VW, Deutsche Post, University of Art, Braunschweig

Electric cars are over-hyped. Hardly anybody buys them. Hybrids with engines that charge batteries are practical; some such as the Toyota Prius sell quite well. But the whole industry is too excited about Evs, and is only preparing itself for the day when politicians outlaw petrol and diesel.
Back in November 1991 California legislature demanded that, “by 2010 seven cars out of ten will be electric”. It hasn’t happened and despite desperate efforts by the motor industry to persuade the world it is green, it won’t. Not yet anyway. You can’t store electricity in a tank, like you can petrol, and the only way we’ll have electric cars is by having two - one car for Town, one car for Country. That’s not very Green.

VW, however, has a hopeful little invention that follows historical precedents. It is the ingenious product of VW’s co-operation with the German Post Office (Deutsche Post AG) and the University of Art at Braunschweig. Dr. Rudolf Krebs, Group Manager for Electric Traction at Volkswagen AG describes the eT! as an automotive building block for zero emissions in urban areas. It has electric wheel hub motors and great freedom in manoeuvering. “If ‘refuelled’ with electricity generated from renewable energy sources, the eT! could indeed be operated with zero emissions,” says Dr Krebs.

Historical precedent 1. Ferdinand Porsche designed hub-mounted motors for his Lohner Porsches at the beginning of the 20th century. They do not require drive-shafts, gear trains or brakes. (Above) This Lohner Porsche had hub-motors in front; some were four wheel drive.

Historical precedent 2. When VW was run under the British military government of 1945 its principal customers were the British army and the German Post Office. The army bought VWs as communications and staff cars, the post office for delivering mail in the war-torn country.

It was Reichspost before it was Bundespost
Deutsche Post is still one of the largest customers of lightweight commercial vehicles, and wants a postal van that can operate semi-automatically. eT! can follow a postman from house to house (“Follow me”), or return on command (“Come to me”) – driverless. It can be operated by a ‘drive stick’ from the passenger’s side and its electric sliding door reduces a delivery person’s walking movements.


The eT! concept shown in a world premiere at the Design Centre of Potsdam will now be analysed. Let us hope if it ever gets made they find a name without the !

Fedden's Mistake

Roy Fedden is remembered unkindly for his disastrous foray into making cars in the 1940s. Yet the more you look into the career and inventions of Professor Dr.Ing. (honoris causa) Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) the more you see what Fedden was driving at.

It was far sighted in 1942 to begin work on a British Volkswagen. In Germany the factory was doing war work but the VW’s merits were acknowledged by a handful of individuals in Bristol, among them motoring journalist Gordon Wilkins, who had gone to the Volkswagen factory inauguration in 1938. Alec Moulton, who won fame as inventor of a key component of the Mini also worked with Fedden, chief engineer of the Bristol Aeroplane Company.

Bristol had been making four out of every ten RAF aero engines and Fedden knew this would be much reduced after the war. He had been promoted as special adviser to the Minister for Aircraft Production, the ascetic vegetarian socialist MP for Bristol Sir Stafford Cripps. With the connivance of the Ministry of Production and the Industrial Supply Division of the Board of Trade, he put a team together in 1944, working at Benton House, Cheltenham. Other motor industry firms were refused similar facilities, raising questions in the House of Commons.

Fedden faced down the critics, Rolls-Royce and Jowett among them, and carried on. Materials were sanctioned for six prototypes, although only one was built, and once Germany was defeated Fedden went on a commission inspecting what was left. The Allies confiscated patents and intellectual property, so he came back from Wolfsburg with a Type 60 rolling chassis. Established UK manufacturers rejected it but the war-time team had already been at work on a rear-engined Beetle-shaped six-seater, and wanted to know how its creation compared with Dr Porsche’s.

They knew that in 1930 the twelfth assignment of the newly created Porsche design office at Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen was a people's car. The specification of the Porsche Type 12, dated September 1931, called for a car with a backbone frame, all independent suspension and a three cylinder radial engine at the rear. Gordon Wilkins drew up the prototype’s shape, produced glossy brochures of the F-car, as it came to be known, with a flat floor, all independent suspension and a three cylinder radial engine at the rear.

Bristol specialised in radial engines with sleeve valves, so hanging over the back of the F-car was an aluminium 1495cc air-cooled 1100cc, each cylinder at120 deg to one another. All had three exhaust and two inlet ports, with sleeves operated by half-speed cranks off the vertical crankshaft. It produced 72bhp (53.7kW) at 5000rpm and a respectable 85lbft (114Nm) at 2500rpm.

The appointment of Cripps as President of the Board of Trade in the Attlee government might have helped Fedden make progress, although the Patents Office’s FC Whitteridge thought the design “undeveloped”. Another of the Ministry of Production’s scientific advisers, Sir William Stanier, thought Witteridge’s objections could be met, although as the designer of LMS Coronation, or Duchess class locomotives Stanier’s engineering was in an altogether different league. The Ministry avoided showing it to anybody in the motor industry on the grounds that they might not prove objective, and might even make trouble. It never seems to have occurred to official minds that they might also have pointed out difficulties.

By 1945 these were apparent. Whitteridge had been right. The handling was problematical, stability even in a straight line uncertain, there was bad vibration from the tall 3-cylinder engine, which was noisy and overheated. The swing axles tucked up in a way which later became familiar with turning-over cars like the Renault Dauphine.

VW spent six years developing the Volkswagen Beetle. The handling was never quite right and nobody seriously developed another rear-engined mass-market car in the second half of the 20th century. The radial engine was soon discarded. The VW had an air-cooled flat-4 that at least kept the weight low down. The F-car was heavy and sluggish but it was the handling that did for it in the end. Test driver Alec Caine was badly injured when, inevitably, the prototype overturned and by 1947 the project was dead and the company went into liquidation. Yet given six years’ gestation a British VW might have made it. Bristol pirated a BMW design and went into luxury car making instead.

Sir Albert Hubert Roy Fedden MBE, HonDSc, MIMechE, MIAE, MSAE, HonFRAeS, born 1885, died in 1973.

Acknowledgment: Fedden – the life of Sir Roy Fedden, by Bill Gunston OBE FRAeS; Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust 1998

VW shook off its handling troubles. Scirocco at St Andrews Bay last year.

Lancia by Chrysler

Lancia Beta Spider. Blighted by subframe troubles
Brand names have downsides. Take Lancia. They are going to bring the fetching Ypsilon into Britain as a Chrysler. It will be a Lancia everywhere else. Poor Vincenzo (1881-1937) will spin in his grave at the thought of his progeny being sold in Britain as a Chrysler.

Well proportioned premium small car. New Ypsilon 4-door with coupe style concealed rear door
Fiat-Chrysler is scared of relaunching Lancia in Britain after disasters in the early 1970s over what apologists called ‘quality issues’. Lancia Betas got so rusty that the importer (Britain was one of its biggest export markets) was obliged to buy lots of them back in an effort to hush things up. Ask Andrew Andersz, who had to go on The World at One to defend the indefensible. Subframes rusted so horribly engines could work loose on their mountings and while tales of them actually falling out were probably exaggerated, it was a bad problem. Beta saloons were worst affected and while Coupes and the splendid Montecarlo did not suffer as severely, they did decay much too quickly and Lancia in Britain collapsed and died.

Apocrypha abounded. It was widely supposed that Russian steel imported as part of Fiat’s deal with the Soviets was to blame.

One of the most advanced small saloons of the 1930s, the Lancia Aprilia had all-round independent suspension, V4 engine and hydraulic brakes.
Well, it’s not like that now. Ultra high and high tensile steel makes up 78 per cent of the Ypsilon’s body weight and at 965kg it is one of the lightest cars in its class. It is made on the Fiat small platform at the Tychy plant in Poland. Sales of the current model peaked at 85,000 in 2004; it’s now down to 50,000 and Lancia expects to sell 120,000 a year of the new extremely pretty version once it becomes less reliant on its home market and starts to export. There will be a choice of three engines a 2-cylinder 0.9 litre petrol TwinAir, and two 4-cylinders, a 1.2 petrol and 1.3 diesel. The TwinAir and the diesel with have sub 100 grams per kilometre CO2 emissions. It sells for €12,400 in Italy.

Italian style; Lancia Ypsilon.
So, if you want a premium priced and really stylish small car would you go for a classic make, like Lancia, or a tired plain old Chrysler, which has more skeletons in its cupboard than Lancia. Chysler 180, Talbot Horizon anybody?

Rally Classic: Lancia Stratos

Liberty Belle

Found this marvellous beautiful engine when I went to Duxford for my birthday treat. Aviation writer Bill Gunston says no aircraft engine equals the Liberty V12’s record of quick design, quick qualification and quick mass production. It had a long active life in aeroplanes up to 1935. One is still going, revised a bit, in Babs the exhumed Land Speed Record car of John Godfrey Parry Thomas, who died in it at Pendine Sands.

Produced in a hurry to meet a wartime emergency, the Liberty was designed by Jesse Vincent of Packard and EJ Hall of Hall-Scott in a Washington hotel between 30 May and 4 June 1917. One says ‘designed’ but of course it used features such as the water cooled separate 5x7 inch cylinders from Hall-Scott’s existing San Francisco engines as well as bits of Packard. The Vee was set at 45deg to fit narrow aircraft and the valve gear was exposed. By November 1918 20,478 had been made of the 27 litre engine which, coincidentally, was the same capacity as the 5.4x6in Rolls-Royce Merlin designed in 1933. Not many people know that. Surprise your friends.

Coil ignition was unusual for a 1917 engine

Engines had to be narrow to fit in slim aircraft

Valve gear lived outside
Babs was dug up in 1969 by engineering lecturer Owen Wyn Owen from what had become a military firing range and restored as a tribute to the brave Parry Thomas. The original Liberty, damaged in the crash had rusted over the years and was replaced by one built by Lincoln Cars, its twelve separate cylinders mounted on a Packard-Liberty crankcase.

Pictured at Brooklands in 2007, Babs was being worked up for a demonstration run. The chassis is braced by strut and wire, much as contemporary Bentleys were, to improve stiffness. Lots of batteries were needed to crank the enormous V12. What a noise history makes.

GIORGETTO GIUGIARO: Motoring Mozart

Who remembers the VW Porsche Tapiro? Prototype on the basis of a 914-6, with engine enlarged by Bonomell Tuning to 2.4 litre and 220bhp @ 7800rpm, quite a lot for 1970.
Giorgetto Giugiaro, motoring Mozart, a talented prodigy. I met him for a one-to-one interview in the early days of Italdesign. He wanted to show journalists his studios and establish himself as Giugiaro, not just an ex-Bertone freelance stylist. He liked to be called Giorgetto, a sort of diminutive of Giorgio. “I was baptized Giorgetto,” he told me. What a charmer, not much English at the time but a highly expressive Italian.
Gullwing doors for the passengers and the engine room.
He already had an impressive portfolio of cars, yet you could tell that he was really more pleased with his real art, his strongly coloured impressionist paintings. His grandfather painted church frescoes and his father did decorative religious art. Guigiaro grew up near Cuneo in north west Italy, polishing his natural artistic talent with studies of technical design. He was ambitious. He loved his rural roots but wanted commercial success.
Styling sketch for Tapiro
Born in 1938, his car sketches in a school exhibition were brought to the attention of Dante Giacosa, Fiat’s great technical director, who hired him at once. Giugiaro was just 17. Talent shows. It was a story Ian Callum of Jaguar would re-write years later.
Made for a motor show. Luggage room over the engine.
Giugiaro didn’t seem to be making progress at Fiat’s Special Vehicle Design Study Department so after three years he went to Bertone. Bert One as Autocar colleagues used to call it. Nuccio Bertone had his 21 year old genius produce the memorable BMW 3200CS in 1961, the Fiat 850 Spider and the Dino Coupe of 1965. After six years there Giugiaro went to Ghia, where his Maserati Ghibli and De Tomaso Mangusto were shown at Turin in 1966. I remember the show. Everybody thought them too fantastic yet they set a standard in sports car design for ten years and more. Ghia-Giugiaro designs were bought by Japan, where cars still looked stodgy, and encouraged he set up on his own in 1968.
Perhaps less of a success. The 1971 VW Karmann Cheetah. Longitudinal rear flat-4 of 1584cc and 50bhp.You almost forget how much he has influenced the shape of cars. I came across an Italdesign archive of 2000, which has long lists, some surprises, yet shows how Giugiaro remained true to the crisp brushwork of his early oils to which, he told me, he would return when he grew up.

Toyota and John Cobb

Loch Ness. The John Cobb Memorial. It is opposite the site of his accident on 29 September 1952 attempting the world water speed record in jet-powered Crusader. This photograph, taken later in the 1950s is of drivers on a Scottish rally, including brother Craig (in dark jacket) and John (middle facing left) as well as two whom I used to navigate. Jimmy Murray (facing camera in front of Craig) rallied an MG TD with some success. Directly in front of him, Bill Cleland. They said I was brave sitting alongside Bill in his Ford Zephyr but it wasn’t like that. I was never a good passenger. All the serious accidents I ever had were as a passenger. But I had no qualms with Bill. It was like sitting beside Stirling Moss on the Mille Miglia. It was a lesson in car control. He was very quick. No surprise young John Cleland won two British Touring Car Championships. Toyota has noticed Loch Ness is famous for more than John Cobb.