Vauxhall: Britain's Other Car Company

In British families, the second child develops particular survival skills. They learn to be agreeable, adaptable, to excel at things that don't threaten the firstborn's position. They become quietly accomplished at being almost-but-not-quite-first, at winning affection through dependability rather than glory. Vauxhall was Britain's automotive second child, locked in a century-long battle not to beat Ford, but to be loved despite never quite managing it. The company's story is one of heroic engineering brilliance traded for suburban respectability, of American pragmatism overwhelming British identity, and ultimately, of how a great pioneer became a ghost haunting the price lists of a global conglomerate.

The company began life in 1857 as a London ironworks run by Alexander Wilson, a practical Scottish marine engineer who had learned his trade building engines for Thames paddle steamers. Wilson was one of those Victorian industrialists who understood that if you were going to make something, you made it to last - preferably until the next century. When his company finally built their first car in 1903, it was, predictably, a tough, well-engineered machine that could probably survive a direct hit from a Boer War artillery shell.

The Pomeroy Revolution

In 1906, transformation arrived in the form of Laurence Pomeroy, a young draughtsman with a locomotive engineer's training and a racing driver's temperament. Pomeroy was exactly the sort of ambitious young man who could look at established engineering practice and think "that's rubbish, I can do better." Within two years, he had designed engines and cars that won significant reliability trials. When the original chief designer F.W. Hodges took an ill-timed holiday to Egypt, Pomeroy simply seized control of the design office and never gave it back. It was a corporate coup executed with magnificent cheek.

His designs established Vauxhall as a pioneer in reliability trials and endurance racing, setting speed records that built the company's performance reputation among the sort of people who believed that going fast was more important than arriving alive. The 1908 RAC Trial victory, where Pomeroy's Y-Type demolished a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and everything else in its class, announced that a new engineering talent had arrived. By the time of the First World War, Vauxhall was building some of the world's first true sports cars - the magnificent Prince Henry, named after Prince Henry of Prussia whose enthusiasm for motoring lent royal prestige to the brand, and the savage, 100-mph 30-98. Vauxhall was a genuine rival to Bentley, a builder of thoroughbreds for men with deep pockets and shallow regard for personal safety.

The American Takeover

This glorious, high-end era came to an abrupt end in 1925 when the company, struggling financially despite building superb cars, was bought by the American giant General Motors for $2.5 million - pocket change even then. GM had no interest in building expensive toys for aristocrats who might not pay their bills. They wanted a British Chevrolet that could churn out affordable cars for people who actually worked for a living. The racing programmes were axed, the engineers retrained, and the British thoroughbred was neutered, house-trained, and taught to fetch slippers instead of trophies.

Out came cars like the 1930s Cadet, which symbolised the company's new mass-market ambitions with all the subtlety of a boardroom memo. The Cadet arrived with synchromesh gears, which meant that ordinary drivers no longer needed the skill of a racing driver to change gear smoothly. Before synchromesh, you had to match engine speed to road speed through a delicate dance of throttle and clutch, double-declutching like a professional or face an expensive grinding noise and an even more expensive gearbox rebuild. Now you just moved the lever. The motoring press, initially sceptical about American interference, grudgingly admitted that the new Vauxhall was "admirably suited to British conditions," which was their diplomatic way of saying it was boring but reliable. Useful trumped exciting, and the transformation was complete.

Detroit-on-Sea

After the Second World War, Vauxhall fully embraced its American parentage and started producing a string of handsome, chrome-laden saloons that looked like they'd been designed in downtown Detroit and modified for a country where the roads were narrower and the drivers more inclined to apologise. Cars like the Velox and the Cresta were rolling pieces of aspirational Americana, complete with bench seats, whitewall tyres, and enough chrome to outfit a small battleship.

The styling helped Britons imagine themselves somewhere more glamorous than a country still using coupons to buy butter. The Vauxhall Cresta became the perfect car for the man who wanted his neighbours to think he was doing rather well, offering all the presence of a Cadillac with the running costs of something a bank manager could actually afford. As one satisfied owner told Motor magazine in 1957: "It's got the style of an American car but I don't need an oil well to run it." It was Hollywood glamour for people who'd never been further than Margate.

The War for the Driveway

Through the 1960s and 70s, the battle with Ford for the driveways of suburban Britain became the defining commercial rivalry of a generation. When Ford launched the Cortina, Vauxhall hit back with the Victor. When Ford launched the Escort, Vauxhall produced the Viva. It was corporate combat by product launch, two American-owned giants fighting over customers who genuinely believed they were buying something quintessentially British.

The differences were subtle but significant in ways that revealed everything about British class anxiety. A Ford was often more basic, built down to a price - the automotive equivalent of a sturdy work boot. A Vauxhall was usually more comfortable, more refined. At dinner parties across suburban England, the distinction played out in miniature social dramas. The man who'd bought a Cortina would mention its practicality and value. The man who'd bought a Victor would casually note its superior interior trim, as if he'd simply noticed these things rather than spending weeks agonising over the decision. Their wives knew exactly what was happening. In the delicate social hierarchy of suburban Britain, your choice of door handles could reveal more about your aspirations than your bank account ever would.

The German Cousins

By the 1970s, General Motors decided that developing separate cars in Britain and Germany was an expensive luxury they could no longer afford. The engineers at Luton discovered the new reality in 1975 when they were shown detailed plans for their next model and realised they were looking at technical drawings covered in German annotations. The Cavalier would be a rebadged Opel Ascona, developed in Rüsselsheim and merely assembled in Britain with the steering wheel on the correct side.

One senior Vauxhall engineer, interviewed years later for a trade journal, recalled the moment with resigned clarity: "We'd spent decades building up expertise in chassis dynamics, in suspension design. Then one morning we were told our job was to check that the Germans had remembered we drive on the left. It was professional emasculation dressed up as efficiency." The pretence was finally over. Britain was no longer capable of designing its own everyday cars, merely assembling German ones and fitting a Griffin badge.

The Cavalier may have been exceptional - comfortable, reliable, perfectly suited to British roads - yet it was essentially a German car wearing British makeup. For a nation that had once built cars the world wanted to copy, that represented a particularly painful form of capitulation. The class-conscious British motorist, who'd chosen Vauxhall over Ford partly because it felt more refined, more aspirational, was now driving the same car as a shopkeeper in Hamburg.

The Long Goodbye

For decades, this formula worked. Vauxhall remained a cornerstone of British motoring, employing thousands in its vast factories at Luton and Ellesmere Port, selling hundreds of thousands of cars to people who valued comfort over character. But the world of global manufacturing is ruthlessly efficient, and under GM, and later under the vast Stellantis umbrella, British production has been systematically wound down with the clinical precision that accountants admire and communities dread.

When the final car rolled out of Ellesmere Port in 2022, the workers gathered for photographs that would be filed away in local newspapers nobody would read. One assembly line worker, a third-generation Vauxhall employee, told the Liverpool Echo: "My grandfather built Crestas, my father built Cavaliers, and I built Astras. My son's training to be a software engineer." There was no bitterness in his voice, just the recognition that industrial Britain had become something his grandfather wouldn't recognise.

The final van emerged from Luton in early 2025, ending more than a century of continuous production. The Vauxhall name, with its historic Griffin logo, lives on as one of Britain's biggest-selling brands, yet it is no longer a British manufacturer in any meaningful sense.

The second child never quite beats the firstborn, but they're supposed to find their own path, carve their own identity. Vauxhall did that once, when Pomeroy built cars that made Rolls-Royce look pedestrian. Then it learned a different skill - being agreeable, adaptable, giving people what they wanted rather than what might make them uncomfortable. It became hugely successful at being almost-but-not-quite-Ford, at winning affection through dependability. Now it's simply a name, kept alive as a badge on imported machinery, another great British pioneer that perfected the art of quiet survival until there was nothing left to survive for.