Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Jos. Lucas electrics and Other Automotive Screw Ups

This is topic Jos. Lucas electrics and Other Automotive Screw Ups in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 04-28-2004, 05:48 PM:

Products bearing this name made British cars the brunt of more jokes than could fill the Joke A Thon. They never seemed to get it right. First, what was wrong, was it bad design, poor quality components, labor problems? With good stuff available from elsewhere in Europe as well as the U.S. why did car builders continue to use Lucas?

Posted by Pete Naples (Member # 761) on 04-28-2004, 06:01 PM:

Hmmmmmmmm. I think the problems people have with them are more to do with age than anything else, I've had Land Rovers and Range Rovers for years, and yes I've had a heck of a lot of electrical gremlins, but only on cars that are knocking on a bit, my last RaRo is now 22 years old, the Land Rover before that is approaching 40 years old. Current RaRo is only 14 and has zero electrical hassles.

Also at the time when Lucas (aka The Prince Of Darkness) was in common use in British cars and bikes, there was a great push to 'buy British', there may well have been import restrictions or tax hikes on foreign goods, bear in mind that this would be before the EU as we know it today.

Here's a few Lucas jokes to keep you going.

Prince of Darkness

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 04-29-2004, 01:59 AM:

It's because they've got their name on it. Nobody's got their name on a Hyundai, Chevrolet, or Ford's electrical system, it's just part of a Hyundai, Chevrolet, or Ford.

Lucas has been/is an industrial manufacturer which supplies electrical, brake, & other components & services to a range of customers from automotive manufacturers to aerospace (by the way, Joseph Lucas himself died before his company began manufacturing automotive electrical components; his big thing was an acetylene lamp or something for *early* automobiles & carriages.)

One of the reasons there were still so many different English car companies at a time when most countries' auto industries had already consolidated to just a few is that MG, Triumph, Morgan, Jaguar, Austin, Austin-Healey, Jensen-Healey, Rover, Rolls, etc. would just outsource the electricals to Lucas, & the instruments to Smiths (Smiths, not Lucas, did the switches too on Rolls, though).

It was in its independence of componentry both a little behind fashion (cf: Body by Fisher) and ahead of its time (cf: Bosch).

So whenever an alternator died, switch broke, or there was an electrical fire in an English car in the US, out of all those auto manufacturers, across all those manufacturers' models, across all the years of that model, it was always a Lucas alternator or switch or Lucas wiring behind the dash.

Adding to this is that the US imported pretty much only the english sports cars, mostly convertibles, which got flogged like hell anyway, left in the rain with the tops down & water pouring on the dash instrumentation, mud & water all over the electrical fuel pumps, starters, etc. Also, in the US they were cars which, unless something catastophic happened to them, remained on the road/market much longer than the average because they were convertible/luxury/sports/lust cars.

I've personally experienced more dead US-automaker alternators, radios & switches than Lucas ones. And by god lets not hear a word from the people who romanticized VW beetle, van, & camper suicide machines/car bombs. I have TOO often stopped to waste MY fire extinguisher passing by the damn things when the humanitarian thing to do would be let it burn completely away but that was my moral lapse , gotten my behind nearly killed when the left rear wheel & axles came off TWICE in the murderous campers (they do that, VW did not have recalls but "improvement campaigns" & that was a big one), and had to get out & push when talked into driving a VW van for someone & the accelerator cable broke IN A TUNNEL. An MGB has always been & still is a more efficient, reliable, economical, prettier, better performing, safer auto than any of the murderous, hellspawn VW beetle derivants including the vans. Those damn VW things still felt like steering a riding lawnmower even at highway speed, steering spooky & treacherous as hell even at low speeds, had not enough power to pull it down the road when crosswinds hit the large surface area, mys sister was blown off an exit ramp in one, & ejected from another, DON'T get me started... And what were those horrible Porsches mfd. by VW in the 70s that did nothing but go straight to the shoulders of the interstates with the Fiat X1/9's & added to the number of angry folks I had to pull over & take to the next exit? There was a time that there was NO MORE room on the sides of the interstates in the US because it was all taken up by those X1/9's & the VW mfd Porsches.

Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 04-29-2004, 07:40 AM:

Damn, I had forgotten about VWs and Fiat. We may as well add Renault to the list too. Remember the Dauphine and 4CV. Rollover specials is there ever was one, and clouds of smoke after 40,000 miles. The R5/LeCar would roll in almost any turn at more than 3 mph, Renault sponsored a showroom stock class in SCCA racing for the R5, I remember one race at Summit Point where at the end of the front straight after the starting green 8 or 10 were upside down in the dirt. By the end there were as many on their tops and sides as rolling.