Why British car makers kept their sales figures a secret until 1969

"In the past, British car manufacturers have been rather reluctant to issue any clear figures on their actual model production," we reported in May 1969. "Now the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has compiled detailed statistics for the Big Four - British Leyland, Ford, Rootes and Vauxhall." Car production and export figures had been obtainable as early as the 1900s, extracted from government trade documentation, but they were expressed in financial terms and didn't distinguish between makers, let alone individual vehicle types. Before long, the SMMT started to release its own statistics. In 1923, for instance, the British industry made 153k vehicles, of which 29k, or 19%, were exported (primarily to Australia, if you're interested). Enjoy full access to the complete Autocar archive at the magazineshop.com Whether statistics on makes and models existed for SMMT members isn't entirely clear, but we would assume Wolseley had some basis for its claim in a 1934 advert to be the maker of the best-seller in the 9hp class. After the war, members allowed more detail to be publicly divulged in the form of capacity categories. For instance, Autocar reported in 1951 that cars under 1600cc were by far the most popular. This was still in contrast with the situation in several other countries, though. For example, we reported in 1954 that Volvo, Volkswagen and Ford led the way in Sweden; in 1957 that Renault was the favourite in France, selling nearly twice as many cars as Simca, Citroën or Peugeot (in that order); and through the 1950s, we often labelled Chevrolet as America's number one. Then came that British watershed moment of May 1969 – and it wasn't only make and model statistics for the previous year that were shared but for the previous four years. The British Motor Corporation's 1100/1300 range had topped the 1965 model chart (the Austin and Morris saloon versions being the most common), with 158k sales, followed by the Ford Cortina (117k) and Austin/Morris Mini (104k). In 1967, the Cortina blasted past the 1100/1300, with 165k sales versus 131k, while the new Vauxhall Viva appeared in third with 100k. Worryingly for the British firms, imported cars had scaled a steep incline during those four years, rising from 56k to 91k annually. Leading the charge were Fiat, Volkswagen and Renault – but they each had a market share of only 2%, compared with 40% for BMC successor British Leyland, 27% for Ford, 12% for Vauxhall and 10% for Rootes. And with the market totalling just under a million, those top three models each grabbed a market share in excess of 10%. By modern standards these figures are impossibly huge, as there are simply so many more makers and models competing today. In 2025, the top brand was Volkswagen with 9% and the top model was the Ford Puma with 2.7%, from a total of around two million. Whether this is negative fragmentation or positive diversification is a matter of debate. Throughout the 1970s, the foreign challenge grew considerably more serious, as Britain joined the EEC (forerunner of the EU), Japanese car makers began major export drives and British Leyland destroyed itself. Hence in 1977 Ford was on top, but with 'only' 26% of the British market, British Leyland lost almost half of its share, at 24%, European cars took a much improved 28% and the Japanese were already at 11%. Then, in December 1978, the SMMT announced that it would, in Autocar's words, "clamp down on information about how well or badly the sales of individual makes are going in Britain". This was to "protect SMMT members' investment in the Motor Vehicle Registrations Information Service", which cost a whopping £720,000 per year (£4 million in modern money). The SMMT had been providing detailed information in monthly press releases, and "there has been abuse of this by some service companies which have reproduced it in full with no editing and issued it to their specialist subscribers", so from then on it would restrict the publicly available data to the top 10. More detail than that is shared these days – but the full dataset remains under lock and key.

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Why British car makers kept their sales figures a secret until 1969

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Why British car makers kept their sales figures a secret until 1969

When the British car industry broke the silence over sales figures

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Latest car reviews

Top manufacturers

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Legal bits

About Autocar