Wednesday, March 13, 2019

the 1920s Austin was really well built, engineered and designed, and was selling so well, that it was licensed/franchised and built and sold at BMW Nixi, Rosengart, and American Austin. Even Nissan copied it


in 1927 BWM introduced something new: the Dixi DA-1 3/15, a license-built copy of the Austin Seven.

Hard to imagine now, but the cute, fuddy-duddy little Austin Seven was, in fact, a revolution: small, cheap, yet well-built. It was England’s answer to the Ford Model T and it put the country to motoring with 375,000 built. Companies in France and Australia built it under license. In America, the aptly-named American Austin Car Company sold ’em with fun, cutesy big-car restyling, shrunken Stutzes and Marmons that looked truly cartoonish. Not only was the Dixi BMW’s first car but also Datsun’s, half a world away (though they may or may not have consulted with Austin before they started building it. The debate continues). By the 1950s, however, both companies had sorted it out.

https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos/articles/2018/03/07/in-the-beginning-bmw-made-the-dixi

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