Motoring Misfits: Austin 'Minor' van

It's been a while since my last blog, and there's no particular reason, just everyday life getting in the way. Today I want to start a new occasional series looking at a subject that fascinates me: the 'motoring misfit', those odd vehicles that while not necessarily bad just didn't seem to have a place in the market, and my first candidate at first glance appears to be something very common.

Look at the van pictured above. Isn't that a Morris Minor, one of the most popular and beloved vehicles of its era, so how on earth can I claim it to be a motoring misfit? Take another look though and you'll see this is a Minor in disguise - there's a crinkly grille and an Austin badge where you'd expect it to say Morris. How come a Morris Minor van ended up wearing the Austin identity? It isn't a DIY job as you might think but a standard production model, so keep reading to find out why its manufacturer felt the need to create this pointless motoring misfit...



The reason for its existence is actually quite simple, if not entirely logical. You see, throughout the time of BMC and into the early British Leyland era, Austin and Morris maintained completely separate dealer networks that basically competed with each other. That was fine when they had distinctly different ranges, but by the mid-1960s the majority of their cars were just badge-engineered versions of the same thing. Austin Seven or Morris Mini Minor, Austin 1100 or Morris 1100, Austin Cambridge or Morris Oxford, Austin 1800 or Morris 1800, they were all but identical apart from the badges, which seems crazy nowadays.

The A35 was the last unique Austin car-derived van

With the demise of the venerable A35 van in 1968, the Austin dealers needed another small commercial to replace it. Rather than going to the effort and expense of designing a completely new vehicle, BMC took the cheap and easy option of simply rebranding the equivalent Morris van and pickup. These had been around since 1953 so were already 15-year old designs and were actually a year older than the vehicle they were replacing! Although commonly called Minors, only the Morris cars were officially known by that name and the commercial vehicle derivatives were simply the Morris 6cwt and 8cwt, named for their payloads, so the 'new' Austin commercials thus followed suit and became the Austin 6cwt and 8cwt.

Apart from the badges and the trademark crinkly grille, the Austins were completely identical to their Morris bretheren, were built on the same production line and retailed for similar prices. For fleet orders, the choice of Austin or Morris really made no difference beyond any brand loyalty left over from the old days, and for private buyers it was a case of which one had the nearest dealership. There was nothing wrong with them and they actually sold in fairly decent numbers during their short life, but they were more than a bit pointless given that they were just clones of a more established alternative from the same company that remained available alongside them.

We've had a Morris with Austin badges, so here's an Austin with Morris badges 

This bizarre badge-engineering worked the other way too. These Austins were basically a reversal of the precedent set in 1962 when the Austin A60 van and pickup, based on the equally elderly pre-Farina Cambridge, had also become the Morris Half-Ton for the same reason. Production of the Morris Oxford commercials had come to an end and left Morris dealers without an alternative, yet instead of taking the opportunity to combine the two franchises, BMC created a duplicate of an existing product for them to sell. These Morris-badged Austins were longer-lived than their other-way-round counterparts, lasting right up to 1973, yet seem less numerous today.

Both vans and pickups got the Austin treatment

This madness came to an end in the early 1970s as British Leyland finally did what BMC should have done many years before and created a combined Austin-Morris franchise. The practice of badge-engineering largely ceased and the two brands went back to having mostly separate car ranges, although they were now sold through the same showrooms. All the various Minor and A60-based commercials were replaced by the Marina van and pickup, which were only ever available as Morrises, and the Austin name didn't appear again on a commercial vehicle until the Metro van of the eighties.

A genuine Morris. Spot the difference...

Today, these Austin 'Minor' vans and pickups remain a curiosity and most people would probably never even notice them as there are so few differences from their much more numerous Morris equivalents. They are of course welcomed by the Morris Minor Owners' Club and are no more difficult to run, being structurally and mechanically absolutely identical. I suppose this was an early example of the model sharing that is now rife in the commercial vehicle industry, but with one important difference: today's van clones are sold by separate companies rather than competing subsidiaries of the same group.

All parts are interchangeable, hence this Austin with a Morris grille

Commercial vehicles naturally live hard lives and don't survive anywhere near as well as the cars on which they were based. Nonetheless, a few of these Austins remain to serve as a reminder of that era when badge-engineering was rife and BMC took it to absurd and illogical lengths, creating models like this that really didn't need to exist. Practically their entire range was available with multiple badges, but most were built from the start in both Austin and Morris versions. These vans on the other hand started out as just one and only became the other much later in life when they were already outdated, and in the case of the Austin Minors actually replaced a slightly newer design. Next time you see a Morris Minor van or pickup, look a bit closer and you may well find it's actually an Austin.