Age Concern

VW puts an age limit of 80 on journalists. (Above) The delightful Scirocco
If Sir Jackie Stewart was a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers he would be ineligible to drive press cars. With the honourable exception of Jaguar, according to a list “kindly” supplied by the SMMT published in the current Guild Update he is too old, at 70, to be trusted with cars from a score of press fleets. The problem, apparently, is insurance.
18 January 2010
Drivers over 70 are no more likely to cause crashes than any other driver, and are considerably safer than younger drivers, according to a report published today by the IAM (Institute of Advanced Motorists).
Neil Greig, IAM Director of Policy and Research said: “The report contradicts the common assumption that older drivers are a danger on the roads. Just eight per cent of drivers are over 70 and they are involved in around four per cent of injury crashes; but of the 15 per cent of drivers who are in their teens and 20s, 34 per cent are involved in injury crashes.”
Older people rely heavily on their cars, and the ability to drive gives many older people better mobility and access to more activities. Men in their seventies make more trips as car drivers than men in their late teens and 20s.
Mr Greig added: “The IAM recommends that, rather than seeking to prevent older people from driving, we need to make them aware of the risks they face, and offer them driving assessments to help them cope with these risks.”
The RAC Foundation agrees. Its director Professor Sir Stephen Glaister said: Despite the myths, older drivers are no less safe.” Other motoring organisations reach similar conclusions. Andrew Howard, head of road safety at the AA: “The 70-year-old of the mid-1970s is very different to the 70-year-old today who is much fitter.” The AA published data showing a disproportionate number of young drivers have accidents.

So why do the motor industry insurers take the opposite view? Is the list a smokescreen enabling press offices to refuse cars to old, perhaps retired Guild members, to whom they don’t want to lend cars? Or do insurance company records for Guild members show they are more dangerous than other drivers?

Age Concern

I could drive one of these at the SMMT Test Day.
One manufacturer in three must stop selling cars to drivers over 70. If industry publicists are agreed that three score years and ten is the upper age limit for drivers, it follows that it will become a cut-off point for salesmen.

Of 33 makes taking part in next week’s SMMT test day, 22 apply an upper limit of 70 or 75 for journalists. Alfa Romeo, Chevrolet, Honda, Infiniti, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lexus, Proton, Subaru, Toyota and Volvo will welcome older drivers who are, according to the RAC Foundation, amongst the safest on the road. Search Blogspot for Still Safe at 70.

Ford and Renault will allow older drivers into their slower cars. Audi and SEAT raise their disqualifying age to 80.

Of some 300 cars I have tested since I passed 70, all but one have been returned without so much as a scratch. The exception I am sorry to say was an Audi, on which I buckled a door sill on a low car park wall. I have driven Aston Martins, Bentleys, Audi R8s, Porsches, Jaguars and more but now, it seems, the PRs are imposing some kind of ageist apartheid. It can only be inferred that they will stop selling cars to anybody over 70.

I could, of course, easily fall off the edge of the Millbrook test track next week, if I go. Nobody’s perfect. But after something like two million accident-free miles (save for a couple of minor blemishes mentioned in the Blog) I hope to get away with it for a bit longer. The SMMT says the age limit is imposed by car companies’ insurers. My insurers find me safe enough, my licence is clean; I had some speeding misdemeanours when I was younger but I try and remain within the law nowadays.
Or I could drive one of these: splendid Jaguar engine at Geneva last year

Highway Code

You don't expect The Highway Code to carry political messages although, of course, it does. Herbert Morrison, Minister of Transport in 1931 and Lord Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, described the first in 1931 as: “A code of good manners to be observed by all courteous and considerate persons.” Leslie Hore-Belisha (he of the beacons) wrote in the foreword to the 1935 edition: “In every human activity there is a standard of conduct to which, in the common interest, we are expected to conform.” Yet the compilers could not avoid reflecting social distinctions. Not only is the 1935 driver obviously a professional gentleman, a banker or a doctor perhaps, but the coachman solemnly rotating his whip is conducting a carriage for nobility or gentry.

By the 1946 edition the socialists were in power, so perhaps in view of the shorter tenure expected of Ministers of Transport, no name is attached to the Foreword. The signalling driver is now obviously middle class. No more a racy 2-seater, his car is an upright saloon alongside a cloth-capped cyclist. The coach has been replaced by something working-class, looking suspiciously like a brewer’s dray.

The pictures come from Highway Code (Michael O’Mara Books, 2008), which very sensibly comments that stopping distances in the 2007 Highway Code were the same as those in the 1946 edition. Officialdom never really understood stopping distances. The late Jeff Daniels and I once did a feature in Autocar debunking police theories on estimating cars’ speeds from skid marks. Disc brakes, grippy tyres, decent servos and anti-lock mechanisms, not to mention other improvements in car behaviour have always been well beyond the reach of a bureaucratic mind.

Volvo crash test

Crash tests are spectacular affairs. Volvo has just marked the tenth anniversary of its crash-test laboratory by performing three sorts of impact tests before a hundred journalists. All the computer simulations in the world can’t prove what happens in real life crashes but it is just as well that the science of testing has improved. Mercedes-Benz has been doing them since the 1930s. I went to one, it must have been about 1970 because it was a Chrysler 180, a slightly lugubrious car designed in Coventry as a big Humber but made in France. They had a crash test facility, on a sort of coal tip near Paris, in which they sped a car on a kind of chain drive affair, into a concrete block. It all went wrong. The roof crumpled, the doors flew open, the windscreen fell out and the passenger compartment was crushed; it was just as well nobody was inside because they’d have been killed. The press officer who’d invited us was aghast, tried to explain that there had been a miscalculation over the impact speed.
No chance of that with Volvo. They have done 3000 crash tests and say: “The degree of precision in a test in which two moving cars collide at 31 mph is 2.5 centimetres. This corresponds to two thousandths of a second. By way of comparison, a blink of the human eye takes about 60 thousandths of a second.” A concrete slab is used for tests including rollovers and avoidance or mitigation of a crash. The crash block weighs 850 tonnes and is moved around on air cushions. Volvo has a team of 100 crash-test dummies: men, women and children-shaped, of different sizes and ages with advanced measuring instruments configured for different crashes. In 2001 Volvo was made a centre of excellence by proprietors Ford, crash-testing Aston Martins, Jaguars, Land Rovers and Ford as well as Volvo cars and trucks.

IAM Safe Cycling

It is reassuring to get some common sense on safety. You can generally rely on the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM). Cycle training, it says, would be better for safety than making helmets compulsory. An online poll of 6,000 found only 1 per cent support for compulsory cycle helmets. More cycle lanes would be better still. Duncan Pickering, IAM Cycling Development Manager, said: “It is encouraging that people see additional public money – by extension further training and improved infrastructure – as the most important factor affecting cyclist’s safety. We would never discourage cyclists from wearing helmets. Cyclist behaviour, awareness of other road users and visibility would make a bigger difference.” Roundheads always imagine you can achieve things by compulsion, regulations, bans or prohibitions. They do not always work. Look at the ban on mobile phones while driving, which outgoing governors Ed Balls and Harriet Harman flout. Who remembers cycling with a Cyclemaster? Here is a 1952 one that took some of the effort out of cycling. It was 32cc and a 2-stroke and didn’t do much for a bicycle’s centre of gravity. It is in the motorcycle museum at Bakewell.

Still safe at 70

Porsche once cancelled a road test car. I had been booked a 911 Turbo but at the last minute I couldn’t have it. Why? It was, they said, an insurance problem. I pointed out that in some 40 years of road testing I had never crashed a car. One scrape with a tram in Geneva, an Opel ran into me in Stuttgart once but curiously both times I had heads of PR with me as passengers and they accepted I was blameless. I was once run into by an RAC Rally competitor on the wrong side of the road but that scarcely counted. No, the problem, it seemed, was that I had reached 70. Too old to drive a Porsche? Too old to buy a Porsche maybe. I told the PR office I was writing a piece about an age limit on Porsche buyers. I got my road test. The RAC Foundation’s findings that I am among the 3.7 million drivers, born before the war, who are among the safest on the road are welcome. I shall try and keep it that way.

I liked the 911: I wrote in The Business magazine “Mid-engines are best for handling and Porsche never made a racing car with the engine anywhere else. It is a matter, as engineers will tell you of polar moment of inertia, the dumb-bell effect. Weights on the ends of a pole aren’t easy to swing round. But put them near the middle and it is. Hanging the engine out the back didn’t matter in the 1938 Volkswagen; it didn’t go fast enough. It was only when its designer’s son Ferry Porsche developed a sports car, that tail-heavy oversteer made the handling a challenge.

The 1960s 911 turned challenge into confrontation. A powerful flat-six engine instead of a feeble flat-four, together with swing-axles that tipped the rear wheels on corners, made it problematical. Yet perversely some drivers found the difficulties thrilling, which indeed they were so in the 1970s Porsche made perfectly balanced front-engined cars instead. The 924, 928, and 944 handled consummately; their poise was beyond reproach.”