This is just the perspective from the U.S.
Rootes and other British cars used positive ground(earth) electrical
systems until the early 1960s. My hunch is that they switched to
negative grounding to stop seeming weird and to be more compliant to the
standards of the rest of automakers. I think early MG-Bs were the most
common positive ground cars.
I think your friend thinks negative grounding is no big deal because
this standard has been so common for the last 30 years that few people
remember anything else.
Again from the U.S. perspective, we installed lots of non-factory sound
systems, like Motorola, Clarion, and Blaupunkt, and until the British
car makers switched to negative earth, we couldn’t install them in older
Rootes and BMC cars because they were generally made for negative ground
systems only.
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