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Volkswagen Group sells more cars than Ford in Britain. That’s not just Volkswagens of course. It is also Seats, Skodas and Audis. You could include other VW-related nameplates, Bentley maybe, Porsche and Lamborghini although the numbers would not add up to much. It was a bit different in 1991 when everybody was into acquiring a premium brand as a means of improving profit-per-car. Ford sought Jaguar and Volvo, General Motors Saab, while Toyota created Lexus and Nissan Infiniti.
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Ford is now back to just Ford. If it still owned Jaguar-Land Rover and Volvo, or wasn’t busy relinquishing its stake in Mazda, VW might not have taken the lead. Ford claims it is less concerned about market share than about profit. Well, it would say that, wouldn’t it, yet it is probably true. The engines and components it still makes for Jaguar and Volvo, a relic of its ownership years, must make a useful contribution to its balance sheet. An Aston Martin V12 started life as a doubled-up Mondeo V6 after all, and Ford-made bits will go into Indian-owned Jaguar and China-owned Volvo for a long time to come.

VW has been good at absorbing other makes and keeping them all on board. It is rationalising its engineering, concentrating development of sports and luxury cars at Porsche against opposition from Audi, which keeps the 2007 modular longitudinal matrix for the Audi A4, A5 and Q5. With the dust is settling on who owns what at Porsche and VW, Martin Winterkorn told Audi executives just before the Porsche AGM at the end of November that it will keep the lead in developing large luxury cars. Winterkorn reassured Porsche that it won’t be merely a tenth VW brand and will develop the Panamera and future Bentleys, as well as a sports car platform for Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini. It will have a new wind tunnel, a design centre with a hundred new engineers and integrate electronics at Weissach.

Not A Car of the Year

Not a Car of the YearAnother Not a Car of the Year
There’s a FIFA flavour about Car of the Year voting. Clear winners don’t get prizes. In 20 years COTY has never elected a Jaguar, Range Rover or Land Rover. It can’t be anti-Englishness. Munich doesn’t come off well either. There has been no BMW. A range that goes from Rolls-Royce to Mini has never met COTY criteria. The 57-strong jury that elected the electric Nissan may be environmentally aware, yet it doesn’t do safety. Volvo and Saab have never featured. Engineering excellence? Bentley has never made it despite the W12’s technological mastery. Production quality? There have been no Hondas. Value for money? No Skodas or Seats.

Still Not a Car of the Year
Not only have these exemplary makes never won top award, they have never made the first three. Mercedes-Benz did once, a lowly third in 1994. Korean makes have been excluded so strong sellers with long warranties, it seems, don’t count. There has never been a Porsche or an Aston Martin.

Unworthy as a Car of the Year, any year
I have long had qualms about COTY. Judge the jury’s deliberations since my Sunday Times column covered the 1991 Car of the Year.

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1992: VW Golf, Vauxhall/Opel Astra, Citroën ZX 1993: Nissan Micra, Fiat Cinquecento, Renault Safrane 1994: Ford Mondeo, Citroën Xantia, Mercedes-Benz C-class 1995: Fiat Punto, VW Polo, Vauxhall/Opel Omega 1996: Fiat Bravo, Peugeot 406, Audi A4 1997: Renault Mégane Scénic, Ford Ka, VW Passat 1998: Alfa Romeo 156, VW Golf, Audi A6 1999: Ford Focus, Vauxhall/Opel Astra, Peugeot 206 2000: Toyota Yaris, Fiat Multipla, Vauxhall/Opel Zafira 2001: Alfa Romeo 147, Ford Mondeo, Toyota Prius 2002: Peugeot 307, Renault Laguna, Fiat Stilo 2003: Renault Mégane, Mazda 6, Citroën C3 2004 Fiat Panda, Mazda 3, VW Golf 2005 Toyota Prius, Citroën C4, Ford Focus 2006 Renault Clio, VW Passat, Alfa Romeo 159 2007: Ford S-Max, VauxhallOpel Corsa, Citroën C4 Picasso 2008: Fiat 500, Mazda 2, Ford Mondeo 2009: Vauxhall/Opel Insignia, Ford Fiesta, VW Golf 2010: VW Polo, Toyota IQ, Vauxhall/Opel Astra 2011 Nissan Leaf, Alfa Romeo Giulietta, Vauxhall/Opel Meriva.

That makes eight Vauxhall/Opels, eight VWs, eight Fords, seven Fiats, five Renaults, five Citroëns, four Toyotas, four Alfa Romeos, three Peugeots, three Mazdas, two Nissans and two Audis.

Never made it into first three as Car of the Year
COTY jurists’ integrity is beyond reproach. They must believe the Nissan Leaf is worthy, never mind what this blog thinks, nor Christopher Booker in The Sunday Telegraph: “Even with a taxpayer subsidy of £20.7 million, to allow the price of each of these supposedly planet-saving vehicles to be brought down to £23,000, this will only enable the lucky purchaser to drive quite slowly for 100miles…”
Yet another Not a Car of the Year

Volkswagen Karmann Ghia

The European Union has approved Volkswagen’s purchase of bankrupt Wilhelm Karmann GmbH, according to Automotive News. This provides control of Karmann's divisions for car and components development, contract manufacturing, plant engineering and equipment and tool development. “Given (so many) considerable suppliers and Karmann’s moderate market share, the Commission concluded that car manufacturers would still have alternative suppliers,” according to the competition watchdog. Karmann filed for bankruptcy after it stopped making the Mercedes-Benz CLK in 2009.

Valmet of Finland took over roof-making in Osnabrück and Zary, Poland; Canadian Magna International acquired roof business in Japan, while Webasto gained Karmann’s concession for the US and Mexico.

Karmann made its name with the VW Beetle-based Karmann Ghia and VW has plans for cars at Karmann’s Osnabrück factory in Lower Saxony, starting next spring with a Golf convertible. Will it have the grace and style of a Karmann Ghia? VW CEO Martin Winterkorn had kind words. “Over the decades, some of the most beautiful models in the automobile world have left here. We will be carrying on this tradition from 2011.”

A definite maybe perhaps, yet it could scarcely have the perfect proportions of the little Karmann Ghia, over which I eulogised in my first ever motoring column. “It has faults in its handling,” which I apparently found easy to master. Well, no denying the perils of swing-axles. I can’t have been going fast enough.

Here is my test car of 1959
VW hit upon the idea of the sleek coupe in 1954 and the first were displayed the following year at European motor shows. Italian studios were all the rage and VW commissioned Carrozzeria Ghia, which created haute couture Cadillacs for Rita Hayworth and was in league with Chrysler. One of its less accomplished designs was the Chrysler Norseman, which took 15 months and $150,000 to build in 1956, before being shipped off to New York. Unfortunately it was on the Andrea Doria, which collided with the MS Stockholm off Nantucket and the Norseman went down with the ship.

Ghia assigned Luigi Segre to base a design on the VW platform chassis, with air-cooled flat four at the back. There was no question of competing with Porsches, which looked quirky and had only just got under way. Karmann made 444,300 up to 1974.


I had not quite got into my writing style in 1959. I was quite new.
Demonstrator cars had plastic seat covers; I was already into taking interior pictures. Right-click to read motoring column

Jensen-Healey

Well, it wasn't the last open sports car. America changed its mind on toplessness. And the Jensen-Healey was not as rust-resistant or trouble free as other cars made by the little factory at West Bromwich. Otherwise this column from The Guardian of 16 September 1972 was accurate and well intentioned. I was careful to insert a caveat in the first paragraph. My brief half an hour's drive was too short for more than a superficial assessment. It was a time for hedging bets. I was unconvinced about Kjell Qvale, the Norwegian-American who had made a fortune selling sports cars in California, and was chagrined at having no Austin-Healeys to sell. You can tell from the way Tony Rudd is spelt why a whimsical Fleet Street called this newspaper The Grauniad.

Citroen letdown

Surprising really for Citroën to be caught out by hydro-pneumatics twenty years ago, when they had been working on them for twenty five years, but there you are. There were some DS saloons wafting about at the Le Mans Classic a couple of weeks ago but not many. Their hydraulics, like those on the XM I was testing simply weren’t up to the rough and tumble of running on roads. You don’t see many Cars of the Year XMs about, but I was right about the Mercedes, “a speed machine for the connoisseur.” Still is. Prescient comment too about how speeding drivers are regarded and the promising state of the old Goodwood racing circuit, as used by Peter Gethin for his driving courses.
I watched Gethin win the 1971 Italian Grand Prix at Monza. It was one of the most exciting grands prix ever, when Monza was a slipstreaming circuit and the lead changed several times every lap. Clay Regazzoni (Ferrari), Ronnie Peterson March), Jackie Stewart (Tyrrell), François Cevert (Tyrrell), Mike Hailwood (Surtees), Jo Siffert (BRM) and Chris Amon (Matra) all led at one point, Gethin only briefly on laps 52, 53 and crucially 55, the last. He won at an astonishing 150.75mph by 0.1 sec from Peterson. It was 2003 before Schumacher went faster on the changed track. The redoubtable Peter Kenneth Gethin took part in 30 grands prix; Monza was his only win. He was 70 on 21 February.

McLaren F1

I came to know Bruce McLaren quite well in the years I covered Grand Prix racing. He was such a fixture in the business that, a bit like Jim Clark, you never thought of him dying in a racing car. He was careful, dependable, a regular nice man and you somehow imagined he never took big risks. In those days, of course, they were all taking bigger risks than they knew. I was on my way to the Range Rover press launch in Cornwall when I heard he had died testing a Can-Am car at Goodwood. That was 40 years ago next month. Now McLaren Automotive says it is 20 years since the team that was setting out to design the McLaren F1 came together. Apparently the decision to build, “the finest sports car the world has ever seen” was taken in 1988 so it must have taken Ron Dennis two years to put the resources behind the F1, launched in 1994 at £540,000. In four years 64 F1s, 5 F1LMs, 3 F1GTs and 28 F1GTRs were made along with six prototypes. An F1 with delivery mileage was sold at auction in October 2008 for £2.53million. I drove an F1 for The Sunday Times in July that year.
What an experience. Two daughters’ careers never looked back after I picked them up from school in the F1. Ruth didn’t like it much. She found the acceleration so fierce she walked home. Amazing to think that Dr Porsche designed a road-going Auto Union in the 1930s with the same seating configuration as the F1 McLaren.