Big, Bad Barge: Austin 3-litre
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he Austin 3-litre was a disaster. There is no other way of putting it. The thinking and ideology behind the creation of the 3-litre was straightforward enough – there had been a continuing need for BMC to have a representative in the 3-litre class. This was a marketing requirement for the company and in the UK, this market was split four ways between the Austin Westminster (and its badge engineered derivatives), the Vauxhall Cresta, Ford Executive and Humber Super Snipe. It was quite simply, a totally unremarkable bunch of cars built in order to satisfy a demand.

BMC's offerings in the class were the C-series engined Austin A110 Westminster, the Wolseley 6/110 and the “interesting” Vanden Plas 4-litre R. Basically, they were 3-litre versions of the Farina saloons and as they were based on a saloon that had never covered itself in glory, it can be taken as read that these were not the most inspiring cars on the market. In fact, with the 4-litre R, BMC learned a lesson in humility because it was created specifically to fall into the company director part of the car market, but was priced just below the important £2000 purchase price tax break point. Any company car purchased that cost over this price was subject to a swingeing increase in taxable duty – and so, BMC thought they had pulled off a marketing master stroke when they secured a supply of 3.9-litre Rolls Royce B60 engines for use in the car. Equipment levels were hiked massively and this car was expected to sell in comparatively large numbers – the Rolls-Royce link being seen by BMC is being a positive selling point.

Unfortunately, this plan was scuppered on one major point, which overshadowed the upmarket image the car was supposed to convey. The problem with the 4-litre R was that its engine was a very heavy and unsophisticated unit, which had its roots in the military field. The upshot of using the engine in this car was that it made the balance of the car exceptionally nose heavy – and as such, made its handling understeer-biased and steering excessively cumbersome. The driving experience was underwhelming and the image of the car was completely undermined by the fact that most prospective buyers were well aware of the engine's origins - in fact, a B40 version of the engine was used in the Austin Gipsy!

Sales were resultantly dismal and one would have thought that maybe the company would have learned an important lesson from this car.

But they did not. The psychological need for BMC to remain in the “director's car” market was such that they continued to press ahead with a new model in the sector, codenamed the ADO61. By the early sixties, the BMC design department was becoming increasingly dictated to by the accountants of the company and so, their influence was soon imposed on the new car. When BMC were in the early stages of the planning for the new car, the decision was made to use the entire centre section of the yet-to-be-launched ADO17, but with unique and elongated front and rear ends, styled by Farina, with help from Dick Burzi. At this stage of development, this may have looked like a pleasing economy for the company (who were still a prime protagonist of the “badge engineering” school of marketing), but a questionable decision when one looks at the styling of the donor car.

Styling aside, the ADO61 was developed in a logical and predictable way. Unlike the previous three BMC designed cars (Mini, ADO16 and ADO17), the new car would be entirely conventional in its engineering – there would be no room for unconventionally-engineered cars in this most conservative of markets.

Initially, the plan was for the C-series unit to be used in the new car as it had already seen service in the Westminster/Wolseley 6/99, but in the interests of increased refinement, it was deemed necessary to redesign the power unit's bottom-end internals – as it was also being planned to use the engine in the MGC (ADO52). Where a four-bearing crankshaft sufficed before, a new seven-bearing crank was installed. The transmission of the ADO61 was 4-speed and the driven wheels were the rear wheels, which was a retrograde step for BMC. By the time the car had reached an advanced stage in development and its design was set, the cost cutting measures that the accountants had put in place may as well have not been undertaken: commonality with other cars in the range was minimal apart from the most obvious sheet metal and so, economies of scale through component sharing were minimal.

Unlike the engine/gearbox set-up of the ADO61, the suspension system adopted for the car was rather less than conventional: Like the ADO16 and ADO17, Hydrolastic was the springing medium, used all round. Unlike its smaller brothers, however, the rubber springs at the rear were separated from the hydrolastic displacer units. The idea of this was to smooth the ride even further, which BMC managed with some aplomb – which partially explains its excellent ride quality, along with the ADO61’s much greater weight – but also because a change in the pickup-point of the connecting pipes into the displacer-chamber reduced the typical bounce to near zero. (NB: This modification was later incorporated into the Maxi's suspension setup).

The rear suspension also used Hydrolastic spring and damper units, which unlike the ADO16 and ADO17, were supplemented by a self-levelling facility. This height adjusting rear end was a system that was completely independent of the car’s main suspension set-up and in a nutshell, the height was, regulated via a set of hydraulic rams. The system was powered by an engine driven pump and like the Citroën hydropneumatic system, the fluid was circulated along hydraulic pipes underneath the car. Located at the rear suspension's trailing arms, there were 3-way valves to distibute the oil and two rams to set the level. These valves allowed the oil a) to pass, b) to extend the levelling rams and c) let pressure off the levelling rams. On the valves, there was a lever connected to the trailing arm to sense the ride height of the car. This set the valve to the position needed. The bore of the system's piping and valving was quite small, so that the system did not attempt to level out the bumps whilst the car was in motion. The hydraulic pressure output by these rams was regulated via valves that sensed the level of the car – lowering it if it is too high, raising it if it is too low. This was seen as a “must have” by BMC, who saw that this small splash of ingenuity would set the car apart from its domestic rivals. It must be said that this philosophy of trying to offer something more advanced in the chassis department did result in a car blessed with superb ride quality.

Unlike the previous three BMC new cars, Alec Issigonis had no hand in the development of this car – in fact, Issigonis positively wanted nothing to do with the car; Ron Nicholls would head-up work on this car, but he had no involvement in the concept of the car. Whereas ADO15, 16 and 17 were the product of Issigonis– more or less single-handedly, the ADO61 was the brainchild of George Harriman himself - and the finer points of the design were hammered out by the BMC board. Such confused conception was the father of this rather confused big car.

It would appear that the first full-size prototype of the ADO61 was produced in 1963 (before even the ADO17 was launched) and what is very striking about this was that it looked almost identical to the Austin 3-litre in its final production form. The styling even at this early stage could only be described as imposing, but the obvious question of how the car would compare with the Austin 1800 was, it appears, left unuttered. As events transpired, it actually took four years from the appearance of the first prototype (below) to the car being unveiled to the world and this was mainly because development was a very low-priority project – events in the wider world of BMC had obviously overtaken the ill-fated ADO61.

Prototype from 1963 shows BMC's big-car thinking of that time. The shape is remarkably similar to the final version, launched five years later.

Development appeared to drag on through the Sixties and like all products from BMC before and afterwards, the press were well aware of the car's existence long before any official announcement had been made. Interestingly, the launch of the car to the public was a long and drawn-out affair because its announcement to the press took place almost a year before the car actually went on sale. The press launch took place at Longbridge in the lead-up to the 1967 Motor Show and in a professional presentation given by Raymond Baxter (the then BMC/BMH Public Relations Officer) the event was set-up so that the new car would be presented at the end of the show, to be the climax of the event. Raymond Baxter did his utmost to build up an air of anticipation in the assembled journalists, but when the Austin 3-litre was wheeled onto the stage, it was met with a ripple of polite applause followed by an embarrassed silence.

The trouble was, of course, that the Austin 3-litre was so obviously ADO17 based that it practically begged for the inevitable question to be asked: What advantages did this car offer over its smaller counterpart?

It was not until the following year that the press would find out – and of course, the news was not good. The main trouble was that the obvious ugliness of the car was (for many) an insurmountable problem and those that could get past its looks found that the Austin 3-litre had so many dynamic shortcomings that it was impossible to think of anything positive to say about the car. For a start, the testers knew that the new incarnation of the C-series engine was not going to be a sparkler, when they found that in the MGC, it was lugubrious in the extreme. This was the case in the 3-litre, only more so - because of the vast weight of the new car, it meant that the car suffered from the same engine maladies, such as its unwillingness to rev, but it also had an astonishing thirst for petrol, too.

By the time the car was released in 1967, it would only be to a hundred trusted customers, who were chosen to run pre-production versions of the car for the company on an extended trial. Between the time of the initial launch and this first tentative step towards a full launch, BMH had been taken over by Leyland – and there was a real feeling within the new management to proceed with the launch of the new car, if only to demonstrate very graphically just how much BMH had lost their way.

ADO61 version as presented to the press in 1967: Versions like these were run in small numbers before the official public launch in order to gauge public reaction. The headlights were described as “television shaped headlamp units”, but these unsightly items were dropped in favour of the original arrangement for the final production models.

When the Austin 3-litre finally went on full sale to the public in 1968, it was already an embarrassment to the company. As it was, customers avoided it in huge numbers – and those that did not and chose to go into their local Austin showroom, were practically obliged to ask those same embarrassing questions of the car as the press had done over a year before.

As for the car itself, the interior had a nice, traditional wood and leather feel to it, but because it shared the ADO17 centre section and had a large transmission tunnel, it actually offered less space than the smaller car. Not only that, but the dashboard offered a rather naff strip speedometer which appeared to have been lifted straight from the ADO16 – not exactly the thing that someone spending over £1500 would be looking for as a desirable feature (to put it another way, in those pre-inflationary times, the Austin 3-litre actually cost nearly 50 per cent more than the Twin-carburettor Austin 1800S – a vastly better car).

The family resemblance between the two cars is most evident in this shot. Identical centre sections give the game away, although the 3-litre's proportions are quite a bit more conventional than its smaller cousin. Only the overly-long bonnet really counts against the ADO61 - the boot treatment looks as though it always should have been there.

Of course, the Austin 3-litre was an outmoded dinosaur – BMH knew that, Leyland certainly knew that – as did the customers. The car was a victim of its own ugliness, for sure, but not only that, but the 3-litre class as a whole was suffering under the two-pronged assault from the Leyland-produced Rover and Triumph 2000s. Customers in a position to buy such cars as the ADO61 quite rightly looked at the vastly superior new 2-litre competition and drew the conclusion that this new breed of smaller “executive car” would provide them with all their needs, without the extravagance of a 3-litre car. After the merger, of 1968, BLMC quite rightly allowed the car to go into full scale production – the tooling costs had to be justified, for a start. This is so, because they could justifiably say that the Austin 3-litre is a prime example of why BMH so needed to be taken over by Leyland.

Once, the Austin 3-litre slipped onto the market in late 1968, it sold disastrously – it never even reached the financial break-even point of 50 cars per week. In its three year production run, a total of 9992 were produced and such was the magnitude of its failure, that the planned Wolseley version was dropped because it would have sold in negligible numbers. British Leyland never even contemplated replacing the car, but with Rover, Triumph and Jaguar in the stable following the merger, why would they need to?

Copyright © 2002 Keith Adams, with contributions by Alexander Boucke