"destruction Testing - of British made cars (1950s)
 

you know how it is - you go onto YouTube for one thing then something totally unconnected follows.

My Dad owned a garage in the '50s and '60s selling BMC cars and trucks, but he always drove a Jaguar and I drove Fords (Anglia, 2 x Cortinas, 2 x Escorts, a Mondeo, 3 x Scorpios etc).

He always told me to not retain a car with more than 50,000 miles on the clock as the engine/gearbox would be shot. I often did, and they often were!

Can you imagine regarding a 50,000 mile engine being worn out now!

Enjoy this :

Interesting that test drivers wore coat and tie.

My wife had a '66 Mustang when we started dating. 6 cyl automatic.

It had around 90,000 miles on it and would use a quart of oil to go 100 miles.

It was still cool, we should have kept it.

Hey, what's the deal? The cars are LEFT hand drive and they are driving on the right side of the road! British cars on British test tracks no less!

Fog

I'm happy to have the then and now difference. It was pretty neat stuff for my first real post-college job in a company that was at cutting edge of making better parts. They had patents on fixtures and QC so made more truly round cylinders and parts to spec than others could. They made parts for the then Corvette engines, John Deere and hydraulic cylinders and rams. In a short time you saw rows of traditional lathes and grinding move to operators who watched output quality and did setup instead of all the traditional machining steps.

All of a sudden old ways seemed stupid. Instead of inspecting x % of the previous day's work they knew how round parts were while they were being made. Everything stopped if something was wrong. The old way was scrap what you already made and hope what was shipped would not haunt you.

We got much better products but this was 1980s rust belt so it was also the start of seeing a lot of workers no longer having skill the whole world would pay a living wage for. Even then low skill jobs in the plant started to disappear.

And every part made by Lucas!

One of my friends had this story. He had an old Mini-Cooper, and while driving back home on a summer day (a Sunday, when back in the day, everything was closed), his fuel pump died. looking under the hood, he noticed that the fuel pump and the windshield wiper fluid pump were identical. After switching the hoses, he spritzed some gas into the carburetor every quarter mile or so and made it home!

Having had a succession of Austin A-40’s, Hillman Minx’s and a Rover, hats of to those drivers, anything over a very moderate speed was terrifying, and those bias ply tires in the rain——!
Thanks for posting !

Yes they are LHD - probably Export models homologated for German use. We had no roads like that in the '50s. The autobahns in Germany were built by Hitler.

It was an interesting video but steady state driving at a mile a minute puts less wear and tear on an engine than normal city driving especially in the days before the advent of computer controlled engines.