British Saloon Cars of the 1960s

Title: British Saloon Cars Of The Early Sixties

Author: Michael Allen

Format: Hardcover Book, No. Pages: 190

Publisher: Haynes Publishing, ISBN: 1856482545, Year: 1989

During the early post-war period, the British motor manufacturers had played a leading role in the nation's recovery from the effects of the six years conflict, with much of the passenger car production throughout the 1950s going to overseas markets, and in so doing establishing places in Britain such as Coventry, Cowley, Dagenham and Luton as major exporting centres.

Inexpensive family saloons were the mainstay, with many all-new post-war models in this category soon appearing under the very familiar names of Austin, Ford, Hillman, Morris, Standard, and Vauxhall, and whose products in the family-car classes I dealt with in British Family Cars of the Fifties, the preceding volume to this book. Meeting so well as they did the demands of worldwide markets, these British cars were profitable to such an extent that considerable expansion in respect of new manufacturing facilities was able to take place in Britain throughout the 1950s, with the result that each of the makers aiming at the mass-market was able to widen their range of products quite considerably during the early part of the following decade.

Vauxhall introduced their first small model, the Viva, to complete a very effective small, medium (Victor), and large (Velox) series of cars in the under-£1000 bracket; whilst Ford set about plugging the very noticeable gap which hitherto existed between their small-car offerings like the Anglia, and the very much larger Consul/Zephyr models. The B.M.C.'s attempt at offering something for everyone included running the new Mini and 1100 series of small front wheel drive models alongside the company's established conventional small cars, whilst also now extending their badge-engineering policy to cover almost all of their basic range.....