admin | 
06 15th, 2009| 
The first British car to pass the million mark was the Morris Minor which was designed by Alec Issigonis, one of the brightest designers in automobile engineering since the war and the only true innovator in this field. He deserves this recognition for having got the Mini, the first modern car with a front mounted transverse engine, onto the road in a very short space of time. The Mini passed the four million mark on June 30, 1977.
Alec Issigonis was not a designer in the strict sense of the word but a ‘creator’ of cars (he received a mechanical engineering degree honoris causa after the enormous success of the Mini). When, because of the Suez crisis, the British Motor Corporation decied to market a small car with low fuel consumption, Issigonis held that this could only be achieved by mounting the engine transversely so as to take up as little room as possible. As this was the first attempt at producing a transverse engine in a block with the gearbox and the differential gear, there were some mechanical problems for users and to BMC itself (in the production costs). However ,it is still today the best example of a small car; with an overall length of 10 ft ½in (3.05 m) it is capable of carrying 4-5 people. When the Mini appeared on the British market in 1959, Issigonis accurately predicted that its layout would have many imitators.