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Comment by porknubbins | Hacker News Reader

Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reason. I don’t know it unions were the whole story, as really only Germany or Germanic countries have ever had great quality control for cars in Europe, but there must be some systemic reason.

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There are lots of manufacturers in the UK right now who have fantastic quality. Rolls Royce aero engines. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Airbus wings and landing gear. Lots of cars as well. Medical devices. The list is endless.

The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year.

https://www.makeuk.org/insights/reports/uk-manufacturing-fac...

That's all true. But the list could have been a lot longer. The UK had a lot more industry than it does today and there definitely were quality issues. At the same time: competition that wasn't even on the horizon back then (for instance: Korea) became a major factor and at some point you need the scale. For the UK driving on the left side of the road made that all of their exports had to be made for domestic or foreign use, foreign manufacturers often chose to simply not field a model in the UK, so that was an extra cost.

It's funny, I've a complete love/hate relationship with cars from the UK. I love them, love the looks, love to drive them. But I hate the unreliability that was part and parcel of it and I hated even more to buy a spare part and then to find out that it subtly didn't fit because of some defect in body geometry with as a result that it looked like crap (fenders... subframes... don't get me started on that one, I can bore you to death about the kind of crap they sold).

The Metro could have been what the 206 was for Peugeot, instead they made fairly nice design in the most cheap and unsafe way possible. In comparison the 206 was a little tank.

This is an under-appreciated point: the UK manufacturing sector is highly successful, but only where it doesn't employ large armies of workers, and is instead either automated or very small volume/large margin.

News coverage of this is, as expected, completely dire.

> Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country

There's a culture in industries. As you said, look at Germany. Look at the culture in SV - it would be hard to open a development business of any size that ran completely against the SV engineering culture.

> the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to

That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history. :)

> I don’t know it unions were the whole story

Looking at the two countries with the best reputations for quality, a lack of union and labor projection may be the problem: Germany has very strong unions; in many cases, they get a seat on the board of directors. Japan treats its labor very well - often lifetime jobs, famously Toyota empowers assembly line workers to stop the entire line themselves - and has low labor market liquidity (but my info on Japan could be out of date).

"That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history".

What absolute rubbish.

Rolls Royce is one of the leading aero engine makers today. They make the engines for the 787 and the A350, and many other planes.

TBF, the industrial revolution started 250 years ago and the Merlin ceased production 75 years ago and has almost literally nothing in common with the Trent - not design, metallurgy, thermodynamic cycle, fuel...

Calling the referenced achievements ancient history isn't an unreasonable take, despite current successes.

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