Practically Classics Forum

I posted this question on another old car forum ages ago, no one really had a (I thought) a plausible answer.

A huge amount of cars (both sports and saloon) in the 60s, 70s and (a bit into) 1980s had 1300 engines, why 1300? what was so special about 1300?

It isn't that a common engine size today, yet it seems nearly all manufacturers in the past were producing one.

Anyone please?

Only guessing, but maybe it was a taxation break in one of our export markets.

One answer is that quite a lot of cars were exported to smaller places like cyprus/malta/ greek islands /caribbean etc as well as country's that still had minimal infrastructure for cars etc.

Places like this needed the same differing sizes of cars as other country's, but due to size of the islands / road networks they did not need large distance capable engines.

EG:

Many 1.3 powered saloon cars where sold to these places in the 50's, 60's, 70's & 80's and a good number where bought for use as Taxi'sand company cars etc as they had the room inside for passengers and luggage etc, but did not need large engines due to minimal power requirements.

Also Taxation as mentioned above was (and in some places still is) quite high on imported vehicles, so the lower engine size meant you could import a larger higher spec car with smaller power unit for less tax.

My theory, for what it's worth, is based on the A series: in that in that case 1275cc was about as far as the design could be pushed from the original 803cc and stay reliable without major retooling and redesign. Tax breaks based on capacity (as opposed to stroke) didn't really come into it for the UK until the 80's when 1400 became the new 1300, and bought with it a whole new range of engines from the big manufacturers.

As with all things, if you can cheaply stretch say 1 litre to 1300, you can charge more for it, and at a bigger margin too.....

Seamus O' Dolomighty wrote:1300cc why?

Why not? It's a nice number.

mr rusty wrote:My theory, for what it's worth, is based on the A series: in that in that case 1275cc was about as far as the design could be pushed from the original 803cc and stay reliable without major retooling and redesign. Tax breaks based on capacity (as opposed to stroke) didn't really come into it for the UK until the 80's when 1400 became the new 1300, and bought with it a whole new range of engines from the big manufacturers.

As with all things, if you can cheaply stretch say 1 litre to 1300, you can charge more for it, and at a bigger margin too.....

This isn't far out I'd say. Most smaller engines could stretch from 850 to 1300. The VW 1200 was stroked out to 1500 (The Beetle also got this engine for the dearer models), as was the Triumph SC engine. It was due to this that the MG Midget got the engine, as the 1275 A Series could no longer take the U.S emmision regulations and give sufficient power (People have taken A Series out to over 1500 cc but it was not considered viable by BL; I wonder whether this was because the Triumph engine had already been done ).

Taxation had been based on cylinder bore, which was one reason why older engines were long stroke. When owning a car was a luxury, it followed that some people might be able to stretch things a bit and get a small car but not a bigger one (In the late 1940s, after a three year wait, my grandfather took delivery of an A 40 Devon, which had a 1200cc engine, from which grew the B Series; at the time, there was only one other such car in the borough). Go back to the 1950s and a 1500 car was quite something; if you had an MG Magnette most people (Who had cars) were driving Standard 8s, Morris Minors, Austin A30/35 or Ford side valve cars (Not to mention pre war cars). By the 1960s, aspirations were rising and with it engine sizes.

Always bedder to 'ave a ferteenundred than an levanundred.

I thought that it was because the best size for a cylinder was 330cc ish. You could tune that to get the best ammount of power out of the cc. Hense 1300 / 4`s and 2000/6`s

There may also be a racing connection here. Race catergories limited engine sizes for events so that may have had a knock on effect on production models. Many 1300s were actually 1298cc and many 1100s were 1098cc to stay just below the limit, whatever that limit was.

This sounds more like it. Thanks chaps.