Bewick:
The Sed/Atk that replaced both the Atkinson and the Seddon was a retrograde step IMO they weren’t in the same leauge as far as reliability was concerned nor would Sed/Atk listen to the operators complaints with anything other than an"indifference" which was both breathtaking and downright insulting! So what do you do?(i’m listening newmercman!) you finally vote with your feet but are castigated by the likes of you for having the “affront” to go elsewhere for vehicles that give you exactly what you need,rather than persevere and just see your problems multiply by blindly continuing to buy motors that are not,and never will be,up to the job!! Yes,in their day the Atki’s were an ultra reliable workhorse which I will always heap praise upon,but then again they were “of their time” and all good things come to an end! However,it begs the question of how did Sed/Atk get it so wrong when they launched the new marque in late '75? They can’t blame the operators because they were never consulted(well I know I wasn’t)The Monastery somewhere in the Northwest,Saint Bewick of the Atki’s.
Saint Bewick, as one who jumped ship to the continentals you obviously never shared the views of some of your competition, far too many people would have continued to buy the crap that was being made by the British Manufacturers, take the Sudden Accident as a prime example, you could buy a sleeper cab in Europe before you could get one in Britain, the ERF export cabs were sleepers and if you look through pictures of 1960s Motor Shows you’ll see sleeper cabbed British Lorries, but they weren’t offered to the British Hauliers, I have a sneaking suspicion that was because they never wanted them, union interference played a part, but so did a reluctance to change.
Looking back just 25yrs there were quite a lot of firms running British Lorries that had drivers up the road all week and never had sleeper cabs (EH Nicholls, Swains, Wallis Haulage, to name a few) they could’ve had sleepers, they chose not to because they refused to move with the times, you as Bewick moved with the times, you ended up with a business that was bought out by a larger group, so you must’ve done something right. EH Nicholls is a shadow of its former self (as are many others who shared the same philosophy)
Now the sleeper cab is not the be all and end all of it, the drivers may have preferred them, but engines and their reliability were also a strong selling point for the continentals, so was aftersales service, Volvo and Scania were not without problems, the 290 88 especially could be a total nightmare, but look at Volvo today, they managed to become the lorry to have, every other lorry on the road for a spell in the late 80s/early 90s was an F10 or an FL10, so they were basically a modern interpretation of the Atki that you like so much, that’s criminal, it should’ve been the Sed/Ak that achieved that.
Now here’s where I agree with our resident nutcase, I believe the reason that Volvo and the rest managed to do it was because they listened to their customers and gave them what they wanted, the only thing was they never listened to the British, far too many were too stiff upper lipped/stupid to complain about the crap being served up to them and would’ve carried on doing things the same way they’d always been done, we just struck lucky because we wanted the same thing as the foreigners 
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