Requiem for a Puma

Suddenly at 71 years... Well, 71 thousand miles in this case. Obituary for a well-liked car. 71,000 miles at an average speed of, say, 30mph means Ruth or I spent 2,366.666 hours at the wheel of the Puma. That is 98.61 days. Fourteen weeks, day and night, or three and a half months. First registered in 2001, one of the last Puma Thunders, R50DOV had been on show in the foyer of Ford’s Brentford office and came to us with 4 miles on the clock. It was brought on a transporter from Essex to Wemyss Bay, so by the time it reached Duncan, the Ford dealer on the Isle of Bute, it had gone further by sea than it had on its own wheels.

What a pretty car. Silver. It may have been only a Fiesta underneath, but designed by Ian Callum (Jaguars, Aston Martin DB7, RS200, Mondeo) it was well proportioned and beautifully detailed. Ruth liked it from the start. It only did around 6,500 miles a year because we had other cars and a throughput of test cars. Ruth used it for commuting and going out saving lives, so I suppose most of the 14 weeks’ day-and-night in it was down to her. We used it surprisingly often for long distances between the north of Scotland and the south of England. Her friend Iona liked the Puma’s style so much she bought one too.

R50DOV had distinguished company from time to time

Buying R50DOV’s replacement was an unedifying experience. What with the time it took and the rigmarole. “The Financial Services Authority insists I read out the following…” Rubbish of course. Car salesmen try to sell you policies for this and policies for that and the FSA would only insist on you sitting down to listen if you were actually going to buy one, which we were not. It was all a ploy to get your attention and after a couple of boring read-outs we got wise and said Shut Up We Are Not Going To Buy That. One stupid salesman, trying to sell Ruth a car too noisy by half, told her that Nobody Drives Nowadays Without The Radio On, so she wouldn’t be aware of the racket. He didn’t stand a chance. An Audi A1 was a possibility but to get a decent one you have to add on this and add on that.

So fatigue was setting in by the time we came to several choices of Ford or a Honda Jazz. Sales lady at Ford did a good professional job – she will go far – but the Honda won despite a salesman blundering over things one would have expected expunged by Honda main dealer salesmens’ school. The Jazz is not as stylish as the Puma and Ruth will miss the heated windscreen this winter – what a boon that was. She already misses the pert Callum styling. The Jazz doesn’t cut as much of a dash, but it’s bigger and we can use it for journeys for which the Puma was really too small. The Jazz will hold more, it could even hold two Labadors, and it is quiet. Ruth hardly needs to turn the radio up beyond Quite Normal.

Room for a couple of Labradors in here?

French Protectionism

You can tell the wheels are coming off the French car industry when a government minister complains. Renault and Peugeot-Citroën are losing sales because Hyundai and Kia are dumping cars below market price, says Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg. Automotive News Europe, which usually knows what it’s talking about, says he wants the European Commission to question a trade agreement between Europe and South Korea. “Hyundai and Kia are unfairly competing against [French carmakers] by engaging in dumping, which is unacceptable,” Montebourg told the French Socialist Party.

PSA’s and Renault’s sales have collapsed in France while Hyundai and Kia have flourished. Hyundai Europe CEO Allan Rushforth pointed out that the company was doing well because of quality and price. “The success of Hyundai in Europe is based on products designed, engineered and built in Europe. Our most popular, and fuel-efficient, models sold in France are built in the Czech Republic and Turkey. In fact, nearly 90 percent of the Hyundai cars registered in Europe during the first half of 2012 were built outside Korea.”

It is a Europe-wide problem created by trade unions inflating car-makers’ wage bills. At Ford’s Saarlouis factory workers get about €480 ($600) to make each Focus. That compares with €207 for the Hyundai i30 at its Czech plant near Nosovice. This allows Hyundai to offer the i30 at €15,990, €960 below the cheapest Focus. Discounting in Europe makes things worse. Ford European sales dropped nearly 10 percent to 532,819 in the first half of the year, while Hyundai grew 12 percent to 232,454, and Kia jumped 25 percent to 173,232.

It takes Hyundai 19.5 man-hours to build a car in Nosovice. Ford is faster, at around 11 hours, but that is not enough to offset German labour costs, at €43.85 per hour, four times the €10.62 rate for workers in the Czech Republic, according to Automotive News Europe. Alongside the Nosovice plant the company has built a factory producing 600,000 transmissions a year. Kia 56kms (35 miles) away in Zilina, Slovakia, makes the same number of engines. Trucks shuttle between them, transmissions one way, engines in return.

Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg, to say nothing of Renault and Peugeot-Citroën, could never keep up. Peugeot may be over the hill.

Readers' letters

1985 Ford Sierra RS Cosworth

The Guardian readers’ letters were the rudest. I covered motor racing for the newpaper in the 1960s and 1970s. Pioneering stuff. Motor racing seldom made sports pages. John Samuel, sports editor recently presented with the Doug Gardner Award, wanted to be “inclusive”. He asked Adam Raphael, the motoring correspondent who went on to be a notable political writer, to cover racing. Adam didn’t want to and asked Barrie Gill, of the new (1964) Sun who might. Gill kindly suggested me.

I enjoyed The Guardian. It was demanding on writing style and I did the motoring column sometimes as well. I didn’t know about newspaper writing, had no formal training; I made it up as I went along. By good fortune John Samuel was patient. Just as fortunately perhaps, he had nobody else on hand who knew anything about motor racing.

There was a broad church of student readers with whom I got on well. But when I was critical in the motoring column of the 70mph speed limit Guardianistas were furious. Prejudiced and abusive the roundheads went after me. They seemed to suspect that not only did I not share their dirigisme, but also (probably alone of Guardian contributors) I was never a member of a trade union. They, and readers of The Obsever, nevertheless stuck by me for 15 years.

It was The Grauniad when I started with it. Compositry was a weakness on a small patch of floor in Grays Inn Road. Losing £120,000 a day now, they say. That’s what happens, you see...

Sierra Sapphire. Cosworth 4x4 was a development.

Sometimes it was as well not to tell readers absolutely everything. I did not disclose, even to my broader-minded Sunday Times readers in 1990 how, testing the Sierra Sapphire Cosworth in Spain, my former colleague from The Motor, Roger Bell in the passenger’s seat, pointed skywards. We were directly under the flight path to an airport and he was indicating a Boeing 747 overhead, seemingly stationary. We were both doing 150mph.

The Boeing was getting down to its landing speed approaching the runway. We were enjoying racing car speeds on an open road. Roger had been with the test team for the E-type Jaguar. In 1961, 150mph was so rare for a production car they put on crash helmets and used racing tyres. Here we were, on a sunny day, doing it in a production saloon Ford. Safe as houses at twice what the hapless Tom Fraser, Minister of Transport thought so perilous in 1965.

I didn't do 150mph in this E-type, one of the first I drove, at the Glasgow Motor Show following its introduction in Geneva. That's me on the right, with Jaguar apprentice Clive Martin outside the Hamilton newspaper that ran my first motoring column.

The Zandvoort Four

Jim Clark, Lotus-Ford, 1968
You don’t meet many geniuses. On June 4 1967 I watched four write motor racing history. The death of Keith Duckworth at the age of 72, extinguished the light of the quartet who shone so brilliantly that day at Zandvoort. The others were Jim Clark, Colin Chapman and Walter Hayes.

The Dutch Grand Prix was third race into the 1967 world championship calendar. The British teams had been having difficulty finding a suitable engine and now with the first race of the Lotus 49 they thought they might have one in its new Ford-Cosworth. You couldn’t expect it to win first time out but astonishingly it did, the first of a record-breaking 155 grand prix victories, for what would be the greatest racing engine of all time.

The winning driver Jim Clark was affable, the car’s creator Colin Chapman admirable, Walter Hayes thoroughly likeable, but Duckworth, the engine designer, was perhaps the one you could say was truly lovable.

Colin Chapman (left) with Jim Clark
Shy reserved Jim Clark did not much care for journalists, although he put up with those like me who had known him from before he ever raced. He knew I was unlikely to rush into print with confidences. They were carefully respected even though it meant subduing an urge to tell the world. If I had, I knew I would quickly turn from being a motor racing insider to an outsider.

Colin Chapman was founder of Lotus, and the most innovative racing car designer of his generation. He had not been first to put the engine behind the driver, but he had done it better than anybody else, and understood perfectly why. He exploited every nook and cranny of the regulations, invoking anything not expressly forbidden. He made a driver lie almost on his back to reduce a racing car’s height. Chapman’s pursuit of lightness was obsessive, to the point where everybody knew his cars were fragile, yet everybody wanted to drive them because they were winners. Chapman would give a lucid one-to-one press conference, telling you what he thought you ought to know about racing car design, while looking over your shoulder for somebody more important.

Walter Hayes, head of its public affairs, arranged for Ford Motor Company to pay for an engine that would win the world championship for Jim Clark. A former editor of the Sunday Dispatch, Hayes was a sage. He knew Clark was the world’s greatest driver; he knew Chapman was best car designer. He also knew that he, Hayes, was the world’s best publicist. All he had needed was to find the world’s best engine engineer and inspire him. Hayes did the one-to-one press conference without looking over your shoulder. You got his full attention, eye contact, first name; he knew what you wrote for. He would steer you to the best story. Thoughtful, articulate and utterly in command, he stage-managed designers, racing drivers, teams and was the best spin-doctor the car industry ever had.

Walter Hayes, Ford Public Affairs
Walter’s world collapsed ten months after Zandvoort when Clark died at Hockenheim. Like the rest of us, it had probably never entered his head that Jim Clark would die in a racing car. It was a blow to Chapman too, but he recovered and carried on designing the ground breaking inventive racing cars, taking the rules of motor racing to the brink, pioneering advances like aerodynamic down-force and ground-effect. Unfortunately he took his brinkmanship into business. A court would hear how John DeLorean, Chapman, and Lotus accountant Fred Bushell siphoned off taxpayers’ money intended for DeLorean's ill-fated Belfast car company, when in 1978 Lotus was paid $17.65 million to develop the absurd backbone-framed stainless-steel roadster.

The loot was laundered in a Panamanian registered, Geneva based company. None of it got anywhere near the car and, in the words of the Delorean receiver Sir Kenneth Cork, “went walkabout”. A House of Commons Public Accounts Committee reported in July 1984 that the money was “misappropriated”. A three way payout gave DeLorean $8.5 million, while Chapman and Bushell divided $8,390,000 between them in numbered Swiss bank accounts. Chapman took 90 per cent, but the bulk of the missing millions was never recovered.

By the time of the settlement Chapman was dead. The unfortunate Bushell was jailed for three years and fined £2.25m. Lord Justice Murray told Belfast Crown Court that Bushell had been the brains behind a “bare faced, outrageous and massive fraud”. He also said that had DeLorean not been American and Chapman alive, they would have been given ten year prison terms.

David Keith Duckworth was born in Blackburn Lancashire, went to Giggleswick School and studied engineering at Imperial College, “scraping through” his BSc as he put it. This may have been due in some measure to his dissertation being critical of the course, its organisation, and its methodology. It was not the only time his frankness led to trouble. “I don’t compromise easily. I won’t accept theories that are wrong. I can spot bullshit at 100 yards and I have to say so.”

Keith Duckworth (left) explains an FVA to Ford vice president of engineering, Harley Copp
A deeply analytical engineer, he joined the fledgling Lotus company in 1957 as a gearbox development engineer, but soon recognized Chapman’s shortcomings and left, telling the proprietor that he was not prepared to waste his life developing something that would never work. Instead he set up an engineering company with his friend Mike Costin calling it, a little bleakly perhaps, Cos-worth. They adapted the Ford Anglia 105E engine for Formula junior and swept the board.

The DFVThis led to a four-valve version called FVA (for Four Valve Type A) and when Ford put up £100,000 for a V8 they called it the DFV (for Double Four Valve). It set new standards of power and reliability. Duckworth did press conferences too, scattering aphorisms like confetti: “It is better to be uninformed than ill-informed.” He laughed a lot and pontificated, but would never patronise, beyond perhaps a cheerful “That’s a bloody silly question Eric. You can do better than that,” delivered in rich Lancastrian.

He found it better to be truthful. “If you lie you’ve always got to remember what yesterday’s lie was.” His warmth was genuine, although if he wanted to be evasive over some technicality, he would smile benignly. “Very few straight answers are ever possible. The decisive man is a simple-minded man.” Keith trained as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, but whenever he flew me in his Brantly helicopter, it was always with an injunction that, “This thing is put together by engineers and engineering things always break in the end.” It never did, although a heart attack in 1973 forced him to give it up.

When, seven years later, he relinquished his 85 per cent stake in Cosworth Engineering, its success was already assured. It had reached well beyond motor racing and produced a range of brilliant engines for production cars of Ford, GM, and perhaps as its ultimate accolade, Mercedes-Benz.

The Zandvoort Four were supremely gifted, Keith Duckworth the acme of the articulate engineer. His laughter was the happiest sound ever in a pit lane.
From: The Scotsman, published following the death of Keith Duckworth, aged 72, in December 2005.

Electrickery

Ford Comuta electric 1967
Legislators in California and their eager apostles in Westminster and Brussels cannot reverse a tide of events by passing a law. Los Angeles tackled photo-chemical smog by regulation and now nothing turns politicians’ heads so much, especially on America’s West Coast, by proposing (according to Automotive News and the Wall Street Journal) new rules that 5.5 per cent of cars must be zero emission by 2018.

They have said all this before. The accompanying Sunday Times column of 17 November 1991 said California was insisting on seven cars out of ten being battery powered by 2010. Legislators have had to back-track several times. Demanding 1.7 million electric cars by 2000 proved absurd. Even now there are only some 5,000 on the roads of the Sunshine State.

Ford Comuta chassis (batteries not included)
We are still not much better at storing electricity than Camille Jenatzy was in 1899 and Jacques Calvet’s plea for on-street battery charging remains as piously optimistic now as it was in 1991. And as Ben Webster the Environment Editor of The Times pointed out last week, the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership has admitted that electric cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents owing to the energy consumed in making batteries. An electric car would have to drive at least 80,000 miles before producing a saving in CO2. Many will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 90 miles and are unsuitable for long trips.
Even those driven 100,000 miles would save only about a tonne of CO2. Emissions made by manufacture, driving and disposal of electric cars, does nothing for tackling doom-laden environmentalists’ belief in climate change. The government Committee on Climate Change has called for them to be increased from a few hundred to 1.7 million by 2020. The Department for Transport is spending £43 million over the next year giving up to 8,600 buyers of electric cars a grant from taxpayers of £5,000.
Sounds like California. Perhaps the environment lobby will shut up and Our Leaders will back-track. Let practicalities prevail.


Sunday Times: Motoring, Eric Dymock 17 November 1991
Stand by for the charge of the battery brigade
The Californian legislation that obliges car manufacturers to offer electric alternatives is spreading. Nine other US states have announced they will follow California's lead, and with three more thinking about it, the electric car now seems likely to become big business.
This week Citroën announced the promising battery-powered Citela in Paris, and the Worthing-based International Automotive Design (IAD) launched in Los Angeles the production version of the car it revealed at the Frankfurt motor show in September. Its LA 301 has a tiny petrol engine providing the energy for a 32 kw (43 bhp) electric motor.
Electric cars have seen false dawns before. In 1874 Sir David Salomons of Tunbridge Wells built a 1 horse power three wheeler powered from Bunsen cells. In 1899 Camille Jenatzy set a world speed record with an electric car, covering a kilometre at 65.79 mph. But hardly anything more practical than a milk float has ever gone into production. Electric cars have been frustrated by heavy expensive batteries, long recharging cycles, and short range.
Jenatzy's car had to have its batteries charged before it could do the return kilometre, and there has been little real progress in terms of speed and range. Even with modern sodium-sulphur or nickel-cadmium technology, a 4 ton battery the size of a 550 gallon petrol tank would be needed to provide a family car's 400 mile range and 100 mph performance.
Until Californian air pollution provided the incentive, electric cars seemed destined to occupy the margins of motoring. But now any manufacturer who wants to sell cars on the rich market of the American west coast has to answer California's call for 1.7 million electric cars by the year 2000. The state will demand a proportion of the cars sold must be TLEVs (transitional low emission vehicles), followed by ULEVs (ultra low emission vehicles) in phases up to 1995.
By 2010 seven cars in every ten will need to be electrically powered or, in the legislative jargon, ZEVs (zero emission vehicles). When I asked a senior General Motors executive what would happen if nobody bought the electric cars it had to offer, he said flatly, "We have to sell them."
The law will demand that the quota is sold, at a loss if necessary, on pain of not being allowed to sell anything else on the territory until they are.
Manufacturers the world over, including Renault, Fiat, BMW, Peugeot and Volkswagen are pressing forward with electric developments. General Motors has revealed the unfortunately named Impact, which is designed to keep up with the speed of urban traffic. It can reach 60 mph as quickly as a Jaguar XJ6, has a maximum of 100 mph, and a range of 124 miles. But like Jenatzy's record-breaker of 1899, it still can not do both at once.
GM is reticent about how often its heavyweight batteries would have to be recharged after sprinting to 100 mph. BMW has found that its sodium sulphur batteries are more responsive but they are also more expensive. They need replacing after about 30,000 miles at a cost of £30,000.
Audi has a hybrid full-sized 100 estate which does shopping trips on electricity, and uses its ordinary engine on the motorway. It would not meet California's requirements, but it would do for congested town centres closed off to petrol or diesel vehicles.
Its nickel-cadmium batteries occupy the space normally taken by the spare wheel, last ten years, and provide sufficient energy to drive the car at 30 mph and accelerate to 20 mph in 8 seconds - adequate for town driving. A small auxiliary electric motor drives the power steering and there is a petrol-fed water heater. Audi says the extra cost would be under £10,000, and its operating range at town speeds would be about 20 miles.
The combustion engine takes 45 minutes of main road running to recharge the batteries, and Audi awaits encouragement from local authorities, delivery services, and residents in noisy and smoky streets before making production plans.
The British-designed IAD LA 301, with a 660cc Subaru engine, is ready for production under an arrangement with the Los Angeles department of water and power. Some 10,000 are expected to be built, with a range of 60 miles on a dollar's worth of subsidised off-peak electricity. The most likely price is £15,000.
The Citroen Citela, like the Audi, uses nickel-cadmium batteries with a long life expectancy, giving a range of up to 70 miles. Recharging takes two hours from a standard three-pin plug, or half as long from a specially transformed power supply.
There is space for three adults and a child, in a vehicle the size and weight of the Citroen AX on which it is based. When it goes into production in 1995, Citroen expects it to cost no more than a basic AX, around £6,000 excluding the batteries which account for a further £2,400.
What is needed now, according to PSA chairman Jacques Calvet, is for electricity authorities to start making provision for on-street battery recharging. A pilot scheme is to be run at La Rochelle in 1993, in which 50 Citelas will show their paces, and try out a recharging network of power points installed by EDF the French electricity undertaking. EDF plans a national programme of recharging outlets in French cities by 1995, ready for the start of Citella production if the La Rochelle experiment proves a success.

Boris johnson hopes... Nissan Leaf and charging for London

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.