Norton joins BSA!!.....
It would have been an exciting headline in the 60's...Unfortunately this isn't the 60's and it means Norton has joined BSA (and Royal Enfield) as another Indian owned ex British company (not forgetting British Steel and Jaguar Landrover)....
It seems we are pretty much unable to produce anything ourselves these days....Hell, we can't even pick our own cabbages ...:anguished: ..Ian
email (option): ian@wright52.plus.com
Within living memory, Great Britain was once "the workshop of the world".....so much was made here and exported all over the Globe.....
Nowadays, we make bugger-all and import nearly everything......
Its as though our ex colonies have more pride in what great Britain stood for than we do now, even though we screwed them over something terrible. !
email (option): richardpurkiss@hotmail.com
Oh you, British.
The nation that produced so many great names over the years.
William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill. Boy George.
Yeah but, we also produced Margret Thatcher, Grayson Perry and Keith Lemmon :flushed: Ron
email (option): ronpier@talk21.com
However every car barns insisted os doing everything exactly the same way that hd them all loosing money hand over foot for decades.
But the shinny suits at Rover steadfastly refused to use any engine other than their own , same for Jaguar, same for BMC etc etc. If they could have put aside their petty brand loyalties and consolidated the engine building into one factory making common engines for the entire range then there was a slim chance that economies of scale would start making them profitable and even better is they selected the better engine and dumped some of pig engines that spent more time in the workshop than on the road.
I was reading a history of Bentley and could not believe just how many times the partially assembled cars were shipped from one side of the country to another. The history of Daimler is little better similar with Carbodies, shipping partially assembled vehicles all over the country.
AT least BSA had the right idea , make all the parts at Small Heath & Redditch then ship them to Meriden for assembly on modern efficient production lines regardless of the name on the side of the tank.
However once again, the last ditch thing that may have saved BSA & Triumph from oblivion was scuttled by small minded middle management who decided that the workers would sabotage one brand over another so it got scrapped and 2 of the new lines got shoehorned into the buildings at Small Heath that were always a bottlenecks and very inefficient as the buildings were purpose built for making small arms not motorcycles.
As for Norton itself, from the days of AMC through to the last debarcle there has not been a single person with perhaps the exclusion of Mr Deere ( Dreere ? )who has the feintest idea about making & marketing motorcycles yet most seemed very well versed in scamming people out of money.
It has no future and has not had one since the days of NVT .
I seriously doubt that any Indian would know the name Norton , they were way too expensive to survive in the USA & Australia so I doubt many Indians would have ridden one let alone owned one.
Like most of the "great brands" of the past there is no way it will ever become profitable unless it is just a rebranding of an existing product to cash in on the very few in the UK , EU USA & Oz who still remember what a Norton was and are still functional enough to ride a motorcycle and that market is not big enough to sustain yet another big British styled motorcycle factory.
Like the dregs of the British bike industry in the 70's they will be fighting each other for a small percentage of some one elses customers . Even HD has finally woken up to the fact that they have to make a bike that will appeal to young riders in order to have achance of selling bikes to old riders, a simple fact that British factories totally ignored to their own cost.
However we will not be amused because we will be expecting something like a Commando or Manx and neither will cut the mustard in todays traffic with todays fuels .
email (option): bsansw1@tpg.com.au
The reasons for the failure of British Industry generally, apart from the particular problems of the motorcycle industry, are many and varied and have been debated at length for decades...
There was no single reason for the failure of any of it but an incredibly complex mix of multiple factors coming into play over decades.....
Nevertheless, the fact that the manufacturing base of this country is now nearly non existent is a thing to be regretted and the sale of nearly every British asset to foreign companies is a situation I find hard to stomach, whatever the reasons...Ian
email (option): ian@wright52.plus.com
The new BSA is being desugned and engineered in the UK and will be manufactured in India
A large part of it was our class structure. Chaps like me, straight from Public School made engineering decisions on matters they knew didly squat about. It was very difficult to work your way up. We have the same problem now with our Political class
email (option): jeremy@clogmaker.co.uk
There was no single reason for the failure of any of it but an incredibly complex mix of multiple factors coming into play over decades.....
Nevertheless, the fact that the manufacturing base of this country is now nearly non existent is a thing to be regretted and the sale of nearly every British asset to foreign companies is a situation I find hard to stomach, whatever the reasons...Ian
Politicians who are mostly university graduates and if they ever worked in industry it is always in a white collar job consider a "sofisticated & mature economy" to be a service economy.
We have had 3 Prime Ministers say exactly that, which showed they knew as little about economics as they did about running the country.
As late as lat week an economic spokesman for the UK Government was on our TV saying that the Covid- 19 pandemic would have a serious consequence on the UK economy as it would substantially reduce foreign investment in the UK for the forseable future .
So if the UK is dependent upon other peoples money pouring into the country, what chance OZ ?
We have a similar problem with politicians who do not understand the difference between a foreign take over & a foreign investment.
Then there is the problem of consolidated capital which now controls nearly every major business in the Western world.
Which is why most of the current take overs are done by companies from India &China where the people who founded the business are still in control and not a bunch of bankers .
Consolidated Capital rapes & pillages the business that they control to extract the maximum dividend then when there is nothing left pulls out and searches for a new host to suck dry.
Family owned business look for ways to expand the business and not to simply maximumize return on capital.
As for BSA I firmly believe what one of my riding buddies postulated.
The board who again were a consolidated capital board, expected WW III to break out any second whe it would be happy days for BSA once again with massive government contracts for armaments.
BY the time they realised that WW III was not going to happen so they had to rely on the civilian output , it was way too late, the products were outdated, the cash flow was severely restricted so they resorted to "Hero worship" to get them out of the poo, but while Mr Turner was a good stylist and had a profound knowledge of the directions of the motorcycle industry be was a pathetic engineer and massive ego maniac .
If you follow stock markets you see this happen all the time.
A business is failing so the board's solution is to bring in a a "super hero" CEO and the second it is announced the share price skyrockets but 5 years down the track the business is a basket case again.
Weather we like it or not, we are the last major motorcycling generation and our motorcycling days are rapidly coming to an end.
Asia & Africa will probably go through a motorcycling phase but this will be a commuter bike phase, not a super bike one , as a step towards 4 wheeled transport as the population approached middle class.
The number of people getting new motorcycle licenses down here has been reducing every year for the past 20 years and will continue to do so .
Of all of the majors, only HD down here is doing any marketing to the non motorcyclists and HD is on the skids big time having takes President Trump at his word and returned a lot of the previously ofshored manufacturing back to the USA only to find the promised assistance did not materialize.
So I can not see any future in any attempt to relaunch British names from the glory days of British motorcycles.
This is of course provided that they do not decide to launch BSA & Norton branded electric assisted push bikes which the current youth seem to have taken a likeness to .
email (option): bsansw1@tpg.com.au
['Mr Turner was a good stylist and had a profound knowledge of the directions of the motorcycle industry but he was a pathetic engineer and massive ego maniac . ']...
Well we certainly agree about Edward Turner..I've read plenty of accounts that affirm that.. I'm also afraid your assessment of the future prospects of the motorcycle industry (and its following) are probably basically correct as well...
Enjoy it while it lasts....One bright spot is that right at the end, when all the investors have gone and most of the younger generation turn out not to be interested, bikes will be really cheap and I'll get the pick of the models I can't afford anymore...:laughing: ....Hopefully I won't be too cranky and will still be here to enjoy it...Ian
email (option): ian@wright52.plus.com