> - Classic LBC sightings on the road. Regretably few.
There IS a perfectly good reason for this. After the war (WWII), England's
economic situation was not too healthy, and as a result the government
encouraged companies to export products to earn valuable exchange.
Car companies were "encouraged" (forced ???) to export as many of their cars
as possible, and in fact each car complany was alotted a certain amount
of steel, depending on how many cars were exported. There were certain cars
in the 1950's which were never sold in the home market, and all production
went overseas.
Anyway MG, Triumph, Singer, etc all had to export a vast majority of their
production to the USA (it being the largest market of British cars). The
net result of all this is that there are more British cars here in the US,
than there are in the UK.
I looked up some production figures a couple of months ago, and from what I
remember there were about 100,000 MGA's built, of which 80% came to the US.
That leaves 20,000 for the rest of the world. Assumming that 10,000 MGA's
stayed in the UK, and that by now about 70% of them have rusted away,
that only leaves about 3000 MGA's in the whole of the UK.
How many are there in the US ? at a rough guess I would say 20,000 (mainly
in CA and the Atlantic states - where demand was the highest).
I think that 82% of all MGB's came to the States and similar for the
the Midget and the Big Healeys. Remember also that the climate in the UK
is a lot damper than it is in the US, so rust is a MAJOR factor.
So we (on this side of the pond), should consider ourselves lucky, we have
a much larger selection of cars to choose from.
Gerry
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