Cost of a new Moggie if made today?

[Chris Edgar]

Modern cars come with a vast array of of very highly technical gadgets, gizmos & so called refinements .... not all of which are actually necessary but probably give the purchaser a "feel good" experience.
Add to that the degree of comfort & opulence of modern cars compared with a Morris Minor. (I recently borrowed a friend's Lexus. Very nice but it was a bit like driving a ball of fast cotton wool.)

All of this stuff costs money for design, development & manufacture. I would guess quite a lot of money.

I just wonder what Minors would cost today if they were rolling off a production line employing modern methods .....

Anyone like to speculate on this?

Chris

[chrisryder]

they'd be priced according to the market, rather than what they cost to make. so i'd imagine, based on their specification, they'd be, as you say, at the cheap end of the new car market. kia picanto territory. So something like £6995?

Of course, that doesn't take into account their obvious desirability!

[bmcecosse]

They would be made in India -or China.....for buttons ! But as above -sold according to the market.

[robedney]

I'm wondering if anyone has thought of bringing them back -- like the Mini. Of course they'd be terribly spoiled with all the modern refinements, but people do seem to adore the styling.

[chrisryder]

if they brought them back into production, we'd all be stuck with telling people that we drive 'the old morris minor' not just 'a morris minor'.

[bmcecosse]

There were suggestions for a Morris Minor 2000 at the Millenium - could have been based on the Rover 25 floor pan quite easily. Obviously - nothing came of it......

[mike.perry]

What you would get is a bloated overweight carricature of the real thing which would have to be completely redesigned to comply with the thousands of safety regulations

[dalgrae]

Living in Bristol I often pick up my spares from The Morris Minor Centre (Charles Ware) to get to the spares department you have to walk through the workshop which has at least 4 off convertables & usually a mix of travellers / saloons under build with all the add ons possible they seem to be advertised at £15k ish on the web site I know they spend a lot of time on the rebuild so maybe the new/rebuild price might be similar who knows

[Chris Edgar]

I think that if they were produced in volume the cost of each car would be very low by today's standards.

I believe the "Nano", produced by Tata in India is less than £2500...very basic, no power steering or electric windows etc.

[PGH]

I guess that there are so many ways at looking at this but , as suggested above, the price would be based on fact that it was a basic car in it's time so it would be at the cheaper end of current car prices.
Not sure what the minor sold for in 1972 but I'll take a stab at a round £500. If you were willing to pay this in 1972, based on average earnings, you would be prepared to pay £8700 now. (Based on RPI it would be £5150). Probably the likely selling price would be somewhere between the two. Of course, over the years many changes would have to have been made to accommodate legislation changes so we probably would not recognise the car in 2012.
In real terms the cost of cars have reduced substantially over the years. I have run the same model of car for the last 15 years owning three cars in that time. The basic cost of the car has not changed much in that time.

[autolycus]

Mike has hit the nail on the head: the EU simply wouldn't allow anything like the Minor to get near a road.

Regulations for type approval are so strict, on so many counts, that modern car design is very highly constrained. How would you meet all the crashworthiness requirements? Where would you absorb all the collision energy? Picture a Minor steering wheel with an airbag. What about all those pointy bits that spear pedestrians and passengers alike? Or single circuit brakes? Or unprotected wiring and fuel system? Then there are emissions. If you could get emissions anywhere remotely close to modern requirements with an SU carb, and a Lucas distributor (with or without electronic bits), we'd all be getting 70 or 80 mpg from our A-series engines.

I wonder what the road tax on a Minor would be if they taxed them on emissions, like modern cars?

The Minor design was great in its day, and they're still fine as special occasion cars*, but Joe Public, or Joe plc's Fleet Manager, isn't going to want an unsafe, rust-prone car, with neither bells nor whistles, that costs £1000 more in fuel every year than a little eurobox with better performance. Even if the EU let him.

* or daily driver for a tiny masochistic minority of enthusiasts.

Kevin

[MarkyB]

I'd look at the difference between the "new" beetle and the Golf which supplies the underpinnings, same thing with the new Mini and fiat 500.
This should equate to the premium you would pay to own something with at least the appearance of character.

[chrisd87]

I wonder how labour-intensive the Minor would be to build, compared to modern cars? Obviously the Minor is very simple, but if it were very labour-intensive to put together then that'd wipe out any cost saving. Land Rover had this problem with the Defender in the 90s, when according to some accounts they lost money on every one sold, as despite being an incredibly simple vehicle, it was practically hand-built. Then there's also the question of whether many people would buy one - beyond a relatively small band of us enthusiasts, most people would probably just see it as a slow, noisy, rust-prone and not very safe car, and would therefore rather buy something else. This limited production would probably then see the price escalate, further reducing the appeal.

Even if it were possible to produce all of the necessary parts, there'd be the obvious problem of all the mountains of EU regulations - occupant safety, pedestrian safety, 'safety assist' technologies, and emissions.

Personally I'd like to see new Minor bodyshells available to enable the reshelling of comprehensively rotten cars, but I think any attempt to resurrect the Minor in anything like its original form would be totally unviable.

[AntB]

i think it's an almost impossible question to answer, especially when you take into consideration the quality of some aspects of the MM/S2/ thou'.

crumple zone implications aside, what manufacturer today would invest so much in the way of steel in a new car? or a hybrid chassis/ monocoque as the Minor has? this would be cripplingly expensive, as would the 1mm+ thick steel used in the wings/ doors/ bonnet etc.

unfortunately there's a reason why 'budget' (hyundai/ kia/ whatever) small hatchbacks have stayed at the £5k mark for nearly 10 years and it ain't because they've found special new ways of making them!

edit: as a morris minor was the escort/ anglia/ focus of it's time i think the simple answer is to see what the list price is of one of those, likely the same amount of money spent to make them, just in different ways.

[MarkyB]

I can't see anyone making an exact replica, they wouldn't be allowed to sell them.

[dp]

To make it worthwhile for a manufacturer it'd have to follow the same route as the new Mini, Beetle and Fiat 500 Ie not just a practical runaround but a 'lifestyle choice' with lots the retro-ness laid on thick.

Since the image of the Minor, if any, in the eyes of the public is of the district nurse and vicar, you could fade over some black and white vintage footage of said matron and vicar with with sexy nurse in the turbo cabrio version, wind in hair and the pierced, tattooed vicar unloading drums and saxaphone from his Traveller for the hard, edgy 'tough on the mean streets' market.
Strapline, "Some things never change"

[LouiseM]

But that's exactly the problem. The Minor never had a 'cool' image to start with so a new 'retro' version wouldn't have the same mass market appeal as the Mini, Fiat 500 etc

[faversham999]

I would have to be put on to an existing floorpan ,so you could only have the body shape fitted around that ,with all the safety rules you could still get a similar looking car . A lot less metal front and back would have to be plastic.

[daveyl]

It would be nice Idea (in my view) if BMW used the floorpan/running gear of their baby-beemer '1' series as a platform. Rear wheel drive and smallish. Perfect.

[StaffsMoggie]

Mike has hit the nail on the head: the EU simply wouldn't allow anything like the Minor to get near a road.

Regulations for type approval are so strict, on so many counts, that modern car design is very highly constrained. How would you meet all the crashworthiness requirements? Where would you absorb all the collision energy? Picture a Minor steering wheel with an airbag. What about all those pointy bits that spear pedestrians and passengers alike? Or single circuit brakes? Or unprotected wiring and fuel system? Then there are emissions. If you could get emissions anywhere remotely close to modern requirements with an SU carb, and a Lucas distributor (with or without electronic bits), we'd all be getting 70 or 80 mpg from our A-series engines.

I wonder what the road tax on a Minor would be if they taxed them on emissions, like modern cars?

The Minor design was great in its day, and they're still fine as special occasion cars*, but Joe Public, or Joe plc's Fleet Manager, isn't going to want an unsafe, rust-prone car, with neither bells nor whistles, that costs £1000 more in fuel every year than a little eurobox with better performance. Even if the EU let him.

* or daily driver for a tiny masochistic minority of enthusiasts.

Kevin

That must be the biggest load of utter nonsense I have ever read on here.