Yuri,
You got to get this right, British engineers are very inventive, good at problem solving and easily bored, the Germans have 10,000 engineers turning each BMW into a slightly better BMW, same in other firms and over in Japan, in the UK some mad boffin with a slide rule designs the thing and it's perfect.
The British management come along and put the project under a an accountant
The accountant gets a value engineer
The value engineer makes the same thing cheaper
The shareholders are happy
The result is junk, British firm eventually goes bust because no one buys the stuff, meanwhile British firms want 20% profit on turnover, the French about 3% and the Germans sell everything at a loss except a few things sold to Treasure Island (UK to those who live here)
British engineer gets a job designing Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac and just about everything else. Accountant retires with pension, the shareholders wonder after years of dividends where the money went all of a sudden.
That leaves the British craftsman, he has no time for drawing boards, never heard of CAD/CAM, thinks standardisation is a negation of his craft, he gets a job with firms like Morgan and everything works as long as it is fitted by hand.
And another thing, we invented mass production of road vehicles from 1784 when the post office bought standard coaches for the royal mail service which is why those quaint christmas cards look the same, but we got bored with it and 100 yrs later along comes Henry Ford, very typical and the colonials think they invented mass production.
Ps if BMW had been a Brit co it would have gone bust in 1959!
