ABSTRACT
The Brit ish motor vehicle industry was init ial ly slow to develop. The first manufacturing group, Harry Lawson’s British Motor Syndicate, was only reg istered in November 1895 and its first manufacturing subsidiary, the Daimler Motor Company, was established two months later. In part, this slow start might be ascribed to the efficiency of steam technology in this country and to cheap and plentiful supplies of coal; a consequence of this was the slow development of gas or oil-powered internal combustion engines. The lack of a market on the scale of that in the United States could also have been a factor, though that does not explain the much more impressive performance of the French motor vehicle industry. The ‘Red Flag’ Act (repealed 1896) was not important nor, probably, was any shortage of capital, though the general failure of large engineering firms to engage in early motor manufacture could have been. Most important was the stress on traditional engineering practices, on individualism and technical quality rather than on production techniques and the market.
