AUSTRALIA's OWN CAR Part 3 HISTORY
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HISTORY AUSTRALIA’S OWN CAR Part 3 W wick Budd When GMH launched the new Australian built Holden in 1948, it was hailed as Australia’s own car. It was not as Australian as Laurence Hartnett’s original proposal, but it had the endorsement of the Australian government and the magic of the Holden name. The order books began to fill. After his dismissal as the managing director of GMH in 1946, Hartnett decided to remain in Australia and build his own car. This was never going to be an easy task going up against the resources of a global giant such as GMC. In October 1949, 400,000 shares were issued for the new Hartnett Motor Company. The car to be produced was based on the French Groggier light car with a high proportion of local content. It was a small car using lightweight components, front wheel drive and powered by a flat twin cylinder engine of 600cc. For Hartnett, the response must have been disappointing. The available figures may differ, but it appears that only approximately half the shares had been subscribed by April 1951 and the total number of cars produced over the following years was no more than 135. The company was wound up in 1955. It is difficult to confirm how many cars may have been ordered but the company was unable to build enough to satisfy the demand. In May 1950, Commonwealth Engineering of Sydney was contracted to supply 2000 sets of body panels for the Hartnett, but a year later none had been delivered. The completed cars had to be fabricated by hand which added to the cost of each car and caused further delays. In the litigation that followed, it was found that Commonwealth Engineering had failed to honour the contract and was forced to pay compensation. At the time, the company was under the control of the Commonwealth after it ran into financial trouble in WW2 with outstanding government orders in hand. However, the compensation was too late for the Hartnett Motor Company and the Commonwealth Government sold its shareholding in the engineering company in June 1957. Laurence Hartnett was not a man to give up easily. In 1957 he negotiated a joint venture with Carl Borgward who owned the Lloyd factory in Bremen, Germany. The following year another small car was offered to the Australian public and some 3000 cars were assembled in their factory in Brisbane. Known as the Lloyd- Hartnett, it was similar to the earlier Hartnett and also featured front wheel drive and was powered by a 2 cylinder, overhead camshaft motor of 600cc. There was still a healthy market for small economical cars and even our own Standard Motor Products, (later AMI), toyed with the idea of importing DKW cars from Germany. Don’t forget the famous Goggomobile which weighed in with a tiny 300cc motor. Unfortunately, the Lloyd-Hartnett also failed when the parent company, Borgward, was made bankrupt in 1961. In 1960 Hartnett became Australia’s first large scale importer of Japanese vehicles when he formed a partnership with Nissan. He hoped that this would lead to a jointly owned manufacturing plant, similar to the successful AMI – Toyota deal, which saw Toyotas assembled at the Port Melbourne factory, three years later. The Nissan partnership dissolved in 1966. Success or failure? Laurence Hartnett has been credited by many motoring writers as the “Father of the Holden”. His attempt to develop an all-Australian car, the Hartnett, has been trivialised by some who claimed that he was trying to sell Australians the wrong sort of car that we just did not need or more importantly did not want to buy. A bad judgement decision by Hartnett because they believe that Australians really wanted a traditional, conservative family car like the Holden. The parenting claim does not stand up well to scrutiny. Hartnett wanted GMC to build a car which was designed and produced in Australia, and he presented this proposal to the board in New York. The GM Chairman at the time, Alfred Sloan, was not impressed with the idea of working with that “goddam socialist March 2021 The Triumphant Standard 11 setup’ in Australia. Sloan was referring to the Curtin/Chifley Labor governments which had brought Australia safely through WW2. When his plan was so forcefully rejected and he was presented with a small foreign design to rework for local conditions, I believe Hartnett would not have been happy to be known as the baby Holden’s father. This idea may have some appeal if you believe in the official Holden story, but I think that Hartnett showed his disappointment when he was dismissed from his MD role at GMH, and resigned from the parent company rather than work in the US. He didn’t attend the birth of his baby Holden either. The claim that Hartnett made a bad business decision can also be called in to question. His successful track record over many years with GMC would have told him that to produce another family sedan like the first Holden would have been disastrous. GMH could simply undercut the new Hartnett family sedan and watch it wither away in the marketplace. GMs weakness was the small car market where they had nothing to offer. To say that Australians would never buy a small economy car is ridiculous, especially if the price is right and fuel is expensive. Remember the Mini? The styling of the first Hartnett may also seem primitive by the standards of today, but I think it is fair to say that it was typical of a 1950s economy car. People didn’t buy Volkswagens for their glamourous bodywork, though the shape of the peoples car is now iconic. The success or failure of the new car was to some degree outside the control of even a well- connected entrepreneur such as Laurence Hartnell. 12 March 2021 The Triumphant Standard.