ALLEGRO AT 50 AND GOLF MKII AT 40
The small family car became a mainstay on our roads in the 1960s and has since passed through several iterations, two of which are celebrating big anniversaries this year!
These days, the small family car is the ubiquitous compact SUV. A slightly raised-up blob of convenience that’ll haul children and their accoutrements, beleaguered parents, maybe a pet too. The small family car is the motoring crutch to the modern mobile family.
And that’s not something new, but if you wind the clock back, this now-familiar class of car looked vastly different to whatever bland-though-benign blisters clutter carparks and roads today.
Fifty years ago, Austin launched the Allegro, a compact four-door saloon aimed at the family type – a decisive shift from the typical three-box design that buyers had enjoyed prior.
The Austin was deprived of the hatchback which enabled its Maxi relation to appeal to a broader audience, which in 1973 already put it on the back foot.
Then, a decade down the line, Volkswagen arrived with the second-generation Golf. The few flaws that Wolfsburg had found in the MkI were reconciled and the motoring face of the 1980s was redefined.
The Golf came into a world vastly different to that of the Allegro. A market that was beginning to see that reliability didn’t necessarily come with an inflated price tag, one that wanted practicality with a few mod cons.
BL’s inward-looking design process led to the Allegro while Volkswagen’s global observations resulted in a very different product with different sales outcomes.
THE NAISSANCE OF THE ALLEGRO
British Leyland needed a replacement for its popular ADO16 models by the early 1970s. The 1100 and 1300 had shifted in immense volumes – 2.1 million in its 11-year production span found homes.
It was a high bar to cross but by 1968 the market’s demand for small practical cars had shifted from a scaled-down saloon to a different car entirely.
BL knew this and fitted the Austin Maxi with a hatchback, a feature that was spreading like wildfire in Europe after its introduction on cars like the Renault 4 and the later 16.
But, not wanting to tread on their own toes, they eschewed the idea of fitting the Allegro with a hatch and instead opted for the more familiar two-box saloon design.
In 1968, ADO67 was conceived as a series of sketches by the late Harris Mann. British Leyland had waited until its Marina project had made it to the advanced engineering phase before starting work on the 1100 and 1300’s successor.
Previously it had been ADO22, a simple re-bodying project, but that was quickly killed off as BL fought to produce a worthy competitor to Ford’s Cortina. The priority for the bods at Longbridge was cornering the family car market with its clean-sheet ADO67.
Mann’
