The
Morris Minor and the
Volkswagen Beetle were in the same car class and, post-war, roughly of a comparable era; whilst the Minor was successful in and of itself the Beetle was much more so, especially internationally, selling roughly ten times as many vehicles. So as the title says how do you go about improving the Minor and making it more of a competitor to the Beetle?
The Minor actually had some fairly advanced features such as unibody/semi-monocoque construction, rack and pinion steering, smaller wheels located as far towards the corners as possible to not impinge on the passenger compartment whilst providing extra stability, and the placement of the engine forward so that when heavily loaded the vehicle remained well balanced and when lightly loaded it gave good stability and handling. There were also a number of other features that the designer
Alec Issigonis, he of later
Mini fame, wanted included but which were left out. These included fully independent torsion bar suspension which management changed to a torsion sprung live rear axle and then later a leaf spring arrangement before the launch, a new flat-four engine so that exports could be offered with a more powerful engine with larger bore size but was cancelled, and to build it as front-wheel drive (FWD). They did actually build several experimental FWD vehicles that were used around the factory personally by some of the staff with apparently no real problems.
Off the top of my head I'd say start right from the beginning with the Minor 1000 body design that had the one-piece windscreen and larger rear window, use the torsion bad suspension, perhaps front disc brakes when they start becoming available on later models, and make it front-wheel drive. Does anyone know if there were any potential alternative engines that could have been used in place of the somewhat underpowered early ones from our timeline, or at least some way of improving them?
As well as improving the sales of the Minor it could also be met by bringing the Beetle down a bit. IIRC the Beetle had the same suspension issues as the Chevrolet Corvair which led to Ralph Nader writing a couple of reports about it, if the Corvair had a rear stabiliser bar from the beginning then perhaps Nader decides to devote one of the chapters from his book
Unsafe at Any Speed to writing about the supposed faults of the Beetle instead.