Alec Issigonis designed two of the most important cars Britain ever built, and they could hardly have been less alike. The Morris Minor of 1948 was a conventional small saloon made unusually good. The Mini of 1959 threw the conventional layout away entirely, and in doing so set the template that almost every small car in the world has followed since. One man drew both, and the second of them is why his name is still the one enthusiasts reach for when they argue about the greatest car designer this country produced.
He is the engineer who put the engine sideways. That single decision, on a car ten feet long, did more to shape the modern small car than anything else in the post-war British industry. He was knighted for it, elected to the Royal Society for it, and remembered for it long after the companies he worked for had been merged, nationalised, and broken up.
From Smyrna to the British motor industry
Issigonis was born on 18 November 1906 into a prosperous Greek family in Smyrna, the cosmopolitan Ottoman port that is now Izmir in Turkey. His father, Constantine, was a marine engineer and a naturalised British subject, which would prove to be the family’s route out. When the Greco-Turkish war reached Smyrna in 1922 the family lost almost everything; Constantine died soon after, and Alec and his German-born mother were evacuated by the Royal Navy to Malta. They settled in England the following year.
He studied engineering at Battersea Polytechnic in London, where he struggled badly with mathematics and failed the subject more than once. He never much regretted it. For the rest of his life he trusted the drawing board and his own eye over calculation, sketching cars freehand and working out the engineering around the shape rather than the other way around. It is part of why his cars look resolved in a way a committee’s rarely do.
His first serious job was at the Coventry car maker Humber, working on independent front suspension. In his own time, with his friend George Dowson, he built the Lightweight Special, a homemade single-seater for hill climbs that showed the instincts he would carry through his whole career: save weight, make the structure do more than one job, throw out anything that does not earn its place. In 1936 he joined Morris Motors at Cowley, and the British motor industry had the designer it would be known for.
The Morris Minor (1948)
Through the war years Issigonis worked quietly on a small-car project, codenamed Mosquito. It emerged at the 1948 Earls Court Motor Show as the Morris Minor, and it was a genuinely advanced little car for the money. Unitary construction, torsion-bar independent front suspension, and precise rack-and-pinion steering gave it road manners that embarrassed cars costing far more. It steered, rode, and held a corner like nothing else in its class.
The Minor also carries the most famous story in British car design. Late in development Issigonis decided the car looked too narrow, so he had a finished prototype sawn down the middle and widened by four inches until the proportions were right. The change came too late to alter the bonnet pressing cleanly, which is why the earliest cars wear a raised strip down the centre of the bonnet, the visible scar of a designer trusting his eye over the schedule.
It worked. The Morris Minor became the first British car to pass a million sales, a milestone marked in 1961 with a short run of cars finished in lilac and badged Minor 1,000,000. It stayed in production into the early 1970s and lived on in commercial forms, including the Morris Minor van that became the face of the Post Office fleet. For a first major design, it set a standard most engineers never reach with their best.
The Mini (1959)
The car that made him a household name came out of a crisis. The 1956 Suez emergency brought petrol rationing back to Britain and a wave of tiny German bubble cars onto British roads. Leonard Lord, the head of the British Motor Corporation, loathed them, and told Issigonis to design a proper small car to drive them off the market.
Issigonis set himself a brief that reads like a puzzle. Fit four adults and their luggage inside a box no larger than ten feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high, and give the mechanical parts as little of that space as possible. His answer rearranged the car from first principles. He turned the engine sideways and used it to drive the front wheels, then tucked the gearbox underneath it in the sump, sharing the same oil. He specified ten-inch wheels, smaller than anything in use, to keep the wheel arches out of the cabin. In place of steel springs he used compact rubber cones developed by his collaborator Alex Moulton. The result freed roughly 80 per cent of the car’s floor area for the people inside it.
It launched in August 1959, badged as the Austin Seven and the Morris Mini-Minor and known internally as ADO15. Sales were slow at first, then the car became a phenomenon that ran far beyond economy motoring, helped along by John Cooper’s hotter Mini Cooper and a run of Monte Carlo Rally wins. The Mini stayed in production until 2000 and sold more than five million. More importantly, the layout Issigonis drew for it, a transverse engine driving the front wheels, is now used by almost every small and medium car on earth.
The 1100 and 1300, the car that outsold them all
The Mini got the magazine covers, but the car that filled British driveways was its bigger relative. In 1962 Issigonis applied the same front-wheel-drive package one size up, in the Morris 1100 and the Austin, MG, and other badged versions that followed, known together as ADO16. It used Moulton’s Hydrolastic suspension, a clever system that linked the front and rear units with fluid to give a supple ride, and crisp styling worked up with the Italian house Pininfarina.
It was the right car at the right moment. The 1100 and 1300 became Britain’s best-selling car for much of the 1960s, the quiet commercial backbone of the whole operation. Among the British classic cars of the 1960s it is the one most people forget and most people’s families actually owned.
The British Leyland years and after
In 1961 Issigonis was made Technical Director of BMC, the height of his influence. The ground shifted under him in 1968, when BMC was folded into the merger that created British Leyland. The new company was run on accountants’ priorities, and a designer who cared little for production cost or profit did not fit the new mood. He was moved gradually to one side, given a role in special developments, and his later experimental work, including the 9X, a cleverer small car that might have replaced the Mini, never reached production.
He officially retired in 1971 but kept coming in to work on his projects almost to the end. The man who had reorganised the small car was, by then, a figure the company honoured in public and listened to less in private.
Legacy and honours
The honours arrived as the recognition caught up with the work. He was appointed CBE in 1964, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1967, a rare distinction for a working designer rather than an academic, and knighted in 1969.
His single-mindedness was both the making of his cars and their cost. He distrusted market research and design by committee, and drew cars to his own conviction, which is why the Mini feels like one idea carried through without compromise. The same trait had a harder edge. He cared little for profit, and the Mini is widely thought to have made BMC almost no money for years, sold too cheaply to recover what it cost to build. He had no time for the things he saw as distractions from driving, disliking car radios and heaters. The genius and the blind spot were the same character.
Sir Alec Issigonis died on 2 October 1988 at his home in Edgbaston, Birmingham. The Mini stayed in production until 2000, forty-one years after its launch and twelve years after his death, still recognisably the car he had drawn. Very few designers get to say that about one car. He did it with two.