The Small-Car Revolution

Rootes Motors opened a new car factory at Linwood in Renfrewshire in May 1963 and announced the Hillman Imp in the same week. Both were presented as good news for Scotland, and both were the visible end of a bargain struck three years earlier: a Coventry company that wanted to expand in Coventry had been told it could expand in a development district or not at all.

The car deserved better than the plant it was born in. The Imp carried its engine behind the rear axle — an 875cc overhead-camshaft four with block and head both cast in aluminium, developed from Coventry Climax’s FWMA racing unit and detuned to 39bhp for school runs and shopping. It had independent suspension on all four wheels, synchromesh on all four gears, an opening rear window and a folding rear seat. The basic saloon cost £508 1s 3d including purchase tax and the de luxe £532 4s 7d, which the Illustrated London News on 1 June 1963 placed some £60 above a Mini and £6 below a Ford Anglia.

The Factory Nobody Chose

The siting was not Rootes’ decision. Under the industrial development certificate regime, a factory extension beyond 5,000 square feet needed the Board of Trade’s blessing before it could even seek planning permission, and Rootes had been refused at Ryton. What Whitehall offered instead was a greenfield site outside Paisley, next to a Pressed Steel body plant, with grants attached. It was the same policy that put BMC’s tractor works at Bathgate and Vauxhall’s new assembly hall at Ellesmere Port. Judged on employment it worked: Rootes expected more than 5,000 people to be directly engaged on Imp production at Linwood, with thousands more in supply and services, and a town of between 10,000 and 15,000 people was planned around the works, much of it Glasgow overspill.

Judged as manufacturing it was harder to defend. Scotland had almost no motor component industry: six firms were supplying Linwood before Rootes held a suppliers’ exhibition, about sixty a year later. The engine was worse. Cylinder blocks were die-cast at Linwood, sent to Coventry to be machined and assembled, then carried back to Renfrewshire to be fitted to the cars.

If Rootes cannot sell 150,000 Imps a year, as they have planned, we shall eat our editorial hat.

The Motor kept its hat. The Imp had been signed off for production early, partly so that a factory about to be opened with ceremony would not stand idle, and the consequences turned up in customers’ hands rather than on the proving ground: water pumps, overheating, water leaks, the pneumatic throttle linkage and the automatic choke. That last one reads oddly now.

The automatic choke worked perfectly well during my trial and while I viewed such things with suspicion years ago, they are now of course quite commonplace on both American and German cars and found to be trouble free.

By the time the trade knew better the reputation had set, the dealer network was not equipped to deal with it, and Linwood’s industrial relations were too poor for fixes to be pushed through the line quickly. Running changes were drip-fed instead. A small car earns nothing on the second sale it fails to make.

Output Against Target

More than 65,000 Imps left Linwood in the first twelve months and the line was running at about 2,300 cars a week by May 1964. Cumulative production reached 252,510 by 1 July 1966 — more than half of everything the plant would ever build — by which time weekly output had dropped to roughly 1,600. Total production of Imps and their derivatives, from the Singer Chamois to the Sunbeam Stiletto, finished at 440,032 when the last car was built in 1976. The 150,000-a-year figure was not approached in any single year.

1963 33,000 (est.)

1964 50,142 (est.)

1965 42,663

1966 38,900

1967 40,850

1968 35,295

The 1963 and 1964 figures are estimates in the source. UK sales only; roughly a third to a half of Linwood’s output went for export.

Source: The Imp Site, from Rootes figures published in Impressions, 1987

The reckoning came fast. At five past one in the morning of 17 November 1964, eighteen months after the launch, the Commons debated Linwood’s future. The plant was on a four-day week, management wanted 300 to 400 redundancies in exchange for restoring the fifth day, and 1,800 men at the neighbouring Pressed Steel works were also on short time. Paisley’s employment exchange had 730 unemployed men on its books; Greenock’s had 1,411.

…the project on which the whole complex was geared has reached nothing near the original target on which the existing labour force was based.

The member for Renfrew East, Betty Harvie Anderson, put the counter-case, and it was a good one: the Imp was already a 76 per cent Scottish product by value, Triplex was bringing a factory north, and the skilled men would be impossible to replace if they went. Both positions were correct at once. That is what made Linwood insoluble rather than merely difficult.

What The Mini Really Cost

BMC had a better 1963. Mini output had passed 200,000 cars a year in 1962 and stayed there for the next fifteen years, and 1963 brought the Mini Cooper S, with a 1071cc engine, 70bhp and £695 on the screen — the car that went on to take the Monte Carlo Rally three times. Whether BMC made money on any of it is still contested. Ford’s senior product planner Terry Beckett had a Mini taken apart to the last nut and bolt at the company’s product planning headquarters at Aveley in Essex, put the build cost at around £539 — close to the de luxe list price — and concluded that BMC was losing £30 on every one. It is worth being precise about what that figure is: a rival’s estimate of BMC’s costs, made by a man who went on to chair Ford of Britain and run the CBI, and not a line from BMC’s accounts. Ford’s number has been repeated for sixty years, usually without the caveat.

Model	Engine	UK price, 1963	In June 2026 money
Hillman Imp	875cc aluminium OHC	£508 1s 3d	about £15,500
Hillman Imp de luxe	875cc aluminium OHC	£532 4s 7d	about £16,200
Vauxhall Viva HA Standard	1057cc all-iron OHV	£527 7s	about £16,000
Ford Cortina 1200	1198cc OHV	£573	about £17,400
Mini Cooper S	1071cc OHV	£695	about £21,100

Source: Launch prices: Illustrated London News, 1963; RAC; Lancaster Insurance; National Motor Museum. Conversion: ONS Retail Prices Index, June 2026

The field the Imp had to sell against was crowded and cheap. Ford’s Cortina had appeared at Dagenham on 21 September 1962 at £573 for the 1200 saloon, and went on to sell 4.3 million cars over twenty years. Vauxhall’s Viva HA arrived in 1963 with a 1057cc all-iron pushrod four at £527 7s for the Standard, aimed at buyers who thought BMC’s front-wheel-drive 1100 too clever, the Anglia 105E too flamboyant and the Triumph Herald too dear. The Viva is often remembered as an Ellesmere Port car. It was not, at first: the first one left the new Cheshire plant on 1 June 1964, Luton having built every one before that.

The scale of what all this was feeding is easy to lose. The Ministry of Transport told the Lords in July 1964 that 10.9 million road motor vehicles were licensed in Great Britain in 1963, against 3.1 million in 1938. The Department for Transport’s figure for the end of 2025 is 40.9 million, of which 33.4 million are cars. The small-car boom was the moment when mass motoring in Britain stopped being an aspiration and became a queue.

Rootes did not outlive its factory. In January 1967 the Minister of Technology, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, told the Commons that Rootes had averaged a 0.3 per cent return on net capital employed over five years, had lost £3 million in the year to 31 July 1966, and was insolvent. Chrysler took control. The Imp was eventually turned into a reliable car that handled and performed well; by then the market had made up its mind. Linwood closed in 1981.

Britain’s cheapest new cars are thinning out again, and the reasons are different: emissions engineering and battery cost sit badly on a small margin. The shape is familiar, though. Small cars remain the hardest thing in the industry to make money on, and the least forgiving place to put a factory somebody else has chosen for you. Linwood cast its cylinder blocks in Renfrewshire, machined them in Coventry and carried them back to Renfrewshire to be fitted. That, not the rear engine, is what went wrong.