Transcript
Page 1: The Prequel/Sequel to John Z, the DeLorean & Me 45+ Years ... · The Prequel/Sequel to John Z, the DeLorean & Me 45+ Years without John DeLorean... and a little more with by Barrie

The Prequel/Sequel to John Z, the DeLorean & Me

45+ Years withoutJohn DeLorean...

and a little more with

by Barrie WillsForeword by John Griffiths

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Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Foreword by John Griffiths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Book 1 - The Learning Years 1 How It All Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2 Jaguar Cars Limited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 3 Kirkstall Forge & Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4 Back to BLMC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 5 Reliant Motor Company Limited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 6 Between Jobs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

Book 2 - Implementation 7 DeLorean Motor Cars Limited - the little more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 8 The Sinclair Vehicle Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 9 Malcolm Bricklin & Proton of Malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 10 Taiwan: Island of Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 11 Adventures in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 12 Indonesia: The Big Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 13 The New Lotus Elan - Managing M100 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 14 China’s Tianjin Automotive Industry Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 15 The USSR and CIS Countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 16 Eastern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 17 Promoting de Montfort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

Book 3 - Investing, More Travelling & Risk Taking 18 Fresnel Lenses & All That . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353 19 Miscellaneous Other Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 20 The DTI Automotive Division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383 21 Chapman Arup: MG Rover & Iran Khodro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 22 India’s 1-lakh Car . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 23 Project Kimber: MG & AC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403 24 The Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445

Postscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467

Contents

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Through the Railings

It was Saturday 16 February 1957. I was just fifteen years old and had ridden my trusted Smethwick-made Phillips Kingfisher bicycle the two miles or so from my parents’ rented semi-detached home in Radford, one mile northwest of the city centre of Coventry, to Browns Lane, outside the village of Allesley to the city’s closest western extremity. Four days before, a serious fire, which started in the tyre storage area, had torn through the Jaguar car plant there, causing serious disruption and much damage to finished cars and work in progress. I peered through the railings, hoping to see some sign of the damaged cars.

Following Jaguar’s withdrawal from racing at the end of the 1956 motor racing season, a number of completed and partially completed D-types were left unsold. In an attempt to recover some of the investment made in developing the Le Mans winner, and to exploit the lucrative American market for high-performance European sports cars, Jaguar’s founder and chairman, Sir William Lyons, had decided to convert a number to a road-going specification. The resultant model was the XKSS. It incorporated only minor changes to the D-type structure: the addition of a passenger side door, the removal of the aerodynamic fin behind the driver and of the divider between passenger and driver seats. Changes were also made for cosmetic, comfort and legal reasons: a full-width windscreen was specified; as were side screens for both driver and passenger doors; a rudimentary, folding, fabric soft top was incorporated for

weather protection; chromed bumpers were added front and rear; XK140 rear light clusters were mounted higher on the rear wings; and thin chrome strips enhanced the edge of the front light fairings.

Through the local newspaper, The Coventry Evening Telegraph, I had already learned that Bill Cassidy of the experimental department had spotted the outbreak in the tyre store and had set off the alarm. Without his prompt action considerably greater damage might have occurred and - much worse - lives might have been lost. As it was, there were no casualties. A number of the XKSSs were saved from the blaze by the prompt action of the workforce, including a number of young apprentices - one called Michael Kimberley, later to become a work colleague and a lifelong business contact - who pushed them out of the blazing building. However, many cars including Mark VIIs and Mark Ones were destroyed along with the assembly lines on which they were assembled.

I was hoping to catch a glance of one of the rare XKSS models in the car park in front of the head office block. Sadly, none were to be seen. Only one or two of the directors’ cars were visible - parked in line alongside the grass ‘island’ in front of the main entrance, in the centre of which was a flagpole but no flag flying. It was a real disappointment for me not to see at least one XKSS but at least I had secured my first glimpse of the place in which I was to commence my automotive industry education two and a half years later.

How It All Started

The Jaguar front entrance and main gates - Browns Lane, Coventry

Sir William Lyons - the founder, chairman and managing director of Jaguar, photographed in 1966

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Jaguar’s Origins: Blackpool

On 4 September 1922, two young men registered a new company with a capital of £1,000, a sizeable sum in those days. They were both motor cycle enthusiasts with the first name William. Walmsley was the elder of the two, the younger man had the surname Lyons. They called their business the Swallow Sidecar Company Limited. Located in Bloomfield Road, Blackpool, it was a near neighbour of the town’s then illustrious football club.

Of the two, William Lyons had the greater design flair and business acumen and very soon his aesthetic, somewhat racy designs of sidecar were being fitted to chassis built by Montgomery’s of Coventry. Within a year the fledgling business was exhibiting at the Motor Cycle Show in

London, alongside the great British motor cycle brands of the day, Rudge, Clyno, BSA, Norton, AJS, Brough, Sunbeam and Triumph. By mid-1926, the company had grown out of its original factory and moved into larger premises in Cocker Street. One of the original thirty workers who assisted the move was a young storekeeper

by the name of Harry Teather. More of him later.

Later in 1926, Lyons developed a sporting body onto the redoubtable Austin 7. The two-seater Austin Swallow was an immediate success and paved the way for car bodybuilding to become the dominant part of the business. In 1927, the company was renamed Swallow Sidecar and Coachbuilding Company Limited. The first

Swallow four-seater soon followed, again based upon an Austin chassis. Fiat Swallows, Standard Swallows, Morris Cowley Swallows and Wolseley Hornet Swallows were to follow the success of the Austin-based cars.

Jaguar’s Origins: Foleshill, Coventry

By 1928, Cocker Street was bursting at the seams and Lyons and Walmsley made the decision to relocate the business to the British motor industry’s heartland of the Midlands and on 7 November 1928, Swallow moved into premises at Holbrook Lane, Foleshill, Coventry. Then in 1931 the sidecar reference was dropped from the company name and the Swallow Coachbuilding Company

Jaguar Cars Limited

Austin Swallow

A Swallow sidecar motorcycle combination

The more mature Harry Teather with body draughtsman Tom Morson (left) and wages clerk Denton Salisbury (right)

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UK’s Oldest Forge

It is reckoned the first forge on the Horsforth site to the north of the city of Leeds, straddling the river Aire as it runs towards The Dales, was founded by the Cistercian monks of the nearby Kirkstall Abbey in the early twelfth century. That made its successor, Kirkstall Forge & Engineering,

the oldest forge in the United Kingdom. An early hammer and the water mill that drove it, using the River Aire for its power, was located within what was a site of 57-acres, straddling the river by a footbridge. By the nineteenth century it was a growth business, headed by a formidable middle-class Yorkshire lady called

Mrs Beecroft. One of her daughters married into the local more upper-class Butler family, generations of which ran the business thereafter, culminating with Tony Butler, whose uncle Rodney was non-executive chairman. Tony’s older brother, Edmund, also sat on the board in a non-executive advisory capacity.

The Butler family had entered the management of the business in 1851 through John Octavius Butler (1812-1883) at what was then known as the old ironworks, of which the Butler and Beecroft families had been proprietors since 1778. The name of the business, Beecroft, Butler

and Company, was altered in 1858 to the Kirkstall Forge Company, on the retirement of the last of the Beecrofts. John Octavius Butler introduced important improvements at Kirkstall Forge, where railway plant, engine and bridge work, and steam hammers were turned out on an extensive scale. Under his management one of the largest hydraulic forging presses ever made in the UK was constructed for the forging and stamping of malleable iron, based upon a system developed by Haswell of Vienna, Austria.

During its growth, the forge had moved into the manufacture of axles for horse-drawn vehicles and progressively into motor vehicle axles through the

twentieth century to become the largest independent supplier - indeed with a near monopoly - to the UK’s heavy vehicle producers.

Along with GKN’s Scottish Stampings in Ayr, Scotland, Kirkstall possessed one of only two giant hammers in the UK heavy enough to stamp out front axle beams purchased by the manufacturers of bus chassis and other heavy vehicles. Kirkstall’s main business, however, was the design, engineering and manufacture of a range of proprietary heavy duty rear axles for truck, bus and off-

Kirkstall Forge & Engineering

Kirkstall Forge entrance - not very imposing - c1970 An aerial photograph of Kirkstall’s 57-acre site straddling the River Aire

Mrs Beecroft - the Beecroft family matriarch

A typical Kirkstall bus front axle beam forging

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Leyland Truck & Bus

Then came a surprise phone call from my former main contact at BMC Bathgate, Jim McCluskey. By that time he had been appointed John McMillan’s replacement as director of purchasing of the truck and bus division of British Leyland, based at its headquarters at Leyland in Lancashire. Jim told me he had two openings he wanted to fill in which I might be interested. The first was created following his promotion - deputy chief buyer to Bill Craig at Bathgate in West Lothian, Scotland. Fellow Scot Bill had been Jim’s number two and was then chief buyer following Jim’s advancement within the truck and bus division.

The second was a new post. This was supplies manager of a brand new company within the truck and bus division. It had been formed as a joint venture between British Leyland and a company created by the nationalisation of the major bus operators within UK. These included Midland Red, East Kent, Ribble, Cumberland, Southdown, Southern, Thames Valley amongst many others. The Labour government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson had placed these acquisitions under the banner of The National Bus Company (NBC) from 1 January 1969. The new joint venture was called Leyland National Limited, headed by a general manager, Marcus

Smith. Until recently, Marcus had held a similar position in another bus-producing company which had been merged into Leyland Truck & Bus - Bristol Commercial Vehicles. New to manufacturing, he came from a family long established in the running of bus operators.

The Bathgate Alternative

I visited Bathgate to meet Bill Craig. The plant had been opened in 1961 as a result of a well-established British government policy of disallowing expansion of

manufacturing plants in the West Midlands in favour of relocation to new facilities in so-called development areas. Through this, Rootes Group had opened a plant at Linwood in Renfrewshire, Scotland to manufacture the Hillman Imp, whilst Standard-Triumph had been encouraged to expand at Speke in Liverpool, where the Triumph TR7 was being built. Bathgate was home to the BMC light to mid-range trucks as well as the former Nuffield tractor. It also manufactured the 4 and 6/98 series BMC diesel engine range.

Whilst the Bathgate job was certainly attractive, the startup nature of the new post at Leyland National - a breakthrough design of unitary construction bus ‘designed like an aircraft - built like a car’, had much greater appeal. It was to be manufactured using car assembly methods

Back to BLMC

Marcus Smith, general manager of Leyland National (left) and George McKay, director of technical services of the new National Bus Company (right)

The British Motor Corporation plant at Bathgate, Scotland

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I first visited Reliant at their head office, on the old Roman road, Watling Street - the arterial A5 from the port of Dover to Wroxeter on the Welsh border - in Two Gates near Tamworth in early November 1971. It was not the most impressive of buildings - red brick with a utilitarian but business-like look to it. I introduced myself to a receptionist who clearly doubled up as a telephone operator, the giveaway being her appearance from behind a glazed screen after my arrival was announced by the bell I had rung. ‘I’m here to see Mr Wiggin, I announced.’ Minutes later, a petite young woman appeared from a staircase off the reception office. She introduced herself as Mr Wiggin’s secretary, Pat Orton, and led me upstairs to an office immediately to the right of what was clearly hers.

On entry, two men were awaiting my arrival. The obviously senior one was behind his desk. He was a tall, slim, relaxed individual, who greeted me with a friendly smile. He introduced himself to me as Ray

Wiggin, managing director of both Reliant Motor Group and Reliant Motor Company. In turn, Ray introduced his colleague, who was equally slim, quite bald with an attempt at a comb-over and a small moustache underneath a pair of questioning bespectacled eyes. His name was Bill Snowdon, finance director of both companies. Hello, I thought, good guy and bad guy routine? I could

not have been more mistaken.

I was questioned in depth by Wiggin about my time at Jaguar in particular and my more recent experience at Leyland National. Less time was spent discussing my time at Kirkstall. Snowdon said very little but listened

Reliant Motor Company Limited

Reliant Motor Group and Reliant Motor Company managing directorRaymond W Wiggin

The Reliant head office at the Two Gates plant on the former A5, the Roman road Watling Street

Meeting Ray Wiggin & Bill Snowdon

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Group Lotus

My long-standing contact from Jaguar days, Lotus’s Mike Kimberley had been taken into my confidence about the likelihood of my departure from Reliant. He asked me

to visit him at his Norfolk home on 18 December 1977. There he, I and our respective wives sat down to an excellent Sunday lunch and afterwards, over coffee, Mike made it clear he wanted to talk to Colin Chapman, his chairman, to discuss how a role could be created for me somewhere in their organisation. He went ashen, however, when I outlined my expectations of salary as it became more than evident that as deputy managing director of Reliant I earned a significantly larger sum than he was earning as managing director of Lotus. As a result, I spent the long drive back from Norfolk to the West Midlands wondering what else might be out there for me. Despite my misgivings about whether an acceptable offer would ever be made, Mike kept in regular contact through the spring and summer, assuring me he was making progress towards a resolution.

Industry Contacts

Having departed Reliant at the very end of January 1978, my immediate port of call was former colleague Roger Musgrave, who had by then found another position in sales working in London. During the weeks following his ‘resignation’ from his post at Reliant, he’d been the rounds

of the executive search companies, otherwise known as ‘headhunters’ and was able to provide an amazingly long and detailed list of contact names and phone numbers for me to work through.

A day or two after leaving Reliant, I received a phone call from John Thompson, the managing director of the then-major automotive engineering group, Smiths Industries. He wanted me to join them but the only senior post he had vacant was that of managing director of their Radiomobile in-car entertainment business. After a meeting at their Cricklewood headquarters with John, his number two Marcus Beresford (later to become managing director of the automotive division of GKN) took me across London from their head office to the Radiomobile plant on the busy North Circular Road.

Radiomobile was the epitome of the traditional pre- and post-war British business - almost suspended in time. There was a workshop at the back in which a female mainly immigrant Asian workforce was assembling kits imported from Taiwan, and a red brick frontage that was a narrow footpath away from the traffic-dense road. Behind the frontage were an oak-panelled reception office, chief executive’s office and boardroom. I stood alone in the

boardroom for a few minutes, looking out onto the trucks, buses and cars belching out exhaust fumes onto the North Circular and immediately decided the job was not for me. Despite that, I awaited Smith’s offer, which was generous in the extreme for the job

Between Jobs

Mike Kimberley (right) inspects the M90 concept inspired and designed by fellow former-Jaguar apprentice Oliver Winterbottom

A period advertisement for theRadiomobile car radio

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The Phone Call From the Unknown Greek

In mid-September 1978, whilst I was awaiting the promised motor show meetings and job offers from Aston Martin and Lotus, my wife took a call for me at home. It was from a gentleman with a foreign accent she had great difficulty understanding. So much so, on my homecoming late that evening, her note left by the phone contained just a Belfast phone number and the message ‘someone called Onassis rang, please call him back’.

On returning the call the following morning, he turned out to be a Greek of whom I had never heard called Myron Stylianides. He introduced himself as ex-Chrysler Europe and a director of personnel of the newly-formed DeLorean Motor Cars Limited in Dunmurry, near Belfast in Northern Ireland. Throughout 1978, I’d been following the press reports, particularly those in Automotive News

published out of Detroit, about the attempts of the maverick former General Motors vice-president John DeLorean’s attempts to locate manufacture of his fledgling sports car company. Puerto Rico and the Republic of Ireland had been considered before a former colleague at GM had tipped off John that the British Government was offering generous grants and loans to companies prepared to invest in its province of Northern Ireland. This was a brave attempt to provide greater prospects of employment to assist their efforts to eliminate terrorism during the so-called Troubles.

A 44-day long negotiation had been completed successfully in the late summer and DeLorean had abandoned Puerto Rico and Ireland to settle for a 72-acre bog in Dunmurry, West Belfast, bordered by the Republican Twinbrook housing estate to the north and the staunchly Loyalist Seymour Hill development to its south. John DeLorean needed a director of purchasing and Stylianides asked if I

would be prepared to fly out to Northern Ireland to meet the great man for discussions about the role.

It took two visits to Northern Ireland and three phone calls before I joined DeLorean. I never did get a formal job offer with salary and conditions from either Aston Martin or Lotus but I was to turn up to meet Colin Chapman and

his team at Hethel in early November 1978 along with John Z, my new managing director Charles K Bennington and DeLorean’s US-based colleagues, William T ‘Bill’ Collins, CR ‘Dick’ Brown and Joseph ‘Buck’ Penrose. The story of that infamous meeting at Ketteringham Hall in Norfolk, UK with Chapman, his finance director Fred Bushell and managing director Mike Kimberley... and much more is told in my earlier book John Z, the DeLorean & Me - tales from an insider.

There are a few more DeLorean snippets worthy of recording for posterity though... ...

DeLorean Motor Cars Limited -the little more

DeLorean director of per-sonnel and administration, Myron Stylianides

Barrie Wills’s DeLorean business card

A fortunately not-too-regular scene outside the Training Build-ing at Dunmurry circa 1978

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Meeting Clive & the Ogle Reacquaintance

I first met Clive Sinclair at his office at 23 Motcomb Street, off Cadogan Place in Belgravia, London, on 26 November 1982. I had received a phone call in my office at Dunmurry just a few days earlier from my old friend and colleague from Reliant days, the designer Tom Karen, managing director of Ogle Design. Tom told me he had been working on the design of an electric car for Clive Sinclair and that it was felt the electronics genius needed someone with an automotive background to assist him. I knew my days at DeLorean were numbered by then. Also, at that time Sinclair was the ‘darling’ of the business pages in the UK and elsewhere and a businessman anyone would wish to meet. He had been responsible for the design and engineering of the world’s first pocket calculator; his ‘black’ digital watch; a flat screen ‘pocket’ TV; and the most successful of all, the ZX and Spectrum ranges

of micro-computers that had transformed the bedroom of every teenager from somewhere to sleep to a games room. In the mid-fifties there were just thirty-three digital computers in the whole of the United States of America. By the end of January 1982, 300,000 of the £69.95 ZX81s had been sold worldwide. When Sinclair Research Limited released its successor, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, in April 1982, their 16k version retailed for £125 and the 48k for £175, ready to be bought by a hungry public at volumes of around 15,000 per week.

The Private Placing

During the previous year, the London Stock Exchange had established the unlisted securities market (USM) to attract fast growing high-tech companies. Clive Sinclair’s advisors, NM Rothschild, arranged what was known as a ‘private placing’ of 374,850 of his personal holdings of ordinary 25 pence shares in Sinclair Research Limited at £34 each. This represented less than ten per cent of his total shareholding and netted him £12,750,000, making him ‘worth’ more than £100 million on paper. Over the previous decade, he had made no secret of his interest in electric vehicles and, indeed, the reasoning behind the private placing in the prospectus was to provide more funds for ongoing research and product development in these. Clive told me he was ready to invest £12.9 million in his vehicle project.

Early Days With Chris Curry

Clive’s first work on his electric vehicle ideas dated back to the early ‘70s when he asked Chris Curry, then a member of his Cambridge-based team and later to found Acorn Computers, to see what he might come up with. Curry’s thinking led to them working together on a wafer-thin electric motor, mounted on a scooter. In a way the prototype was not dissimilar to the electric Segway that was to appear on the market in a blaze of publicity in the 21st century. The Sinclair pocket calculator took off around the same time and its immediate market success distracted the pair’s attention. Despite that, Clive continued to talk openly to friends and press alike about his plans for an ‘electric car’.

The Sinclair Vehicle Project

The former-Sinclair offices on the corner of Motcomb Street, London. Clive’s office top right.

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‘Whispering’ Karl Ludvigsen

Operating under my new company de Montfort’s umbrella, I’d been working as a part-time consultant to Sir Clive Sinclair. This enabled me to support my former boss at Reliant Ray Wiggin’s company, Sherbrook International Limited, over a few days a week. I became a regular visitor to the Turkish Koç Group’s chairman Rahmi Koç and the head of his vehicle component division, Berti Kahmi in Istanbul. These meetings enabled me to do deals for Ray, selling British technology and components to Koç’s by then totally Ford-related vehicle manufacturing subsidiary, Otosan which - as I forecasted - had abandoned the post-Wiggin Reliant. I also undertook negotiations for the purchase of components from a number of Koç’s component subsidiaries for import by Sherbrook who sold onto the likes of Rover and JCB.

Late in 1986, out of the blue, I received a call from Paul McVeigh, who had worked with me at Jaguar and DeLorean and had assisted Sinclair Vehicles through his purchasing consultancy Almac. Paul asked if he could introduce me to someone for whom Almac had undertaken a few tasks, an Anglophile American, the laid-back resident of Islington, London, with a whispering Michigan drawl, by the name of Karl Ludvigsen.

Despite my by-then 25 years in the industry, I confess I’d not heard of Karl but Paul soon gave me the highlights of his background. Born in 1934 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he was the son of a senior executive at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, USA. Karl had carved out a successful career as a journalist, sometime author,

and automotive historian. Indeed, his office in New Bond Street in London, which I was to visit on 12 December 1986, contained a massive photographic library his father and he had accumulated over their years associated with the auto industry.

For a short period from 1980, after his arrival in UK that year, Karl had been vice-president, governmental affairs for Ford and had got to know a fellow American journalist and PR executive, Anthony ‘Tony’ Ciminera. Tony had worked closely with Fiat USA before their decision to abandon the US market and Karl had done some consultancy work for them. By late 1986 Tony Ciminera had been working for some time with the bath-robed Malcolm Bricklin I’d met in Manhattan much earlier that same year.

Ludvigsen had been seconded by Tony to locate experienced automotive specialists to assist Bricklin’s ambitious projects. Having learned my career history from Paul McVeigh, Karl was anxious to introduce me to Malcolm Bricklin - without knowing, of course, I had met the great man with his ‘wall-to-wall women’ in Manhattan earlier that year.

Malcolm Bricklin - Again

Malcolm Bricklin - in common with John DeLorean - had a mixed reputation. In 1958 at 19 years of age, the newly-married Malcolm had dropped out of the

Malcolm Bricklin &Proton of Malaysia

The prolific author Karl Ludvigsen, later in life

Malcolm Bricklin - still at it in 2006

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The Introduction

I had no idea Taiwan had an automotive industry until Dan Prior talked to me about opportunities there for Global Motors midway through the Proton programme. It turned out Dan had been introduced to the country through Larry Risser, whose political links of sorts with David Eisenhower, the son of President Dwight D Eisenhower, had opened doors. Dan’s visit to Yue Loong, the licensor of Nissan was thwarted, inasmuch that he inadvertently offended the matriarch and chairwoman of the family-owned business, probably due to Mitsui subterfuge.

From 1961 to 1980, the economy of Taiwan had grown such that the average annual income was over US $2,000 and car sales had reached 150,000 per annum. Assisted by the government, Yue Loong expanded production capacity to become market leader. It established its Sanyi manufacturing and engineering centre in 1981, to make it more independent from Nissan, bring in modern production technologies, purchase production equipment and train its own production and engineering specialists. Its Feeling 101 model was launched in 1986 and was the first motor vehicle designed, engineered and manufactured in Taiwan.

Despite Dan’s false start, I wondered if there might be an opportunity for de Montfort to work directly with Yue Loong in some way. I decided to take a punt in April 1988 by writing to its chairwoman, Mrs Vivian Wu. To my surprise, I received a reply by return fax inviting me to make a visit to meet company president CT Ou Yang; executive vice-president CH Lee; managing director Kenneth Kai Tai Yen; and another lady, this one the head of the Feeling design/engineering team, Sueney Li.

The First Project With Yue Loong

During my visit to Taipei over 16 through 18 May, the Yue Loong top management were more than frank about their perceived need for help. To their great disappointment the much vaunted, home-grown Feeling model had failed in the market having suffered from an abundance of quality and warranty issues. In a serious attempt to rectify things

they were looking for an experienced team of independent technical and commercial automotive specialists to tell them where they had gone wrong.

I had already signed up two former colleagues who were prepared to work part-time in any projects that interested them and in which their experience was judged relevant. I had great respect for both. John Haig had managed Iran’s national car programme, the Peykan, in Tehran for a near decade before joining DeLorean to assist the manufacturing launch programme. His experience in manufacturing engineering was second to none. Derek Peck had taken early retirement at the age of 55, after nearly forty years with Rover Group and its predecessors, where his last job had been to head up the British side of the joint-engineering team within the XX project with Honda that spawned the Rover 800/Sterling and the Honda Legend. This service had been broken only by his two years working alongside me at Reliant when Derek headed the FW11 engineering programme undertaken with Bertone.

My proposal through which I would handle the commercial aspects with Paul McVeigh’s Almac team once again in support, John the manufacturing and quality review and Derek the investigation into design/engineering and product development, was accepted with enthusiasm and John, Derek and I set out to visit Yue Loong together to start the project.

Taiwan: Island of Opportunities

The Yue Loong Feeling sedan, pictured somewhat appropri-ately next to a British Airways airplane

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The Introduction

During that more than hectic spell in Malaysia and Taiwan, I was re-introduced to Tony Good, one of the near-saviours of Reliant along with Jo Eerdmans, John Barber and Donald Healey back in 1977. Tony was keen for me to visit India with him, where he had major business interests. Apart from being chairman of the first publicly-quoted public relations agency in the UK, Good Relations, the company he had founded, he was a part owner of the prestigious travel agency Cox & Kings and the Taj Group of hotels in India in partnership with the Tata Group. I doubt many British businessmen had more experience of India than Tony at that time.

The UK auto industry’s history in India was mixed at best. Sir Michael Edwardes, when chief executive of BL, had missed a golden opportunity there by turning down an invitation to use the Metro as the basis of a ‘national car’ in partnership with the Indian Government. BL’s place was taken by Suzuki of Japan, who took the opportunity and ran with it. With the Indian Government in the majority, they formed Maruti Udyog Limited as a 26 per cent/74 per cent joint venture to turn their domestic Alto small car into the Maruti 800, India’s first modern car. Production commenced in 1983 in a brand new plant at a greenfield

site in Gurgaon in the state of Haryana. At that time the only cars manufactured in India were the dated Premier Padmini, based on the 1964 Fiat 1100, built at at their Kurla plant near Bombay and the even older Hindustan Ambassador, which was an unchanged (apart from logos) Morris Oxford series-3 manufactured by Morris Motors (BL’s predecessor) at Cowley, Oxford from 1956 to 1959. The dated Ambassador was produced at a plant in Uttarpara near Calcutta. At that time the mighty Ambassador was the limousine of choice for the prime minister of India and governmental officials, whilst the nation’s taxis were Padmini to the west and Ambassador to the centre and east.

The Taj Mahal Palace

Tony Good had a long-standing relationship with Premier Motors and its owners the Walchand Group and offered to introduce me to them. He also proposed we fly to Bombay, me from KL, him from Heathrow, and stay at his part-owned Taj Hotel Group’s flagship hotel, The Taj Mahal Intercontinental (now Palace), opened on 16 December 1903. The Taj, with its 560 rooms and 44 suites, lived up to everything I’d been told about it. Its Sikh doormen and greeters are legendary and the hotel has 1,500 staff including 35 butlers. We stayed in the old wing with its high ceilings and massive fans, providing wonderful air movement within its wings, rather than the modern tower block which had been built as a major extension and opened in 1973.

Over the years its clientele had included Somerset Maugham, Duke Ellington and India’s final viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten. Tony introduced me to the unbeatable atmosphere of the Harbour Bar within the old hotel. We were also to enjoy the Rendezvous, a rooftop venue in the tower. This allowed magnificent panoramic views across the city and towards the Arabian Sea beyond the neighbouring magnificent Gateway of India, built for the arrival by sea of the Emperor King George V and Queen Mary in 1911. All this made the Rendezvous a perfect venue for business meetings and on Sundays there was the further advantage of it being the lunchtime venue of choice for Bollywood starlets.

Adventures in India

A Bombay street scene from 1988 - double-decker bus, Hin-dustan Ambassador, Maruti 800 and scooter await the traffic light change

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The Introduction

Global Motors’ Dan Prior’s exploration of the auto sector of Southeast Asia had kindled a significant interest on my part in the business opportunities in the region not least as I had enjoyed the climate and culture of Malaysia so much. Taiwan had proven successful only in part so I decided to take a look at Indonesia, encouraged by Maurice Rourke of Inchcape. Earlier Dan had met an Indonesian businessman in Boston, USA by the name of Jerry Sumendap. He had heard of Global Motors’ success

with Yugo and plans for Proton and wanted to encourage Dan to take a look at one of the semi-indigenous 4x4s manufactured in his country. Dan had visited Indonesia with Sumendap but the opportunity got caught up in the demise of Malcolm Bricklin’s empire and went nowhere.

My first visit to Indonesia, then the fourth largest populated country in the world after China, USA and the Soviet Union, was undertaken with Maurice Rourke. We decided to do a business tour of Asia on the back of an SMMT trade mission to Seoul, the capital of South Korea. There we attended a seminar featuring SMMT member companies, most of the presentations being almost crass to the point of embarrassment. One of these was accompanied by transparent overhead slides on which were placed text in Korean to the left and English to the right. The presenter to the near hundred per cent Korean audience would carefully adjust each slide so the Korean language text disappeared, no doubt to enable him to read the words in English! The only presentation that made a favourable impression on us was by a young man from

Rover, by the name of Tim somebody-or-other. I recall whispering in Maurice’s ear, ‘you should hire him!’

After visiting Proton and Perodua in Malaysia, we stopped over for the weekend at the Shangri-La hotel in Singapore. Relaxing by the pool on the Sunday morning after breakfast, we noticed a young westerner swimming towards us. It was the same young guy who had impressed us so much in Seoul. He introduced himself as Tim Tozer, coincidentally part of the Tozer family of Tozer, Kemsley and Millburn, Maurice’s employers before the takeover by Inchcape. Shortly afterwards Tim went to work for Maurice at Inchcape, before heading up Inchcape’s Jeep operation in Britain, then Chrysler UK, moving on to lead Mitsubishi Europe in Holland, followed by the chairmanship of General Motors Europe, before he retired in 2015.

Maurice and I moved on to Jakarta in Indonesia late afternoon on that Sunday, flying by the country’s national carrier Garuda. We were the only passengers in first class and received excellent service from the charming stewardesses as we settled into our seats. No sooner had we taken off but the temperature of the air conditioning system dropped so low we were shivering. Whilst the cabin staff donned overcoats, Maurice and I took every blanket we could find from the overhead stowage lockers to wrap ourselves in them for warmth. Fortunately it was a relatively short flight but as the engines roared to assist deceleration as we approached Soekarno-Hatta airport for landing, a fierce rush of heat blasted the first class cabin. We had just about removed the blankets by the time it was necessary for us to belt up for landing. I never flew Garuda again.

Maurice and I spent a night and day in Jakarta. During the day we walked the city’s streets observing the types of vehicles being driven. By far the majority were Japanese pickup trucks, which we discovered had been converted into people carriers by an abundance of independent body-builders that were located across the archipelago of eighteen thousand islands spread over 735,358 square miles of land. This huge fleet of commercial vehicles adapted as private family transport explained why, during

Indonesia: The Big Project

The catalyst Jerry Sumendap’s business card

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Yet Another Phone Call

In parallel with much of de Montfort’s early work in Taiwan and Indonesia, my services were called upon once again by two long-standing industry contacts. In late November 1988, de Montfort was still recovering from its £250,000 bad debt from the demise of Malcolm Bricklin’s Global Motors, when I answered the phone in my Lichfield office to hear the dulcet tones of Colin Spooner’s familiar voice. The Lotus design/engineering guru and I had remained in close contact since the foundations of the strong mutual respect and friendship developed during the DeLorean project. Group Lotus was by then under the ownership of General Motors with my former-Jaguar apprentice colleague Mike Kimberley as group chief executive and managing director. Mike oversaw three businesses, Lotus Cars; the better performing Lotus Engineering, which had grown from the seeds of the Lotus Sunbeam and DeLorean contracts; and GM’s Millbrook Proving

Ground - all a few years before his involvement with Lamborghini.

After some small talk, Colin soon came to the point. ‘I’ve been talking to Mike’, he said, ‘we’re struggling with our new model programme. Do

you think you might come in to do what you did with DeLorean and kick the car into production?’ Flattered and, anyway, short of work due to the abrupt ending of the work with Proton, I told Colin I did have some time available and might just be prepared to put in up to two to three days a week for a while. ‘Good’, said Colin, ‘how early can you come over to Hethel to see Mike?’ I made the familiar eastward trip along the A14 and A11 trunk roads to Norfolk on Thursday 8 December.

The Task

Mike was very open with me. He told me GM had approved what was the largest new model budget in Lotus’s history for a long-awaited small two-seater Elan as a modern equivalent to the road car that had made Colin Chapman’s name. Codenamed M100, the project had got off to two bad starts, had missed two previously agreed deadlines for completion, and had gone over budget. Kimberley also told me he had hired a managing director into Lotus Cars from Jaguar by the name of Derek Waeland.

Waeland had quite a track record - at least on paper. Very much the Essex-man, he had a long career with Ford behind him, including a spell as a member of the team based in Spain that took the original Ford Fiesta into production in a new plant on a greenfield site in Valencia. After the Fiesta project, he had been hired into Jaguar as part of an intake of a number of recruits from Ford. There, he had project-managed the revamped XJS into production and its eventual market launch in 1991. Never a man to understate his own ability and despite those apparent successes, according to Kimberley, Waeland’s track record at Lotus was more than disappointing.

Mike had also taken Colin Spooner away from his core strength of chief engineer and promoted him into the role of project director of M100. This had not proven successful either as Colin had wisely admitted. However, Colin’s ongoing involvement was vital to the project as the origins of the design-engineering brief of the M100 concept were very much his. GM had insisted upon a design competition before settling on the preferred styling of the car. The Lotus-produced full-size model of M100,

The New Lotus Elan - Managing M100

A publicity photograph of the Lotus Elan - arguably Lotus’s best ever car

Lotus director of engineering Colin Spooner pictured in 2013

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My Introduction to China

My interest in the auto industry of Asia had been sparked off by my activities with Proton in Malaysia in support of Malcolm Bricklin’s efforts there followed up by the years spent attempting to further the ambitions of so many in Indonesia inspired by my friend director-general Soeparno Prawiroadiredjo of the Ministry of Industry in Jakarta. Mainland China’s auto sector was something of a mystery in 1995 but there was one man in the UK who had become the specialist in all that was going on there. His name was Peter Bennett OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire), formerly of Joseph Lucas Industries and the man who near single-handedly had earned his employers more than significant income through the sale of technology via licences in a multitude of contracts with businesses across China. His range of contacts in China was second to none, which is exemplified through his massive collection of business card files which represent a Who’s Who of the Chinese industry. Following Peter’s death in 2000, I was taken aback when his widow handed them to me at his special request, a gesture which both gratified and delighted me.

After retiring from Lucas and entering consultancy, Peter became the catalyst to all activities relating to China within the UK’s SMMT. My first excursion to China was as part of a trade mission led by him around 1990. It included a tour of First Auto Works after which we joined the workforce to lunch in their huge canteen. I moved most of the content of my plate around politely with my chopsticks and to this day I still have little idea of what I ate.

P-E Asks For Help

I had networked quite a bit after founding my company de Montfort and one major British consultancy took a close interest in what we were doing. P-E International plc had an office on Warwick Road, the main thoroughfare in nearby Solihull, and the managing director of their manufacturing division, David Blore, kept in touch. In September 1994, David invited me to meet him and a colleague from P-E’s head office in Egham, Surrey, by

the name Bill Cox. Bill looked after the Middle East and Asian markets and was heading a multi-industry World Bank funded project in the city of Tianjin, the main entry port to China’s capital city Beijing.

Bill was very open in telling me his group had no experience in the auto sector on which they were contracted for advice and proposed P-E should subcontract that element of the project to de Montfort, albeit under his watchful eye. We agreed terms and I spent some considerable time understanding the terms of reference. These were very broad and included making recommendations on the future development of the Tianjin Automotive Industry Corporation (TAIC) car and light commercial vehicle businesses and their engine and transmission manufacturing plants, all developed from Japanese Daihatsu technology - just like the dreadful Big Yeh’s Yue Tyan business in Taiwan. TAIC’s first product was the Daihatsu Hijet (known locally as Huali) assembly of which commenced in 1984, followed by the Charade (Xiali) in 1986.

There was already much goodwill towards the UK from within TAIC as Mike Gibbs’ MGA Developments of Coventry, one of a number of British design engineering companies kick-started by the DeLorean project, had done an excellent job in refreshing their TJ210 4x4, TAIC’s first vehicle, which had been a Chinese copy of the US Jeep when introduced in 1965. By 1995, TAIC were manufacturing in excess of 80,000 vehicles per annum.

The First Visit to Tianjin

Having taken note of the tasks ahead of us, I pulled in John Bilton, a former product planner with Land Rover who I knew had a good full-vehicle understanding. John had been a close colleague of Andy Young, one of the two marketing men in de Montfort’s team in Indonesia; he had also been, like Andy,

China’s Tianjin Automotive Industry Corporation

John Bilton, formerly of Land Rover

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My Introduction

I made my first visit to Moscow in 1988 as part of a trade mission led by the SMMT in support of my long-term industry friend John Shute, the founder, chairman and chief executive of IAD, the design-engineers based in Worthing, Sussex. John was about to sign a contract to design and engineer a Ford Transit-size commercial van for the

Russians. The USSR was just beginning to open up under Mikhail Gorbachev and John and his sales and marketing director, Mike Goldsmith, had done a magnificent job in pulling off the deal after months of patient promotion and marketing. Mike had been instrumental in winning the business and spent a total of 18 weeks in the USSR in the 10 months up to IAD’s nomination. Their customer was

the Soviet Government and the van was to be built by BAZ (Bryansk Avtomoty Zavody – Bryansk Automotive Works) who up to then had only ever built missile launcher carriers - the ones seen every May Day trundling across Red Square. Most of the negotiations took place with the Soviet government’s import/export departments Avtoprom Import and Avtoprom Export. The total value of the contract was US$34 million, financed through the EBRD (British government export guarantee scheme - later ECGD). In those days, foreigners were only allowed to stay at the state-owned Intourist Hotels under the direction of the official state travel agency of the same name, founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and staffed by KGB officials. Clean but basic was the rule of the house with a middle-aged female housekeeper on each floor, who kept a beady eye on all that went on from a desk near the lift.

The Formalities

After the signing ceremony at the Hotel Intourist in Moscow, which was to become our home for the week, we left by bus to go to the Ministry of Automobile Industry of the USSR at 21/5 Kuznetsky Most in central Moscow. There the party was greeted by a rather stern Deputy Minister Evgeny B Levichev and the far more congenial Dmitry G Yurushkin, the deputy head of the foreign economic relations department of the ministry. We were led into a large hall, which met every preconception of a Soviet-era meeting place, poorly lit and heated - with little, if any, decoration around its bare walls.

Whilst Levichev maintained his dour expression, with around half a dozen colleagues sitting each side of him on a podium in front of us, Yurushkin took charge by heartily welcoming the British delegates, inviting each to make a brief introduction to the company he represented. We all took it in turn with a well-rehearsed two minute recital. Then, a young sales engineer from Lucas Diesel Systems of Acton, London, rose to make a more-than-impressive short verbal presentation of his company’s products and capabilities. While he was speaking, the Russians looked at each other with puzzled expressions on their faces. As

The USSR and CIS Countries

The first clay model of IAD’s Soviet van

An early prototype of IAD’s Soviet van

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Gerda Givert, Bulgaria, Fork Trucks & Buses

Before the break-up of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations, Bulgaria had become one of the supply nations of choice of fork trucks and buses for the whole of the Russian Empire. So successful had the fork truck business become that exports into countries within auspices of the European Commission had proven possible. Whilst we were exhibiting at the Autotech Exhibition at the National Exhibition Centre, near Birmingham, in October 1989, de Montfort was approached by a Bulgarian businesswoman called Gerda Givert. Gerda worked as European marketing director of a company called Gee & Garnham Limited, based in Wood Green, London. Her role in life was to sell anything the industry of Bulgaria could manufacture that was relevant to the automotive industry in its broadest sense. Most of her success to date had been in the field of fork trucks manufactured by the Sofia-based Balkancar with its export effort run from Dunstable in Bedfordshire by Dimitar Georgiev and represented from Sofia by SP Lift Limited, headed by managing director SG Peevsky.

Meeting SG Peevsky

Glasnost and perestroika had impacted Bulgaria, which at that time was attempting to adjust to the idea of a free market. As a result its major industries were suffering from extreme excess capacity as the organised market of the USSR disappeared. SG Peevsky was a regular visitor to the UK, such was the export success of his low cost fork trucks and I was asked to meet him and Dimitar Georgiev in Dunstable. I took Bob Simpson along as he had a bit of a track record in selling to the former communist bloc.

Peevsky had learned of the international nature of our project management activities and - with my Leyland National experience in mind - asked if I was prepared to visit Bulgaria to take a look at the bus manufacturing operation there with a view to making recommendations about its future. I agreed fairly nominal daily rates, recovery of travel and subsistence costs, an upfront payment sufficient to cover the expenses of Bob and me and a bit more, and made plans to visit Bulgaria’s capital city Sofia.

Autobus Manufacturing Company - Chavdar

Bob and I flew from Heathrow to Sofia on 19 March 1990. We were immediately impressed by the beauty of the historic city, especially its ancient Saint Sofia Church and took the opportunity to use a little of the time we had available for a short tour of the sights.

The following morning we were collected from our hotel by Peevsky who drove us 45 kilometers in his car into the hills west of Sofia to the city of Botevgrad. There we were taken to a huge factory - Autobus Manufacturing Company (AMC) - the home of the Chavdar bus operation. Founded by Racho Dzhambov in 1924, the business that would later become Chavdar produced around 200 buses between 1927 and 1947 on chassis from Ford Motor Company, Mercedes-Benz and Dodge. In 1948 the company was nationalised and its products acquired the brand name Chavdar in honour of the 16th

Eastern Europe

Barrie Wills with an official tour guide in Sofia

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Autotech

The event organisers of the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) near Birmingham were constantly looking for new themes to attract exhibitors and punters alike. By 1987, the biennial British Motor Show had become a regular feature there since its relocation from Earls Court in 1978, despite the noise from the London lobby and in part due to the improvements in the standards of hotels, restaurants and other forms of entertainment in England’s Second City. To complement that show, and to fill the gap in alternate years to the motor show, an automotive technology and services exhibition called Autotech was introduced.

Autotech was inspired by the highly respected and hugely successful annual Detroit bonanza, known as the SAE World Congress & Exhibition. This is held annually at the Cobo Hall in Detroit and is organised by the American Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). The automotive world attends that and the NEC, located between Coventry and Birmingham in the heart of the British motor industry, clearly wished to emulate its success. I decided this was a date in the calendar to which de Montfort should commit.

How to Exhibit a Service?

We were a very small part of the second Autotech in November of 1989. We committed to two adjoining basic booths, one of which would be an open display, the other a meeting lounge in which tea or coffee could be served to anyone interested enough in our services to want to talk to us in comfort. Derek Peck, John Haig, Keith Douglas

and Bob Simpson agreed to share stand duties over the four days of the show as did Almac’s Paul McVeigh and John Bowerman.

We developed a series of illustrated display panels spelling out some of the projects undertaken in Malaysia and elsewhere. All very well and beautifully executed on our behalf by the long-serving SAE show display specialist, the Birmingham-based Ivan Moseley. I also engaged the services of a young interior designer, Kathryn (Kate) Fallon, fresh out of the University of Leicester design school and elder daughter of a close friend, Peter Fallon. Kate designed and furnished the lounge area. The combination of Ivan and Kate’s work was very effective and I was confident it would look both attractive and professional.

Above all though, it needed a three-dimensional something-or-other to pull people onto the stand before we bent their ears about project management and consultancy services. My friend from Reliant days, Tom Karen of Ogle Design, had developed a new state-of-the-art crash dummy. Along with a seat from a Lotus Esprit kindly loaned by Lotus’s Colin Spooner, we transformed our display area with an additional, albeit silent exhibitor. He did the trick, Tom Karen was pleased with the exposure, and we were able to convert enough of those attracted by the crash dummy to listen to our well rehearsed set pieces.

Our Second Autotech

We had a similar problem in 1991. Ivan Moseley repeated his previous display success with a new set of display panels, this time highlighting projects including Indonesia, India, and our efforts on behalf of the Lotus Elan M100 production launch, with the agreement of Mike Kimberley

Promoting de Montfort

The lounge area on the first Autotech stand

The display panel at the first Autotech

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You’re the Engineer, Milner!

It was all Giugiaro’s fault. I spent some time with him and Silvano Corvasce at the 1990 Geneva Motor Show, admiring a successor concept car to his aerodynamic Medusa that very nearly became the gull-winged DMC-24 four-seater sedan. I reminded him Medusa had no rear-view mirrors and asked why - fully expecting him to say he planned for rear-view cameras which were at an early stage of development at that time.

As Silvano translated for me, the great man coughed and spluttered a reply in his native Italian. ‘Giugiaro says he just ignored the mirrors because they would have added up to 0.02 extra on his achievement of the lowest ever drag coefficient of 0.263!’ Peter Milner was standing alongside me listening. I turned to Peter and said, ‘you’re the engineer around here - why don’t you do something about that?’ Without saying anything, the thoughtful, brilliant engineer Milner went away to puff on his pipe and do just that.

The Patented Technology

It took Peter about a year to work out how to minimise the aerodynamic inefficiency of exterior rear-view mirrors on cars. With the assistance of his patent agent, Ken Bryer, Peter invested in a patent application for his ‘new art’ of ‘bending light’ through two small prisms, originally made up of tiny glass ‘matchsticks’ stuck together as a slab, mounted in an aerodynamic bulge on the A-pillar

of a car directing the image towards a reflector inside the car, bringing it closer to the driver’s eye. Like all good inventions, simple but brilliant. At first we called it the Milner Mirror but as it developed it became the Serra Mirror, based on the word serra, the Latin for saw-like. The technically-minded Peter, however, dreamt up SERRA as an acronym for ‘Stacked Elemental Refractor and Reflector Array’.

I have already told how we exhibited the technology at the Autotech exhibition in November 1991 leading to the contract through which de Montfort became its exclusive promoter. The exploitation of the patented technology, protected worldwide through further investment, was to dominate much of my time during the ‘90s.

The DTI Smart Award

In 1992, we entered Peter’s patented technology into a British Government enterprise scheme termed the Smart Award. This was designed by the property developer, David (by then Lord) Young, the new head of the Department

Fresnel Lenses and All That.

Peter Milner’s drawing of the ‘Milner Mirror/SERRA’

The letter from the Department of Industry announcing the SMART Award

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Bruce McWilliams, Spen King & Alcan Aluminium

During May 1987 I was delighted to hear from J Bruce McWilliams, who had been John DeLorean’s vice-president marketing and had done so much to hold the DMC Californian operation together during the dark days in the summer of 1982 when DeLorean Motor Cars Limited in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland was in receivership. Prior to DeLorean, Bruce held senior positions with Saab, Mercedes-Benz and Rover in the USA and always had a keen interest in new material technology and sports cars.

He told me he was working with Spen King, the retired director of engineering of Rover, who had been the leader of the Rover 2000/3500 and SD1 projects. During their days together at Rover, Bruce and Spen had pioneered the V8 engine, for which Bruce had procured the rights from the Buick division of GM whilst heading up Rover’s US business. At the time of Bruce’s contact with me, the two were working closely

with British Alcan and Bertone to reproduce the Fiat X1/9 sports car with an aluminium structured body-in-white. Bruce wanted me to undertake a product costing.

Coincidentally, the mid-engined X1/9 had been the car John DeLorean and Bill Collins had used in 1975 for their first DeLorean prototype. Bill had shoehorned in a 2.8 litre Ford V6 to replace the Fiat 4-cylinder, coupled with a five-speed Borg Warner automatic transmission in a transverse rear-engine format, with huge Pirelli P7 tyres at the rear, to test their concept. The tiny Bertone-manufactured model was also the car Malcolm Bricklin had imported into the US, alongside the Pininfarina Azzurra Spider, after Fiat pulled out in 1982.

Spen and I visited British Alcan in Banbury, Oxfordshire, together for me to be fully briefed and I set about developing the product cost. Once this had been submitted to Bruce, I was distracted towards other projects whilst the two veterans went on to oversee the construction by Bertone of a prototype.

TWR & Tom Walkinshaw

In August 1988 the stylist-designer Peter Stevens, whom I had worked with briefly on the Sinclair C5 project and much more closely alongside Colin Spooner on their superb Lotus Elan M100, rang to ask if de Montfort might assist an idea he was promoting. He was talking to Tom Walkinshaw about the Le Mans winning Jaguar XJR-9 car which had been design-engineered by Tony Southgate, styled by Peter and built by Tom’s TWR Racing, based at Kidlington near Oxford. For some months Tom and Peter had been kicking around the idea of turning it into a premium Jaguar road car. The task was to undertake a

Miscellaneous Other Projects

J Bruce McWilliams

Peter Stevens’s renderings of Tom Walkinshaw’s Jaguar XJR-15

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Stuart Nunn & Ashley Roberts

During the 1990s the Department of Trade and Industry of the British Government became impressively if unusually pro-active and outward looking in its support of the UK’s automotive industry, particularly its component and design-engineering sectors. It was fortunate in having two very able divisional leaders within its automotive industry sector. Stuart Nunn headed the international division and Ashley Roberts the technology sector. Both set out to use

their budgets to best effect and sought assistance in meeting their aims. We were fortunate in winning a number of projects, much to the chagrin of one of our competitors in the bidding, Brian Knibb of Knibb, Gormezano & Partners, who even thought the DTI might be guilty of favouritism. Heavens above!

China & Korea

During 1995, we were entrusted with two overseas studies to both inform and identify opportunities for trade or collaborations with the automotive industries of China and Korea. Peter Bennett OBE, formerly Lucas’s man for all things China, was particularly helpful with the former, whilst Geoffrey Nicholls MBE, who assisted de

Montfort’s efforts to promote Peter Milner’s Fresnel lens-related inventions, also helped our Korean efforts.

These studies were completed in the forms of detailed bound reports but, perhaps more importantly, through presentations to packed audiences reminiscent of our Indonesian seminar, at the same former ballroom at Forbes House, then the headquarters of the SMMT in Halkin Street, Mayfair, in London. The major beneficiaries were the UK’s design/engineering consultancies. However, several component manufacturers were to follow in the example of Pilkington, the St Helens-based inventor of the float glass principle, who were in the vanguard of British companies to move into China.

The DTI Automotive Division

Head of the international sector of the DTI automo-tive division - Stuart Nunn

Ashley Roberts, head of the technology sector of the DTI automotive division (right) talks to Barrie Wills

The de Montfort report for the DTI on the Korean automotive sector of industry

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Offending the ‘Chairman’

In 2000 a short-lived collaboration was created, named Chapman Arup, between the consulting engineers, Ove Arup, and the two Colins, Spooner and Cushing, with me as the equal shareholders of Chapman Automotive Limited. It was to achieve very little, not helped by my controversial behaviour. Arup’s somewhat magniloquent chairman of its global consultancy, John

Miles (not the esteemed Lotus engineer and former Grand Prix driver), knew an enormous amount about construction engineering but ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ about automotive. Acting as a sort-of chairman of the collaboration, Miles was arrogantly criticising Colin Spooner’s presentational skills, when I told him to ‘stop behaving like an arse’ole’.

My frankness did not endear me to Miles, not least because he was more used to having fawning staff around him. I needed to relieve myself immediately afterwards and when I returned I found he had stormed off, much to Colin Cushing’s displeasure. It gave me no problem as I was anyway unconvinced the collaboration would work, so different were the cultures of its parties.

Chapman Arup & MG Rover

There was, however, one programme undertaken by Chapman Arup worthy of mention. From a safe distance I had observed the formation of MG Rover after it was created from part of the former Rover Group volume car production business which BMW sold off in 2000. John Towers had been held up as the heroic saviour after the venture capitalist Jon Moulton of Alchemy Partners had pulled out of the ‘sweetheart deal’ engineered by him with BMW through which Moulton intended to turn a severely downsized Longbridge into a new ‘MG’ using Lotus as his template for composite sports car production. Moulton

had withdrawn after hostile reactions from the trade union movement, led by Tony Woodley, the Joint-General Secretary of Unite.

Towers and his former Rover colleague and product planner Nick Stephenson, Stratford-upon-Avon car dealer John Edwards and Edwards’s accountant Peter Beale, known as The Phoenix Four and supported by Woodley, bought the Longbridge operation for a nominal £10, receiving a ‘dowry’ of £500 million from BMW to pay wages and keep the company running in its transition phase. That was pretty well the deal previously negotiated by Moulton. The new Mini, which under the BMW ownership of Rover was intended to be built in the expensively refurbished Car Assembly Building 2 (CAB 2), remained under BMW ownership and was relocated to Cowley. The Rover 75 did the reverse journey up the M40 and M42 to Longbridge to be built alongside the ageing MG F roadster in CAB 1 - with CAB 2 left empty.

I had met Towers on a few occasions and was far from convinced he had any sort of passion for cars. His background in manufacturing at Perkins Engines and Massey Ferguson ahead of joining Rover provided little evidence of him being a petrolhead. Nick Stephenson, however, was exactly the opposite. Despite, like Towers, being trained at the Peterborough diesel engine producer, he was a genuine car enthusiast. He was also well known in the West Midlands for spending much of his spare time working with car-recovery truckers rescuing breakdowns and crashed vehicles from the M40, M42 and M6.

In November 2000, Colin Cushing approached Stephenson to attempt to convince him Moulton’s plan for sports car production wasn’t all bad and maybe Chapman Arup could offer a route into that niche for him to consider a lightweight roadster and coupé. Stephenson was keen to introduce a replacement for the ageing MG F, which would be capable of introduction into the USA, influenced by the extraordinary MG brand awareness we had previously identified using an example of the roadster at the SAE Exhibition and Congress in Detroit. Chapman Arup put in a proposal and we were awarded a contract to carry out a pre-concept design study to recommend

Chapman Arup: MG Rover &Iran Khodro

The founder of the global construction engineering consultancy which bore his name - Ove Arup

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Ratan Tata’s Vision

The chairman of Tata Sons, Ratan Tata was a man who impressed me a lot on the half dozen or so occasions I met him. A Parsi, he had been chairman of his family-controlled company since 1991. He had commenced his career in the Tata group thirty years earlier working on

the shop floor of Tata Steel, shovelling lime-stone and handling the blast furnace. During the 21 years he led Tata Sons, revenues grew over 40 times and profit over 50 times. He was and remains an avid automotive enthusiast.

Concerned by the number of Indian families, all four, five or six members of them, riding around together on motorcycles or scooters, in 2004 he set out to offer them an affordable four-wheeled car. He termed it the 1-lakh car, one lakh being 100,000 rupees (about US$2,000 at the time). Coincidentally, both former Leyland DAF Vans body-in-white engineer and one-time part owner of Jensen Motors, Robin Bowyer, and I had ‘bees in our bonnets’ there was a gap in the Indian

market for a truly affordable vehicle not too dissimilar to a three-wheeled Bajaj motorised-rickshaw but with four wheels. We had serious doubts Tata could successfully produce a true car, knowing the costs incurred in the most complex part of a car’s body - its doors - and sell it for 100,000 rupees. Like the motorised-rickshaw, the vehicle Robin and I had in mind would have no doors.

Along with Robin’s long-time business associate, ex-Ford Derek Smith, we set out to develop a business plan to

attract funding. Robin had targeted an Indian company to which he had been selling his considerable skills in metal forming, the Essar Corporation, a huge organisation in steel, energy, ports and shipping he thought had ambitions to enter automotive.

The Tata Nano

Ratan Tata’s 1-lakh car was engineered and developed in part at the Tata plant in Pune, headed by the Brit Tim Leverton, formerly with JCB, with much input from an engineering team established on the University of Warwick campus on the outskirts of Coventry in UK.

The cost-saving measures adopted in the product profile included a boot/trunk accessible only from inside the car as there was no rear hatch; one windscreen wiper instead of the usual pair; three wheel nuts instead of the usual four; no power steering initially, unnecessary due to its light weight, but added later in upmarket variants; only one exterior rear view door mirror on the base model; radio and CD player an option only; no airbags; no air conditioning on the base model; headrests integrated into front seats; thinner 135/70-R12 space saver spare tyre; no external fuel filler cap - fuel inlet accessed by opening the front hood (a la later DeLoreans!); manual window operation with power alternative only on upmarket variants.

The rear-engined car was designed by Justyn Norek at the I.DE.A Institute in Turin and was an attractive take on a

India’s 1-lakh Car

Ratan Tata with Dr V Samanthan at the launch of the Tata Aria SUV at the Geneva Motor Show of 2004

Robin Bowyer who, like Barrie Wills, recognised the need for an affordable family vehicle in India

Ratan Tata’s ‘1-lakh car’, the Tata Nano

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The Smart Roadster & coupé

One morning there was a smallest-of-column-inches report in the Financial Times that DaimlerChrysler,

the owners of the Smart brand, had announced the discontinuation of the short-lived roadster/coupé range on the basis of poor sales. I made a clipping of it. RLE’s eagle-eyed Darren Gowland had also spotted it and a few days later gave me his clipping,

no doubt expecting me to do something with it. He was behind the action, however, as I had already decided there was an opportunity to bring that low-overhead-cost, affordable-price sports car into life that I had missed at Reliant and tried for so unsuccessfully with Clive Sinclair.

Before Darren’s intervention and without reference to others I decided to test the water. I sent a de Montfort headed letter by fax to Smart’s chief executive, Ulrich Walker, asking if a deal might be possible through which the plant, equipment, tooling and intellectual property of the roadster range could be bought. It was followed immediately by a reply from his personal assistant, Rainer Becker, inviting me to visit him and his boss at the Smart headquarters and engineering centre in Böblingen, a town in Baden-Württemberg, not far from the Mercedes-Benz product development and manufacturing centre.

A Deal in Principle & a Fresh Opportunity

Confident investment could be attracted, I must have appeared convincing to the Germans. Clearly disappointed by the corporate decision to end production after such major investment in product development and wishing to see the tiny sports car reborn, they agreed to give me a short period of exclusivity to get my act together. Within a week or so, a bigger opportunity emerged into which I

Project Kimber MG & AC

The Smart ForOne two-seater city car

The cost-effective 3-man hours final assembly of the Smart roadster

Smart’s chief executive, Ulrich ‘Uli’ Walker

Uli Walker’s able personal assistant, Rainer Becker

Smart roadster Smart roadster coupé

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The Healey Brand Name

In January 2006, only a few months after I had walked away from the brand, came news that the Healey name had been sold to an Anglo-American consortium called HFI, which planned two new Healey models. HFI had purchased one of the most famous names in British motoring from the sisters Cecilia and Kate of Healey Automobile Consultants (HAC), paying ‘a seven-figure consideration’, according to a spokesman for the Healey family. HFI was planning to launch its new Healey 3000 at that year’s London Motor Show. None ever appeared but the Healey sisters’ London lawyer Nick Couchman had been proven right about the brand’s value, if only to someone who has - to date - still not used it. Maybe there is some time left before the brand Healey is totally forgotten other than by classic car enthusiasts.

The Icelandic Banking Crisis

In the wake of the 2008 collapse of the Icelandic Kaupthing Bank, in 2011 financier Robert Tchenguiz, who was ready to invest in our Project Kimber plan for MG, was accused of fraudulent dealings and was arrested in a dawn raid. The investigation ended in 2012 with the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) citing ‘insufficient evidence’ and no indictment was ever brought. In the event, Tchenguiz lost millions of pounds after Kaupthing collapsed and sued the SFO for false imprisonment and damages to his businesses. Due to a total mishandling of the inquiry, the court ordered the SFO to pay 80 per cent of Tchenguiz’s legal expenses in the matter and in 2014, they paid him £1.5m in damages and further unspecified legal expenses in a settlement, hoping that would draw a line under their botched investigation into the collapse of Icelandic banks. Had we succeeded with the acquisition of MG with Tchenguiz’s money perhaps we could have been caught up in the collapse of the Icelandic banking system. Who knows?

The BDO Stoy Hayward Probe into MG Rover

On 10 September 2009 the 850-page report of an official probe into the MG Rover administration undertaken

by Gervase MacGregor, a partner at the accountants BDO Stoy Hayward, and the barrister Guy Newey QC was published. It expressed concern over the ‘plainly excessive’ fee of almost £1.7m paid to the daughter of Nanjing Auto’s founder, Dr Qu Li, for advice she gave The Phoenix Four about potential business partners in China. The report added for some of the time Dr Li was paid by Rover, she was having an affair with Nick Stephenson (which came as no surprise to us of course!).

It also stated The Phoenix Four - John Towers, Peter Beale, Nick Stephenson and John Edwards - awarded themselves ‘unreasonably large’ salary and pensions packages during the five years of their control, after

buying MG Rover from BMW for a nominal £10 in 2000. Towers, who led the buyout, was paid £8.96m, Stephenson £8.98m and Edwards £9.02m. Beale was paid £8.98m over the four years, whilst former chief executive Kevin Howe received £5.71m. The four made a further £3.2m from share schemes and dividends.

BDO’s investigators also found that Beale, the company’s vice-chairman, had misled the parliamentary inquiry into the company’s collapse and had bought ‘evidence eliminator’ software to delete material from his computer hard drive the day after the inquiry into Rover’s downfall was announced. Beale insisted he was only ‘concealing

personal documents’ but the investigators, who accused him of giving ‘untruthful evidence’ about the incident, said he probably deleted material pertaining to the collapse.

They also spotlighted £5.9m of backing given to Edwards Cars, the Stratford-upon-Avon dealership owned by John Edwards and his wife as not

The Aftermath

Kevin Howe MG Rover chief executive

The fourth member of The Phoenix Four - John Edwards

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Indonesia Calls - Again!

By 12 July 2017 I had pretty well finished the first draft of this tome, including the Epilogue which follows. I had just returned from one of my regular weekday early morning visits to the gym in the nearby village of Hampton-in-Arden. I was wondering whether to wash the Jaguar or cut the lawns. After demolishing my bowl of Scott’s Porage Oats, I decided instead to take a look at my emails.

There was one from someone new to me - Paul Bartlett of an organisation called the Australian Indonesia Partnership for Economic Governance (AIPEG), which I thought initially was a ‘Mickey-take’ from a pal. It read: ‘I came across your profile and was wondering if you would be

interested in the attached opportunity (the Auto Industry Specialist in the attached document entitled TOR - Skills Study). It’s for a 22 day assignment working in Jakarta, Indonesia, along with two economists (that we have already recruited). Please let me know if this is of interest by sending me your full CV for further consideration’.

I spent the next two hours writing a curriculum vitae - something I’d not had since 1978! Prominently within it was a reference to the project I’d headed when de Montfort reviewed 88 businesses within the auto sector of Indonesia and made strategic recommendations to the Indonesian Ministry of Industry - and the projects which spawned from them. I forwarded this to Paul. By the following day we were holding an hour-long conversation by the miracle of Skype. Paul advised there were two others to talk to over the next 12 hours and he would get back to me after he had completed his discussions with them. I had a warm feeling inside as he’d spoken to me first.

By my morning of 14 July, Paul had told me by email he would be recommending to his procurement department that they enter into a contract with me on a direct hire basis with a start date of 24 July in Jakarta. The daily rate

was just under two thirds I had been charging for my services in 1991 but such was my enthusiasm to get back to Jakarta, I settled without a fight with the AIPEG people

in Singapore and signed their contract, which seemed to be non-negotiable anyway. Business class flights with Singapore Airlines and accommodation at the four-star Borobudur Hotel - at which I’d made my first stay in the ‘80s - swayed things for me.

Next, Paul asked if I could start work in Jakarta on the following Monday. I checked my passport - expired end May 2017! A day-long visit to the nearest passport office in beautiful downtown Peterborough (surely the most dreadfully boring place on Earth in which to kill time!) ensued and I was ready to go, a week later than planned, starting work on 31 July. The Terms of Reference covered a project to identify skills shortages and training needs across the Indonesian auto sector on behalf of the Indonesian Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs (CMEA).

Postscript

Paul Bartlett of AIPEG

Barrie Wills’s AIPEG business card

The Olympic-size pool in the hotel grounds of the Hotel Borobudur

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45+ Years without John DeLoreanBarrie Wills’s early days with Jaguar; then Kirkstall, making axles for trucks and off-highway vehicles; the Leyland National bus, the first built like a car in a state-of-the-art plant; the UK’s largest specialist vehicle maker Reliant, its Regal, Robin, Kitten, Bond Bug, Anadol, and a Princess’s favourite, the Scimitar GTE; a little more with

DeLorean, the car, the company and the man; Sir Clive Sinclair’s C5, C10 and C15; project managing the Elan M100 for Lotus; cost reduction in Italy for Lamborghini;

the fall of MG Rover; Arup’s infamous ‘Lift & Shift’; The PwC Three’s ‘Chinese Takeaway’; with Land Rover, Rover and Kia in Indonesia; Proton in Malaysia; Yue Loong in Taiwan; Tianjin Auto in China; Iran Khodro in Tehran; Project Kimber’s

MG roadster plans for Longbridge’s survival; the Smart Roadster, firstly as the MG Midget, then the AC Ace in Coventry, Saxony, South Wales, Louisiana and the Texas-Mexican border, before the financial crisis of 2007/8 put paid to it all; and finally, a

comeback at the age of 75 working for Australia back in Indonesia.

Picture: Barrie Wills at the British Motor Museum at Gaydon, Warwickshire, England, with two star vehicles:

the Back to the Future DeLorean and Del Trotter’s Reliant Regal Van from BBC TV’s Only Fools & Horses


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