How The Enemy Within Killed One Of Italy's Greatest Car Makes - History of Lancia

[Music] the Italian car makers launcher are buying back hundreds of their beta models and scrapping them because of serious rust in the engine mountings hello everybody Welcome to number 27. now I may speak perfect English but I am in fact Italian here I am celebrating my first birthday in Milan the city where I was born as such it has been heartbreaking to see what has happened to lancha over the last few years in 2019 lancha celebrated the 50th anniversary of its takeover by Fiat by that stage lancha was only selling one eight-year-old car in one country by 2021 total sales for the whole car company were just 41 000 cars lancha wasn't just on life support lancha is dead it has been cryogenically frozen with the hope that it may be revived in the future so how did we get here there are three separate historical events that led to lancha's death now you're all thinking that it's all down to rust but in fact that is the least significant of all of them the real reasons that lanche is dead are much more complex and they're going to surprise you they revolve around these three things the first is an unbridled and maybe unwise passion for racing the second is unreasonably high standards and the third and most surprising of all is Alpha Romeo lancha was founded in 1906 by Vincenzo Lancer in Turin now surely this man is the very caricature of what we expect a jolly charismatic Italian to look like under his stewardship lancha developed a reputation for quality and Innovation introducing at that time the first monocoque car in 1937 tragically being chainsaw died of a massive heart attack at just 24 years old his son Johnny was forced to take over the company he had the massive challenge just after the war of trying to bring out some new models with very limited funds at this time he employed the legendary Vittorio Jano who had previously been and who we can see here with Alfa Romeo and then later with Johnny himself together they developed the Aurelia this was the first car to have standard radial tires a rear transaxle layout before Porsche and Ferrari it had inboard brakes for less unsprung weight and it was the first car with a production V6 at this stage let's dismiss one inaccuracy there are voices circling that one of the biggest problems that lancho had is that after the second world war it couldn't get the funds to rebuild and get some Modern production lines the reason for this supposedly is that Johnny lancha who was running it at the time had communist sympathies during the war therefore the Americans under the Marshall Plan refused to fund Lancer unlike the funding that they gave to fear and Alfa Romeo as far as I have been able to tell there is absolutely no proof or anything to back up this claim crucially this is where we get to the first phase in lanchez downfall Jenny's passion for racing skewed his priorities he should have been concentrating on making production more efficient instead he took Lanta into Formula One in 1954 with their D50 now this was an incredibly Innovative car and it was proved to be very very quick if not immediately reliable however Formula One then and now was an incredibly expensive thing to get into and the funds soon started draining lancha's finances by 1955 one of their drivers Askari was killed actually in testing a Ferrari and Janny decided he had to pull out all of lancha's Formula One assets were sold on to Ferrari who then frustratingly went on to win the next Formula One Championship with that very car with the D50 in 1956. the Formula One Adventure weighed really heavy on lancha's balance sheet and despite launching such iconic cars as the Aurelia Coupe and spider the flaminia luxury Saloon and Coupe lancha's losses piled up and Johnny sold the company to the presenti family in 1956. Carlo posenti was an Italian industrialist with a vast cement production Empire he was very very passionate about cars and about Lancer and he did his best to try and turn the company around through the 1950s and 60s lancha made some of the best cars in Italy it made unconventional gems like the Appiah the flaminia the Flavia and the fulvia not all of them pretty cars but painstakingly built and designed now we get to the second element of lancha's downfall at our standard the cars were very very difficult to improve on but this constant commitment to Quality started to drag the company down by the end of the 1960s their production line was aging that models didn't share very many parts in common and everything was painstakingly put together by hand as a result the costs of production were increasing at the same time sales were falling Antonio fesia was then the head of design and Tech he was a brilliant engineer but he didn't really understand the commercial imperatives that a company like this faced so he often clashed with the managing directors that presenti tried to bring in to modernize and make lancha more efficient the losses mounted up and in 1969 byzanti had had enough of bailing lancha out and sold it on to Fiat initially under fear ownership lancha did have some notable successes the Stratos won the 1974-75 and 76 Rally Championship and the north 37 was the last two-wheel drive car to win the World Championship the Delta the new car sold well and also won another string of championships at the end of the 70s the beta was launched technically it was brilliant four disc brakes five speed gearbox independent suspension all round it drove very well and journalists loved it one version had the craziest Dash that you're ever going to see but heartbreakingly there was a design flaw which meant that the cross member at the front collected water and two pockets these rusted out and the subframe holding the engine detached from the car Lancia dealers are trading old models for new obligingly telling disgruntled customers that they'll buy back their rusted beta saloons worth only scrap to the company and offering generous part exchange terms for the new models without doubt this did cause lancha huge harm they were after all forced to leave the UK Market but for me this isn't the most significant problem after all in the early 2000s Mercedes had a terrible problem with rust and yet they managed to come out of it eventually pretty much unscathed they had to deal with it yes but their reputation hasn't suffered long term no for me what really killed off lancha was Alfa Romeo in the 80s and 90s particularly after the first generation delta lancha made a series of dull uncompetitive cars the team I wasn't too bad my dad owned one at the time and I remember quite liking it and I have a strange hankering after the Kappa even though that too was pretty much a failure but the Deidre the Libra the thesis the awful Series 2 Delta were all pretty dire particularly cruel was the replacement for the lancha Delta integral which in the series too was the Delta hpe a soggy two-wheel drive torque steering marshmallow the series 2 itself was replaced by the biggest Abomination yet the series 3 Delta Was Fear intentionally sabotaging lancha no it's just that Fiat decided at the time that Alfa Romeo had more brand recognition outside of Italy and therefore more potential as a result they decided to concentrate on Alpha Atlanta's expense the earliest example of this is in the 1990s when Fiat removed the funds essentially stole lancha's phenomenally successful rally program and moved that instead into Alfa Romeo's saloon car racing efforts with the new 155 the same thing happened in terms of the product range now that Fiat had decided that Alpha was the priority very little effort was put into the design of new launchers as a result each new model that came out was less appealing than the one that it replaced this all came to a head when lancha and Chrysler joined forces in 2011. Lantra was given a series of rebadged outdated Chrysler models unsurprisingly this new effort to push launcher failed from initial production of 99 000 units in 2011 by 2014 lancha had gone down to just 72 000. now the situation is even more dire just 41 000 lanches sold so for me in recent history this is by far the biggest contributor to lancha's downfall fear couldn't handle the number of brands that it had as a result it concentrated on Alpha Romeo and left lancha to fester and die now recently stalantis has been making noises of Elantra relaunch in 2025 and I dearly hope this is a success but unfortunately even if it is I think the only thing that really survives of lancha now is the badge so to recap for me it is these three elements that really killed lancha first of all there was the fact that Janny miscalculated put too many resources into the racing and that meant that the company was taken out of family hands once that had happened there was still the ongoing issue of a sort of decentralized inefficient production process and just a a total concentration on quality at the expense of everything else this was the second issue they couldn't make money because their cars were almost too good the third thing and for me almost the most important once Fiat had taken over is that when Fiat saw that they couldn't manage all their brands they concentrated on Alfa Romeo meaning that lancha got left behind it is really sad to see what has happened to this once glorious Mark we can at least still celebrate some of the older models and indeed I myself am looking for a good phobia thank you all so much for watching please do comment let me know what you think please do subscribe if you haven't already if you've enjoyed this video it really helps the channel if there's other subjects that you would like me to do videos like this on then please let me know in the comments thank you all so much and I really look forward to seeing you for the next one

Channel: Number 27

Views: 112,263

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Id: FvdHV7wUwdI

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023