Originally Posted by
Jetex_Jim
In 1930s while Germany was stamping out the first Beetles priced so that workers could drive them on the new autobahns, the British car manufacturers were still proudly elitist and held on to methods which called for a level of ‘fitting’ during assembly. This approach was presented as a virtue, the low volume luxury car makers held that their cars were built by craftsmen and this was promoted as exclusivity.
You can make the comparison with the American and British aviation industries, and in they way they worked. Spitfires were hard to produce (in terms of man hours) due to the amounbt of hand-produced metal work thaty was needed for the complicated curves. Mustangs were easy to produce because the Americans used mass-production techniques - stampings for complicated shapes for example.