British Cars

British automobile manufacturers are responsible for some of the most prestigious car brands on the planet, from Rolls-Royce and Jaguar to Lotus and McLaren. The British car industry got its start in 1891 on the strength of a German engine designed by Gottlieb Daimler, whose name is probably best known to most of us for its association with Mercedes Benz. By 1901, Wolseley Motors Limited had begun manufacturing cars in Birmingham, England. Available with 5- or 10-horsepower engines, the cars sold well—1,500 vehicles by 1906—making Wolseley the largest British car manufacturer at the dawn of the 20th century. Wolseley competitors included Sunbeam (1901), Rover (1904), Rolls-Royce (1904) and Vauxhall (1903), whose first automobile featured a tiller instead of a wheel for steering. Wolseley Motors owed its early success to its first manager, Herbert Austin, who went on to found his own car-manufacturing business in 1905; more than a decade after his death in 1941, his name would be posthumously affixed to the Austin-Healey. By almost any measure, Austin had a successful career in the motorcar industry, but he always considered Wolseley the one that got away. That's because in 1927, Austin would be outbid for the company where he got his start by William Morris, who is associated with such classic British motorcars as the MG, the Morris Minor, and, after Morris' death, the Morris Mini-Minor, known as the Mini for short. During the 1920s, interwar prosperity spurred many of Britain's most renowned automobile manufacturers to new heights of greatness. For example, in 1922, Rolls-Royce augmented its 40- and 50-horsepower Silver Ghosts with a smaller vehicle—for Rolls-Royce, anyway—called the Twenty, so named for the number of horse under the hood. A few years later, in 1925, the firm replaced its Silver Ghost line with the first of many Phantoms, which was manufactured in England as well as the United States. Another manufacturer, Bentley (founded in 1919), excelled on the track, winning the arduous 24 Hours at Le Mans race in 1925, 1927, 1928, 1929, and 1930. During the Great Depression, though, Bentley couldn't make ends meet and its assets were gobbled up in 1931 by Rolls-Royce. More successful was Jaguar, which launched in 1935, almost in defiance of the decade's financial realities. In 1948 after World War II, Rover introduced its Land Rover, which was built on a U.S. Jeep chassis. In the 1950s, British automobiles began to shrink, beginning with the Lotus in 1952. Its first car, the Mark VI, was a classic roadster, as was the Lotus Seven that followed it in 1957. Only somewhat larger was the Morris Mini-Minor of 1959 and the Austin and Morris Mini Coopers of 1961. In a class by themselves were the Jaguar E-Type cars, particularly the coupe version of the XK-E, also from 1961. For a country that had given the world behemoths like the Rolls-Royce Phantom and Bentley R Type saloon, this was a radical reappraisal of the phrase "size matters."