Hyper

Spin doctors and politicians – they are practically interchangeable. With such media hype it’s a wonder we ever get to the truth. Patrick McLoughlin the transport secretary told Sky News yesterday that electric cars were “fantastic”. Nobody contradicted him. Nobody said, “Get a life. It’s not true. It is a myth invented by greenies and political fellow-travellers. Electric cars are dead.”

He claimed: “They’re not town cars at all. They are fantastic cars; they’re built to a very high specification. Take one out and drive it.” Patrick McLoughlin aka Jim Hacker. Yes Minister was no comedy. It was a real life documentary. McLoughlin will be at the Ministry this morning making sure Sir Humphrey saw him on television, announcing a £37 million giveaway for plug-in chargers in homes, streets and railway stations.

The minister trumpeted that people would be increasingly attracted to electric cars, because charging batteries at home would be cheaper and faster than buying fuel at a filling station. What claptrap. He admitted confidence in electric cars would take time but the same was true of unleaded petrol.
“Buying a car is expensive, but I think if you look at the overall time and money you save by not having to put fuel in them, they are very serious competitors,” he said. “I’m pretty sure there will be a market. It’s a lot cleaner technology as well.” Who spun him all this rubbish? We have been listening to such bleats for a quarter of a century and there are still only a handful of electric cars.
He was careful to backtrack on numbers, “I’m not going to make a prediction of exactly how many cars are going to be on the roads or whether they’ll be electric or petrol. It’ll take a while to get the confidence about battery life. But it’s coming. They are fantastic developments and fantastic achievements by companies operating in Britain and being built by British engineers.”

Poor McLoughlin. He warbled on that since Nissan and Toyota are investing “huge amounts of money” in electric vehicles they would not be doing so if they did not believe a potential market existed. He obviously had no idea a Prius is a hybrid, and nobody told him Toyota has just scrapped plans for an electric minicar. Toyota said it had misread the market, didn’t believe battery technology was up to it and will go for hydrogen instead.

Word from the sponsor

Range Rover stuck on gently sloping driveway. Defender pulled from a ditch. Featured on last night’s Channel 5 Winter Rescue documentary. The RAC had to pull the Range Rover on a towrope and the Defender seemed to have slid off a snowy road. Neither looked badly stuck at all; I’m sure I could have driven them out without any trouble. Yet the TV programmers made a great display of the heroism of the crews tasked with getting threm back on their wheels. Now, I am not patronising the rescuers. They do sterling work. But dwelling on the Range Rover, and making a big issue of it maybe slipping down a steep bank raised a doubt. It may not have been stage-managed, but making an inconvenience into a crisis, as TV doc producers tend to do made it seem contrived. Come the commercial break all was clear. The series is sponsored by Jeep. Too tempting? I am sure Jeep would never play tricks. But a Channel 5 anxious to please just might. What does Land Rover say?

Pedestrian Passengers

So, patsy hacks have tested the Jaguar F-type from the passenger’s seat. It really won't do. Jaguar’s step-by-step PR will be successful because there is so much interest in the car. Giles Smith of The Sunday Times and Jamie Merrill of the Independent on Sunday could scarcely say no to the invitation. “Come to the Gaydon test track,” it trilled, “you can look and ride in but not drive.” I had invitations to be driven by show-off test drivers and invariably turned them down. Sometimes a manufacturer didn’t want to risk a bad report. Sometimes it only had the one car. I would not imagine this applies at Jaguar. It just wants to raise awareness while production gets (maybe slowly) under way.

I went to the Gaydon test track in 1968 for British Leyland tests, principally for the Austin 3 Litre and the MGC. The Austin felt designed by the truck division, even though its code-name ADO61 made out it had come from the Austin Drawing Office. It rolled and wallowed on corners and was ungainly, badly proportioned and clumsy. Cash strapped Leyland couldn’t afford a fresh set of doors so it used those of the 1800. In fact almost the entire centre section was ADO17 except for a huge transmission tunnel. ADO17 was transverse-engined and front wheel drive. ADO61 had a 3 litre C-series 7-bearing engine in-line under the long bonnet, driving the rear wheels. It had independent suspension with trailing arms at the back and Hydrolastic interconnected springing. Self-levelling pressurised by an engine-driven pump added to the complication.

Poor Raymond Baxter, who had taken over as director of motoring publicity, had an impossible job. Lugubrious was all you could call it. BL introduced a Morris 1300 Mk2 and some Mini options at the same event, as well as the MGC. This suffered, like the 2 Litre and most BL creations of the time from understeer which, as the late Jeff Daniels who crops up in several of my pictures described it, “of a most determined kind”. I re-tested an outgoing MGC later, modified by University Motors, from which a lot of the understeer had been banished and it was not at all a bad car.

Neither the MG, billed as a replacement for the big Austin-Healey, not the Austin 3 Litre survived long. Symptomatic of BL indecision, the Austin was designed with twin headlamps, but pre-production focus groups thought the car so ugly they were replaced by the rectangular ones in my pictures. By the time production began the twins were reinstated. Three years and 10,100 cars later the awful Austin was quietly dropped, unmourned. A smart test driver at Gaydon might have been able to disguise the understeer. I drove it and was able to warn readers in time.

Land Rover File: 65 Anniversary Edition

Out Now as an ebook Land Rover 65

Maria Sharapova, Marilyn Monroe and the queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips add piquancy to an endless stream of Defender, Freelander, Discovery and Range Rover in the 65th anniversary Land Rover File, out now. It celebrates Land Rover reaching a mature (pensionable) age. The anniversary marks Land Rover’s appearance at the Amsterdam Motor Show in April 1948. A basic, slightly rural vehicle made to the exemplary engineering standards of Rover cars, it seemed uncertain whether it was a car or a small truck. The Autocar thought it “A practical road and cross country vehicle.” The Motor was cautious of “… a vehicle intended to bash over far-flung parts of the empire on unmetalled tracks. So why should it be built with the same care as a Rover car? Surely something more agricultural would be better and cheaper.” SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle) was not yet invented and coming from one of Britain’s leading car factories it was obviously important. Rover, “One of Britain’s Fine Cars”, however thought of it as a temporary measure to see it through steel rationing and difficult markets.

Orders flooded in after showing it off at the Bath and West Show the month after Amsterdam, assuring Land Rover’s future. It saw farmers and small businesses through the aftermath of war, the first year’s production was only 3048 but 8000 were made in 1949, doubling to 16,000 in 1950. Rover was soon turning out 1,000 a week, earning over £2.5 million a year in foreign currency. A bewildering assortment of open and closed Land Rovers, fire engines, military and civilian followed, doing service in every desert, jungle, swamp, mountain and trouble spot throughout the world. Defender, Range Rover, Discovery, Freelander, Evoque and Range Rover Sport are detailed in The Land Rover File, with detailed specifications, descriptions and photographs. Roger Crathorne, Heritage and Technical PR Manager for Land Rover writes in a Foreword: “The story of a stop-gap model that became a world wide success has been told in hundreds of books, some written not only about one model or series, but just about one particular car. The Land Rover File covers the entire span in one work of reference that answers most of the questions people ask. Departments and executives inside Land Rover rely on what Eric Dymock and his researchers have chronicled as an independent author. We may not agree with him on absolutely everything but we use this book as a working document and I commend it as objective, truthful, packed with good pictures and down-to-earth detail.”

Out now, price £22.50. 416 pages
New photographs, details and specifications of every Land Rover Defender, Freelander, Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Discovery and Evoque including the aluminium Range Rover, military, special and expedition Land Rovers.

The definitive book on every Land Rover since 1948, with company history and comprehensive index.

Foreword by legendary Land Rover Heritage and Technical Manager Roger Crathorne.

Land Rover File 65 Anniversary Edition ISBN 978-0-9569533-6-0

Seat belts

The Institute of Advanced Motorists is upset that one in five drivers knows somebody who doesn’t use a seatbelt. In America they think being told to wear a seat belt is an infringement of personal liberty and in New Hampshire only 72 per cent of drivers wear them. They had to invent an America-only kind of seat belt that fastened on you automatically when you shut the car door. Here 95 per cent of drivers and front seat occupants wear them. It’s 30 years since they were made mandatory and I can believe the statistics that show how many lives they have saved. Yet I can remember the furore that accompanied the law; it was like the one that made motorcyclists wear crash helmets. There was a gung-ho minority that thought it was effete and safety gear of any sort was counter-intuitive. That is to say if you had too much of it and felt too secure you would take more risks. Well, it hasn’t worked out like that. Maybe there are a few hooligans in their belted-in, air-bagged cocoons who think they are immortal, but who would want to go back to the bad old days? I’m not sure I would welcome the big harnesses I fitted in my first Mark 1 Sprite. It took Nils Bohlin (1920-2002) of Volvo to invent the simple lap and diagonal in 1958 and save a million lives.

What are your views on safety legislation? Have you ever been saved by a seat belt, airbag or roll-hoop?

Intrepid diver

The TV ad for the pillarless Ford B-Max is real. No tricksy photo-shopping. Bobby Holland-Hanton really did go head first through the 1.5metre gap of a suspended B-Max to show Life-Is-An-Open-Door. Viewers see him climbing stairs to the diving board. However he was really suspended from a crane for the stunt proper. Bobby works on Bond movies so, on this occasion, the only shooting was by the camera.

Of course, pillarless 4-doors are by no means new. They were relatively easy to make when any self-respecting Rolls-Royce or Daimler had a stout chassis to keep them from sagging when the doors were open. Their structure had the integrity of a railway carriage and your footman turned a stout handle to latch a door. One did not stoop; one preserved one’s dignity getting in or coming down.
But come cars with unitary bodies it wasn’t easy to make. Doors were getting smaller and not many were able to dispense with the B-pillar. Fiat had the pillarless Ardita in 1934, and persisted with pillarlessness until the 1100 of 1952. Triumph tried it in Britain and Licorne in France, but structures tended to wilt with age. They rattled and leaked; a middle pillar held the roof and floor together. Or apart.
MG K-types (top) came in two wheelbase lengths, 9ft, or 7ft 10-and three-sixteenths of an inch. It was not a monocoque. It had a chassis and bodywork that owed something to the ash-framing and bespoke panel-beating of the coaching era. Rods inside the doors fitted catches in the roof and floor and access was relatively easy, despite the car being barely 4ft 6in tall. A long 6-cylinder engine, even of a modest 1100cc, put a premium on passenger space, so reaching seats without dodging round a middle prop was vital. The engine was a Wolseley-derived cross-flow, you could have a Wilson preselective gearbox instead of a non-synchromesh manual, but suspension was by cart springs.

The Lancia Aprilia of 1937-1939 was a little masterpiece. All-independently sprung (sliding pillars in front, transverse leaf and torsion bar at the back) and a narrow-angle ohv V4 engine, it had hydraulic brakes and was good for 80mph. A striking looking car, some 15,000 were made before the war.
Ford’s B-Max has a rear door that slides. Mazda’s RX7 (below) has a small half rear door with a concealed handle, exact, precise graceful. It’s an ideal formula for a small, perfectly proportioned sporty car barely 4ft tall. Surprising, really, that Cecil Kimber never thought of that dinky back door.

see diver