Volkswagen Golf

Road testers are sensitive souls. Driving the new Golf I was struck with how refined it was. The 1.4 petrol engine was next to inaudible, wind noise subdued, the new MQB platform, I decided, superbly engineered and of a quality to match VW’s reputation. It was only when I got into a 2 litre diesel - same morning, same roads, but almost at once it went b-r-r-r-r-p. The body drummed. On smooth bits of road it went Ph-o-o-o-o-h but on every patch and joint it thrummed and strummed. It rocked a bit on potholes and tilted on cambers. Tyres, I decided. Why do they put press test cars on low-profiles? Maybe the Golf is quite ordinary after all.

I was being pernickety. Princesses and peas come to mind. Besides the 7J rims and 225/45 R17 tyres, the 2 litre had sports suspension, lowering it by 10mm. The 1.4 on the other hand had perfectly sensible 6½J rims and 205/55 R16 tyres, making it is a model of a modern middle-sized saloon, well balanced and exemplary. No wonder it is Europe’s best seller. At £19,645 my money would be on the petrol 1.4, not the £24,880 diesel, despite being short of some 28PS. There is scant difference in performance (0.7sec to 62mph), none in CO2 emissions and you would be only 9mpg better off. It would need to do a lot of miles to make up £5235.

This is the diesel with the silly tyres.

The Golf has been restyled but not too much. It still looks a bit anonymous but a lot of buyers like that. They don’t want to make a statement. They are conservative, content for neighbours not to notice a new car. Best way to assess a car – assess the buyers.

VW has been clever about weight. Ever since I can remember new cars have put on middle aged spread. Customers always go for de luxe versions, so “improvements” never stop. Legislation and safety features always add bulk and throughout 38 years, 29million cars, and seven generations the Golf grew from 370cm (146in) long and 750kg (1650lb), to 450cm (177in) and 1140kg (2508lb).

At 425cm (167in) the new one is 5.6cm longer than the last (sixth) Golf but VW has saved 100kg (220lb), which brings it back to about the weight of the fourth or fifth generation. The wheelbase has been stretched and the body widened, so there is more room inside, the hatchback is bigger and there is more luggage space. It’s clever the way weight has been reduced; the structure is 37kg lighter, engines 40kg, running gear 26kg and even the electrical system weighs 6kg less. Aluminium engine blocks make a big saving.

Materials are used sparingly. Sheet metal thickness varies within one item. The rolling mill of the steel supplier makes what they call a tailor rolled blank, a sheet strip with variable thicknesses. Delivered to the hot-forming factory it has 11 areas each of a different thickness, with transitions between them so uniform there are no abrupt changes in strength. The saving is just 4 kg in one cross-member. Simples! As Sergei would say.

Here is what I wrote about another Golf 23 years ago, in The Sunday Times of 28 January 1990, the Umwelt Diesel

If cars of the Twenty-first Century are as good as the Volkswagen Golf with the Umwelt Diesel, giving up petrol engines will not be so bad. This is no sprinter, but it is lively enough and like policemen did in less frenzied times, proceeds in a measured way, which is faster than it looks.
The significance of the Umwelt (for Environmental) diesel engine is that it is the world's cleanest liquid-fuel combustion engine. Cleaner than any petrol engine the exhaust does not even have the characteristic diesel smell. VW has equipped it with a turbocharger, not so much to gain power, as pump 40 per cent more air in to make the combustion process more complete.
The result halves particulates to bring them well within strict American standards, and also banishes the discharge of highly suspect polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons by means of a simple oxidation catalyst.

Still recognisable as a Golf. This is Golf III. Clever VW.
The engine still has some strong diesel mannerisms. There remains a few seconds' pause between turning the key and starting up. The seat belt can be put on in the time it takes for the pre-heater indicator light to go out. And when the engine does start, it is accompanied by the orthodox diesel-taxi clatter, although not for long. Once under way, the noise is inaudible from inside the car and not obtrusive from outside.
The engine also has a low rev limit. Around 4,500 rpm on the tachometer - if this model had one - the power tails off and the car will accelerate no more. Diesel engines need a heavy flywheel to turn them over from one high-compression stroke to the next, so they do not spin quickly up to speed.
Racing engines are given a light flywheel to achieve the opposite effect - to run up to maximum revs almost the instant the throttle is opened. The corollary is that racing engines tend to be harsh and vibrant, while the Umwelt is smooth and constant, achieving its useful turn of speed with a cultured hum.
VW does not even put a D label on the back of the Umwelt Golf, to distinguish it perhaps from the smoky smelly diesels of old. However like former diesels, it still does not exactly dash up gradients, but reaches 100mph, and cruises serenely for a price of £9,739.93. It is a plain five-door Golf with no frills, not even central locking or electric windows. It is almost an industry cliché that diesel engines are installed in basic models on the grounds, it would seem, that diesel drivers are so consumed with ideas of economy that they are unlikely to pay for frills, even cheap ones.
VW's motives in producing the Umwelt may not have been entirely altruistic. Diesel sales in Germany over the past two years have dropped by a third, but the new cleaner engines being produced by VW and Daimler-Benz can be expected to reverse the trend in Germany, and increase the demand in Europe as a whole, the world's main market for diesel-engined cars.

Mini - Missed The Boat at 30

Instead of selling on its virtue, the Mini was sold on price, so it never generated the money it deserved. It never brought in enough to finance its development and replacement, and Leonard Lord and his colleagues set off the disastrous train of events that led to the collapse of British Leyland and virtually the entire British motor industry. The car that should have sold at a premium gave rise instead to the motor industry aphorism that Mini cars make mini profits.
Prescient or what? That was from The Sunday Times of 27 August, 1989 amidst a welter of nostalgia surrounding the Mini's 30th birthday that only showed what a flop the car really was. Instead of celebrating 30 years leading the world in small car design, we were gazing wistfully at an antique, a car that was a pioneering starting-point, and never should have continued in production for three decades virtually unchanged. Over the same time-span, practically every component of the Volkswagen Beetle was altered. Only the brilliant original concept remained; details were amended and refined continuously.

It was not until BMW inherited the Mini’s principles and sold it at a premium price that it became a success. The first Mini had charm. When I drove one in 1959 I was amazed. (Above; the first Mini made at Cowley, 8 May 1959) No small car had ever been like this. Back to The Sunday Times of 30 years later:

The Mini's catalogue of failure leaves us with a car 30 years out of date in style, merit, and profitability. It was badly made and wrongly priced at the start, never earned enough money to keep its lead, and remains a monument to a management that never realised how distinguished it was.

(1963 Super de luxe Mini - with extra bumper bits)
There is scant cause to celebrate one of the greatest missed opportunities in automotive history, or praise a car that is slow, noisy, less safe than it ought to be, and dying on its feet save for a shrinking number of customers.

Like steam buffs hankering after the Flying Scotsman, they are out of touch with the real world. Fast, lively, well-made and reliable cars overtook the Mini almost as soon as it had shown, before the end of the 1950s, how small cars would be designed for the rest of the century and beyond.

The origins of the Mini are well-known. Sir Alec Issigonis (above), a gifted freehand artist of a designer who knew from his own experience of lightweight hill-climb specials how a good car ought to feel and handle, first drew up the Morris Minor. It was a bit radical for the old guard of motor industry grandees, but they took a risk and made it.

(Above: Issy's sketch-pad. He drew one on a table-cloth for me. Stupidly I never kept it)
They did not make it as Issigonis wanted to make it; they used an old pre-war side-valve engine, so it was never exactly nimble, but they gave "Issy" as he was known, his head in other areas such as the body shell and the torsion-bar suspension, - very avant-garde for 1948. The Minor was an instant favourite, and the later Minor 1000 remains a sought-after car to this day.

(Minis won the Monte. Issigonis was as astonished as anybody)
The Mini-Minor as it was known at first, was more radical still. Front wheel drive remained a novelty in the Fifties. Citroën used it, but they were considered very eccentric by the bluff Yorkshireman who ran the British Motor Corporation (BMC), Leonard (later Sir Leonard) Lord.

The transverse engine (above) was even more unorthodox. A couple of brave pioneers had tried it in the cold dawn of motoring, but no serious designer had entertained it as a means of squeezing the mechanical parts of a car into as small a compass as possible, to leave more room for the occupants.

Yet Lord acknowledged that the recipe, together with small wheels and rubber springs developed with the help of Issy's friend Alex Moulton from Bradford-on-Avon, had merit. He signed the Mini off for production, and it was launched upon a startled world on 26 August 1959.

Lord was only interested in competing with Ford, so the Mini was priced against Ford's cheapest car, the Popular. The fact that its technology was of the Sixties, while the Ford's origins lay well back in the Thirties was beside the point. The Mini's price was £496 against the Popular's £419.

It ought to have been £100 dearer on account not only of its novelty, but also for its interior spaciousness (see above), and its splendid handling, which enabled it to run rings round everything else on the road. It was quick, chic, economical, roomy, and took the market by storm.

It leaked of course. Early Mini carpets quickly became sodden because the seams in the welded floor faced the wrong way, scooping up rain water as the car went along. The gearbox and cooling systems were continual sources of trouble. But there were no fundamental shortcomings except perhaps mixing the gearbox oil and the engine oil in the same sump, giving rise to lubrication problems.

(Minis at Silverstone, 1965, somewhat demurely driven - they usually had smoke coming from the front wheels)
Rival designs quickly discarded this feature, for within a very short time Mini imitators appeared on the market. The pattern of small cars changed from rear-engined and rear drive like the VW Beetle, the Fiat 650 and the Renault 750, to front-engined and front wheel drive. Convention was stood on its head, and soon VW, Renault, Fiat, Peugeot, and the mighty General Motors and Ford would follow suit. From being thoroughly unconventional, transverse-engine, front-drive cars became the norm, not just for small cars, but for medium and large cars.

(1965 variant, the Mini Moke)
Lord and his board never realised the revolution they had wrought. They were more afraid that customers would be put off by the small wheels and the slab-sided appearance and turned-out body seams. Lacking the vision of Issigonis, they felt the Mini would only have merit if it was cheap.

The result was that they under-priced the most brilliant small car of all time. Instead of selling on its virtue, it was sold on price, so it never generated the money it deserved. It never brought in enough to finance its development and replacement, and Lord and his colleagues set off the disastrous train of events that led to the collapse of British Leyland and virtually the entire British motor industry.

(Final fling. One of a late series of Minis harking back to the Mini-skirted 1960s)
The car that should have sold at a premium gave rise instead to the motor industry aphorism that Mini cars make mini profits.

Classless, trend-setting, and sufficiently agile to give a good account of itself in all forms of motor sport from the Monte Carlo Rally to production car racing, the Mini should have been a financial as well as a technical success. It was marketed mistakenly as cheap and cheerful, instead of the clever new concept that it really was.

(BMW reinterprets the Mini. The Mayfair 50)
Mini ownership by the trendy Peter Sellars and Lord Snowdon was regarded with polite interest, instead of demonstrating that here was a car so good that price was not a critical ingredient in its choice.

In due course, the Metro was a worthy development of the Mini; few small cars make such good use of space, or offer so much of it for the money. Alas, it was late by 10 years or more, and when it did come, it still used (and still uses) the out of date Mini engine and gearbox because there was no money available for a new one.

When the replacement Metro arrives in a year or two, it will have a new engine. But now it has to hold its head above a flood of Mini rivals from Japan, Korea, and the rest of a world. They have followed where Issigonis led, but where an indifferent and lacklustre BMC feared to tread.
(And BMW succeeded. With hindsight I was being too kind to the Metro. Hopes for it were high in 1989)

Anniversary for Kia

Twenty years ago this week, The Sunday Times motoring column was wide-ranging. Porsche and Volkswagen featured, Kia making it at bottom left on its introduction to Britain, selling 1,786 cars in its first year. Last year it sold 56,114 and has become an international giant making more than 2 million vehicles. Kia Motors Corporation, which celebrated its 67th anniversary in May, began in South Korea manufacturing bicycles, growing to be part of the world’s fourth largest automotive group. Its splendid Scottish Car of the Year Sportage crossover and Sedona MPV are great value for money and recent models such as the European designed and manufactured (if curiously named) cee’d have secured a reputation for quality and reliability.

Yet it is probably Kia's seven year warranty that has been the most distinguished contribution to its success. Peter Schreyer’s appointment as chief designer in 2006 brought the products up to the mark, bringing popularity to new models such as the Soul urban crossover, Venga mini-MPV and new Picanto. Kia has graduated into the mainstream of style; you no longer look on it as a sort of bargain basement car.

Commenting on the anniversary, Michael Cole, Managing Director, Kia Motors (UK) Ltd, said: "Kia has been on quite a phenomenal journey in recent years. In less than two decades we've certainly lived up to our 'Power to Surprise' slogan by growing from a relatively small importer to challenging the best and most established brands in the industry. We think we have a fantastic range of cars and, judging by our growth over the last few years, it seems our customers think so too. 2011 is set to be our busiest year yet and I'm confident it'll be one where we challenge perceptions more than ever as we launch three superb new products in the UK - new Picanto, new Rio and, later in the year, new Kia Optima".

SUNDAY TIMES: Motoring, Eric Dymock
7 July 1991
KIA-PENZA
Two new bargain makes on sale this month offer a practical alternative to buying second-hand. The Escort-sized 1.3 litre Sao Penza will cost under £7,700 and the Metro-sized Kia Pride range is all below £6,800. Both are former Mazdas, the Penza is the old 323 now made in South Africa, and the Kia is the obsolete 121 made in Korea.
This week's price cuts by manufacturers provide new baselines to try and stem disorderly discounting. Kia and Sao Penza start cheap because they use old technology, yet still come with competitive new-car warranties. They are being imported by MCL Group which sells Mazdas in Britain. Group chairman John Ebenezer, who used to import inexpensive brands from east Europe such as FSO, is optimistic about the new arrivals.
"We are constantly looking for opportunities for new products for the UK market and the improved political situation in South Africa has allowed us to import the Sao Penza." Kia is one of the world's top twenty motor manufacturers although quite a lot of the cars it makes do not carry the Kia brand name. The Pride sells as the Ford Festiva in the Far East.
The most expensive Kia is £1,885 cheaper than the current Mazda 121. The Pride 1.1L 3-door at £5,799, the 1.3LX at £6,399 and the 5-door LX at £6,799 will be among the cheapest superminis on the market.
It hardly matters that Kia's technology is not quite 1991 and the ride and refinement not as good as the Fiat Uno or Nissan Micra. The cars have a useful turn of speed, good economy, an agreeable appearance and seem strongly built.
The two Sao Penza models to be sold here are made by the South African Motor Corporation (Samcor) created in 1985 by the amalgamation of South Africa's Ford and Chrysler operations. Samcor is 76 per cent owned by the Anglo American Corporation and the 5,000 workers own 24 per cent of the shares.
The 1.3 litre five door hatchback will be priced at £7,549 and the four door saloon is £7,695 with metallic paintwork.

Automatics

"No thanks. I prefer to change gear myself." Some people still look down on automatic transmissions. They probably prefer a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner to standing over a sink or beating carpets with a stick. Yet there is something about being clever enough to select one's own gear. It's manly to change gear. Automatics are for girls or the elderly.
E-Type Jaguar started with a crunchy difficult gearbox.
Now no car with sporting pretensions can afford to miss out on little paddles beside the rim of the steering wheel so you can change gear looking like a racing driver. How pretentious can you get? This is only an automatic with manual over-ride. Leave the thing to itself. It probably knows better than the driver.
This year marks 70 years since the introduction of the automatic. I wrote this Sunday Times motoring column in December 1990.FIFTY YEARS OF AUTOMATICS
The first mass-produced fully automatic transmission was introduced fifty years ago for the 1941 Oldsmobile and Cadillac. General Motors called it Hydra-matic (the hyphen kept quips about Hi-dramatic at bay).
It was an innovative era. As America entered the Second World War, production cars were furnished with air conditioning for the first time. The first two-speed windscreen wipers appeared and the first Jeep, and the first large-scale production four wheel drive car, a Russian GAZ-61.
The hydra of Hydra-matic stood for hydraulic. The heart of the automatic transmission was an oil-filled turbine pump rather like the "fluid flywheel" used by Daimler in 1930 with a preselector gearbox. General Motors used a gearbox with the gear trains in-line so that they could be changed by means of internal clutches, activated by the speed of the car and the position of the accelerator pedal.
The first automatics were jerky and tended to leak oil, but they were better than the self-changing electric and mechanical systems they replaced. General Motors added another element to the pump to make it more responsive, and the hydraulic gearchanges have been augmented by electronics, which take account of gradients and fuel flow.
The original Hydra-matic cost only 57 dollars and by the 1950s, automatics were the rule rather than the exception in America. They still absorbed too much power to make them viable for small European cars and no practical alternative has ever emerged with the smooth running of the torque converter which evolved from the early "fluid flywheel".
Semi-automatics such as the short-lived Manumatic which had a gear-lever actuated electric clutch and appeared on Hillmans and Wolseleys of the 1950s were short-lived. The Daf Variomatic and its descendents on Fiats and Fords have not caught on. The AP Mini automatic in the sump of the engine was a masterpiece of miniaturisation, but was deeply flawed.
Despite its shortcomings, the manual gearchange will be with us for some time. Its sliding pinions and clashing gears was an arrangement of which the 19th century pioneer Rene Panhard once remarked, "C'est brutal, mais ça marche."

Unintended consequencies

Not before time, there's proposed safety legislation not obsessed with speeding. Proposals for new powers so police can issue tickets for bad driving are all very well, but begs the question of how you catch the miscreants. One sees drivers weaving in and out of motorway traffic, risking theirs and everybody else's necks, and just wish there was a patrol car there to scoop them up. There never is. And with the passing of a regime that thought it could enforce safety by speed cameras while reducing traffic police, maybe we are on the threshold of a new era.

We need more patrol cars like this Vauxhall Insignia
Unfortunately making new regulations does not follow logical processes. This 1993 Sunday Times column was concerned about unintended consequences. The original copy for "proposed law..." is attached.


The AA has just taken delivery of a fleet of new Ford Transits.
Sunday Times: Motoring 02 May 1993
DEATH BY DANGEROUS DRIVING

The creation of a new offence of causing death by driving is to be looked at by the AA as soon as the proposals are drawn up for a new criminal justice bill in the autumn. It is barely a year since the Road Traffic Act introduced two offences, causing death by dangerous driving and causing death by careless driving while over the prescribed blood-alcohol limit. Instead there will be a new single offence with double the existing maximum jail term of five years.

Courts will need to take account of the circumstances of accidents to make a distinction between misdemeanours with unexpectedly tragic consequences and minor shunts. 'We need to make sure that motoring offences do not get out of proportion,' an AA spokesman said. 'Causing death while at the wheel of a car must relate to similar offences in other areas, although we acknowledge public concern over the powers judges have for dealing with the lunatic fringe who drive without concern for life.'

A driver who runs into a car stationary at traffic lights is clearly culpable. But the difference between the consequences may be no more than a matter of chance. The driver of the stationary car may get a stiff neck when his headrest cushions the blow, step from his damaged vehicle and exchange names and addresses before driving off, aggrieved but alive.

Another stationary car might have no head restraints. They are a relatively recent safety feature. In an identical accident with the same degree of carelessness by the offending driver, whiplash could break the driver's neck and kill him.

Consequences in traffic accidents can often be a matter of luck - running into a car with safety features against running into one without. Driver B could face a custodial sentence of up to ten years against driver A getting a caution, a fine, and a few points on his driving licence for essentially the same misdeed, running into the back of a stationary car.

Drink-driving is a different issue. Impairment through drinking is a serious business, the courts take it seriously, and the distinction of a separate offence of causing death while unfit to drive through drink should remain.

But there is a distinction between the driver who crashes carelessly or recklessly into a bus shelter when it is empty, and the one who kills all the occupants. The difference rests only on whether anyone was in the shelter at the time. In one case it might mean a wigging by the bench, in the other a long term of imprisonment.

The logic of increasing penalties according to the consequences of transgressions, would imply decreasing them where the risks are small. Speeding at 3am on an empty motorway in clear weather would become less serious than recklessly flouting the law on a busy afternoon.

Reckless, careless, driving without due care and attention, or whatever it may be called under various road traffic acts, now generally comes to light when there has been an accident. Yet it is the bad driving that is the offence, not whether the driver knocks down a tree or kills a sheep.

In the last four years nearly 100 cases of apparently lenient sentences on drivers involved in accidents have been referred by the Attorney General to the Court of Appeal. Fourteen involved fatalities. The protests the Home Office receives over sentences on killer-drivers are overwhelming.

It is difficult not to take account of fatalities in assessing culpability, but leaving aside the drink-driving issue, not many drivers set out to kill, and pressing for fierce penalties on those who do will not do much for deterrence and could look like a cry for vengeance.

Rolls-Royce

Twenty-one years ago Rolls-Royces were still made in Crewe. They were a decade away from fundamental change. Yet their dignity seemed unshakeable as this motoring column from 17 June 1990 shows. And 'personal imports' to beat Car Tax and VAT was still newsworthy.
SUNDAY TIMES: Motoring, Eric Dymock
ROLLS-ROYCE SILVER SPIRIT II
Upwards of a thousand Rolls-Royces are converging on Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire today for the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts' Club Annual Rally. It will be a meeting of hearts and minds as well as cars. Rolls-Royces are as close to Britain's soul as Big Ben or Land of Hope and Glory, yet as with other pillars of the establishment, it is easy to expect too much of them.
Dignified and regal, beautifully made and long-lasting, Rolls-Royces are as imposing as ever they were. You are more likely to be taken for a pop star at the wheel of one nowadays than a Member of the House of Lords. They tend to be bought more by 'new' money than by the old aristocracy who seem to be happier in Range Rovers and green wellies.
Adjusting one's expectations means not assuming a Rolls-Royce will handle like a Mercedes-Benz, nor be as quiet as one of the new Japanese luxury cars. It means driving them in a fitting manner, not too fast, and avoiding harsh braking or acceleration. The older parts of the suspension were not designed to avoid the diving and leaping that go with clumsy driving.
Rolls-Royce chauffeurs like Rolls-Royce cars are expected to keep their composure at all times. At the chauffeurs' school they are instructed how to open a door, then shut it with a satisfying clunk, like the door of an old First Class railway carriage, as the passengers sink into the Connolly-leather chairs, kick their shoes off, and curl their toes into the shaggy carpet.
Rolls-Royce's tradition of naming cars after ghosts began in 1907, when Claude Johnson, responsible for the creation of the marque as much as the two euphonious partners, had their thirteenth 40/50 finished in aluminium paint, and the carriage lamps and fittings silver-plated. It was named The Silver Ghost
The latest Silver Spirit is less ethereally quiet. It is probably noisier than some of the graceful old cars gathering at Castle Ashby, the difference is that it does 120mph, and accelerates to 60mph in a vigorous 10 seconds.
Its worst shortcoming is the tiresome hum from the air intake of the 6.75 litre V-8 engine which would pass unnoticed in a Sierra or a Cavalier, but as in the tale of the princess and the pea, quite spoils the cushioned luxury of a car that costs £85,609, and does between 12 and 15mpg. With a little effort you feel the fuel consumption could reach single figures.
The heavy thirst is the result of the blunt aerodynamics and the car's weight of 2350kg (5180lb, 46cwt). The controls are all light, but at seventeen and a quarter feet (5.3metres) it is a large car. The ride is now extremely good, with the new adaptive ride control which senses speed, steering, and the disturbance made by road bumps. The sensors then stiffen or slacken the springing within milliseconds, making this the best-riding and best-handling Silver Spirit yet.
Body roll on corners is firmly checked, and the old floaty motion has gone.
The interior of the Silver Spirit is of matchless quality, with further refinements to the two-tier air conditioning system. Unlike those of BMW and Mercedes-Benz, it divides horizontally, giving the occupants the choice of warm feet and a cool head as opposed to a cool driver and a warm passenger.
There is usually so much noise in a car that the quality of an elaborate stereo system is squandered. The Silver Spirit is quiet enough for pop stars to appreciate its ten speakers (two tweeters in the demister panel, mid-range and bass units in the front doors and tweeter and mid-range units in the rear doors) and, for those of their lordships who still have them, to hear Today in Parliament in perfect peace.
ENDS 661w
SUNDAY TIMES: Motoring, Eric Dymock
ROLLS-ROYCE, CREWE
Rolls-Royce has at last had to concede that machines make cars better than people can. Sir Henry Royce, whose engineering credo was that, "There is no safe way of judging anything except by experiment," would probably have agreed. He would go to any lengths to achieve excellence and had he known about it, he would have embraced computer-controlled machining with enthusiasm.
Changing the habits of a lifetime has not come easily. The old wartime factory at Crewe still has machinery, which still looks as though it made Merlin engines for Battle of Britain Hurricanes and Spitfires. They did, and are gradually being replaced by automatic cutters and drillers to turn out better components than the most skilled craftsman.
Rolls-Royce offers the production engineer a singular challenge. It is relatively easy for robots to turn out thousands of identical parts, but Rolls-Royce made only 3,243 cars last year, just under 70 every working week, so it does not want thousands of anything very much. What it does want is seventy or so axle casings, or cylinder blocks, or exhaust manifolds machined to a consistent accuracy that befits the car.
This could no longer be accomplished with the relics of industrial archaeology on which Rolls-Royce Motors had to rely following the receivership of 1971. Like Ferrari, Rolls-Royce has had to adapt to changing circumstances, which meant commissioning a highly automated paint plant a year ago, and bringing in sophisticated new machinery, the latest of which was brought into operation only last week.
Unlike Ferrari, in which Fiat has invested heavily, Rolls-Royce has had to generate its own resources. Profits have gone up from £14.1 million in 1984 to nearly £25 million last year. Sales are up 18 per cent world wide, the Pacific basin is doing well with sales in Japan up, North America holding its own, and the UK up by over 8 per cent.
Just over half the cars made by the company are Bentleys, and when the new model arrives by the mid-90s, the Rolls-Royce and the Bentley ranges will separate for the first time since 1945. The pre-war "Silent Sports Car" will have an identity of its own again, with a separate body style.
More pressing however is a new engine to replace the thirty year old V8, which is neither as smooth nor as efficient as a Rolls-Royce ought to be. Vickers, Rolls-Royce's parent now owns Cosworth Engineering which is not only an outstanding manufacturer of racing power units, but also notable in the production engineering of engines.
Among Cosworth's notable achievements was successfully designing and producing the 16-valve heads for the outstanding Mercedes-Benz 190 2.3-16, in an astonishingly short time. Rolls-Royce is fully extended making cars - it makes most of its own components down to the Spirit of Ecstasy on the radiator shell. Cosworth, rich in talent, would not find it difficult to design and engineer a new power unit adaptable for a 1995 range of Bentley sports cars and Rolls-Royce limousines.
Meanwhile the crafts at Crewe which even the cleverest robots could not replace, continue to thrive. Ferrari lost none of its cachet through installing modern production methods and neither will Rolls-Royce. Ferrari quality and reliability has improved and so will Rolls-Royce's. The irreplaceable features, the sumptuous leather and the carefully-grained woodwork which no manufacturer in the world does as well, will give the cars their own distinctive character for generations to come.
ENDS 600w
SUNDAY TIMES: Motoring, Eric Dymock
Mrs Alberto Pirelli will flag off 125 pre-1966 cars taking part in the 2,000 mile Pirelli Classic Marathon from Tower Bridge at 0800 today. The third annual Marathon which commemorates the old Alpine Rally travels through six countries in seven days, finishing in Cortina Italy, on Saturday.
The 15 special tests, start at Lydden Hill, Kent at 11.00. Spectators will be admitted to a slalom-style event which will decide the first day's leaders before the cavalcade sets sail for the first overnight stop at Ypres, in Belgium.
Stirling Moss has declared himself fit to drive an MGB following his recent motorcycle accident but has not yet discarded both his crutches. Victor Gauntlett has withdrawn his £200,000 Austin-Healey which leaves Indianapolis star Bobby Unser's rather special Jaguar E-Type as probably the most valuable car in the event. Together with all the other precious classics, the Jaguar will be put to some strenuous tests such as a timed climb of the famous Stelvio Pass, Italy's highest Alpine road, nine miles with 48 hairpin bends, which will be specially closed for the occasion.
ENDS 195w
SUNDAY TIMES: Motoring, Eric Dymock
BMW SAYS EURO-PRICES BUNK
Despite a recent rise of 3.3 per cent, BMW claims that the prices of its 3-Series cars are much the same in the UK as they are in the rest of Europe. Taking the prices of extra equipment into account, optional in Germany but not always optional on the UK market, personal imports cost the customer more.
BMW allowed £300 to cover petrol, hotels, and ferry fares and local taxes were taken into account. No allowance was made for any administrative expenses, but BMW calculates that on an exchange rate of Dm2.8 to the pound the costs are as follows:
personal import UK retail extra cost of personal import
316i £12,525 £12,425 £100
320i £15,638 £15,550 £ 88
325i £19,179 £19,175 £ 4
The more expensive the BMW, the more BMW says you save by buying it in the UK.
ENDS 161w