in Ford’s case from the raw material stage to the finished product.IE how many uk car plants actually make large proportion of the product from the metal foundry production stage to the finished product.
The fact is compared to the 1960’s and 1970’s UK manufacturing ability and capacity is a joke when compared on a like with like basis.With economic trade deficit figures to prove it.
Muckaway:
Silver_Surfer:
I was going to say Merc. Such a shame we have no home grown car or truck manufacturer anymore. Should’ve re-nationalised rover & jag & made em make better cars with a Shilelagh, rather than the Jerry’s & the the Indians makin’ them do it right.What like British Leyland? Who were the reason Leyland trucks didn’t have aot of funding as the money was propping up a useless car builder.
The JRT division of BL was actually the most profitable part of the whole empire.It might be fair to say that the Truck manufacturing part of the group ‘might’ arguably have survived a bit longer if Austin Morris had been closed down.The fact is the amount of money needed to get ahead of the foreign competition at the time would have contained so many zeros that it was more than the country could afford let alone the small amount of investment which the banks were prepared to put up.Bearing in mind that it makes no difference wether it’s nationalised tax payer funded or not the money all eventually has to come from the same place either in the form of public taxes or private investment.Public taxes just being a deduction taken from the wages earn’t in the private sector.If the bankers aren’t prepared to allow sufficient wages then it’s obvious that the tax revenues won’t be there either.Which more or less sums up the economic industrial massacre of the nationalised industries in the 1970’s.
This months’ Classic Truck has a feature on the Marathon and how Leyland only had funds to develop “the bottom half” of the motor, recycling Ergomatic bits for the top. This was blamed on money being pumped into the car division. This you see why when you consider the junk BL were producing, anything with an Austin/Morris badge basically (except the Mini) the need for syphoning cash. Just how “workers” were meant to produce anything half decent when they always had one hand in the air was impossible anyway.