The CV306 very much needed to be designed and built on a shoestring – and every addition to the basic concept that Dews added would tip the finance further away from the original and appealing £1m estimate. Of course, Dews naturally kept trying to add in more goodies, much to the chagrin of the Product Planning and Finance Departments. Initial cost estimates said £1million and, on the strength of such favourable financial forecasts, the project was given the green light. Stir into the pot whatever new body pressings were needed to knit it all together, and voila! – the CV306 was born.
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The answer that he soon formulated was: JU underframe and axles J4 side panels and roof Marina 1.8 petrol engine plus an uprated 1.8-litre version of the old 1.5-itre B-series diesel Austin 3-Litre version of the C-Series gearbox (ie: direct change, no remote shift), with an overdrive option Marina heater unit Mini exterior door handles Austin 2200 steering wheel instrument nacelle from Marina van and so on… In fact, wherever existing parts could be used, they were, and no existing option was overlooked.
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No doubt, they’re contemplating how to dig-out his van… The man responsible for its conception, Stan Dews, is wearing the hat, next to him is Brian Hanley, while Ken Daniels is in the background. The Sherpa is born Sherpa prototypes undergoing pre-production testing in Finland. In desperation, Dews cast around the parts bin of the existing J4, JU and car ranges to see which pressings and running gear could be adapted for a ‘bitsa’.
By this time, BLMC’s LCV division was losing market share hand over fist and was down to something like 7 per cent of the panel van market. Not daunted by this criticism, Dews then worked up a pure Transit clone, the CV154: same package, better styling, didn’t look like a “piggy bank”. However, when the investment numbers were added up, they came to £8 million – adjudged too much for a van (which, in fairness, had much lower sales volumes than passenger cars). (They’d obviously never tried to drive an old Ford Thames van up a slippery hill – that certainly didn’t work!) Because of this unfortunate criticsm, work on the CV300 was unnecessarily halted while a different approach was formulated. These ‘expert’ gentlemen (who probably couldn’t even spell the word Citroën) all held their hands up in horror, and said “you can’t possibly have a front-drive van it wouldn’t get up hills in winter”. However, in those days there was the powerful Trade Distributor Panel that had input to product plans.
It was possible to walk about in the back even without a high-roof conversion – something unheard of in standard-spec panel vans of the time. His first concept, called CV300, used the ADO17 1800/2200 power packs for front drive and, as a result, was blessed with a superb low loading floor, very much like that of the Citroën HZ. Dews soon set about his task of producing a new model with which BLMC could fight the successful new Ford. Stan Dews, an ex-Longbridge engineer who had previously left for the bright lights at Ford, becoming a key engineer in the Transit programme, was lured back to Longbridge to take on, amongst other things, the solution to BLMC’s panel van problem. The idiosyncratic Commer PB (with a car track under a wide van body) – so much loved by the GPO, or so it seemed – was about the only van that BLMC could beat on product terms. The company’s LCV panel van market share was dropping off rapidly, as the more modern Ford Transit and Bedford CF vans muscled in. We all know and love it from the James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, but Leyland’s Sherpa had a vitally important role in life – to beat Ford’s all-conquering Transit.Īnd given the resources available at the time, it was a fantastic effort.īy the late 1960s, BLMC’s offerings in the light commercial vehicle (LCV) sector were becoming very old hat indeed: the J4 was rather long in the tooth, and the JU, while better than the J2, was not much loved in the trade either.
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