Global Warming

Global warming alarmists are losing the plot. You can tell it by the way they suggest anybody who disagrees with them is close to a holocaust denier, and probably a gross polluter. David Aaronovitch (Strip away the figleaf and reveal naysayers: The Times November 24) adds a predictable canard that, “The witless have permission to drive Porsche Cayenne Turbos”. There is no mistaking the malevolence, convincing me once again that Private Willis in Iolanthe knew what he was singing about, concluding that Nature shared out political views at birth. Alas WS Gilbert's 19th century distinction between Liberal and Conservative was too restrictive. In reality it is between Cavaliers, convinced practicality will see them through, and Roundheads, dirigiste, fundamentalist, pioneers of political correctness who always know what is best for everybody. Cavaliers view government as a sort of referee rather than a maker of restrictive laws and regulations. Roundheads are disciplined, severe and disapproving, convinced of life’s wretchedness and determined to Do Something About It. The division is as fundamental as gender, profound as tall and short, indelible as race or colour and transcends political boundaries. There are Cavaliers and Roundheads on both sides of the House.

Take speed cameras and congestion charging. Cavaliers hate them as Big Brotherly, oppressive, harsh and in the end ineffectual. Roundheads love them. They imagine they punish offenders, organise traffic, and pour cash into the public purse. Take global warming. Cromwell (Oliver not Thomas) would have embraced it as a common cause, requiring action from all to avert hellfire and damnation. Charles I would have treated such doomsters with disdain, remembered the cold snap in the Middle Ages, and driven off in his Porsche Cayenne Turbo, the masterpiece of precision and fuel efficiency.

Cromwell suffered pangs of conscience as he browbeat peasants into compliance, all for their own good you understand, while Charles lost his head. However, come the Restoration common wealth proved to be nothing of the sort, common sense prevailed and the People’s Republic of England collapsed. You can scare some of the people some of the time, but you can not scare all the people all the time and as John Brignell put it, in his review of Christopher Booker and Richard North’s book, Scared to Death, a phenomenon of our age began, “That returned us to the primitive state of our superstitious ancestors, with their witch hunts.” The Aids epidemic was a prototype scare. The UN has since admitted it grossly exaggerated its scope and effects, but scare nevertheless followed scare. There was hysteria about listeria, mad cow disease, the millenium bug, satantic abuse, speed killing, lead in petrol, human CJD, E Coli, passive smoking, asbestos and now there is global warming. Politicians and scientists played charades, created legislation, bureaucracy blossomed, lawyers prospered and the sight of world leaders jostling for attention in Copenhagen provides no reassurance at all that global warming is yet another, following the same ruinous course as the others. The only crumb of comfort is that, as Cromwell was one of the first to discover and Aaronovitch will too, Roundheads, in the end, lose.


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Audi and Chevrolet

Electric cars have not moved on a lot since this motoring column in The Sunday Times of 14 January 1990. Hybrids may be a production reality and they are smaller, but not much lighter, than the prototype Audi, which had 181kg (400lb, 3.6cwt) of battery. Pure electric cars are still bedeviled by the difficulties Camille Jenatzy faced in 1899. As I put it 91 years later, electric vehicles can go a long way slowly or a short way quickly, but not both. A hundred and ten years further on there is a lot of talk about municipal charging stations, but California's demand for 1.7million electric cars by the year 2000, and seven out of ten on the Sunshine State roads by now remains unattainable. Government targets...

As in 1990 so also now, GM talks airily about the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid, which sounds neither one thing nor the other. CEO Fritz Henderson echoes Roger Smith 20 years ago when he claims the project is, "all-important for us." A spokesman promised the Volt was, "absolutely on target and that will not change. It is as high a priority as we have in this company." Motor industry public relations statements are high in vacuity. Output of pre-production Volts is planned at ten a week, with 80 on the road as press cars and test vehicles. It is a modest aim. One suspects GM's heart is not in it beyond an ambition to appease politicians. The Volt only does 40 miles on one three-hour charge of its lithium-ion batteries, which at 170kg (375lb, 3.34cwt) are not much of an improvement over the 1990 Audi. Volts might only cover 30 miles if there are hills or if you are in a hurry to get to the office. And at an on-the-road price of $40,000 you have to take a low-carbon footproint very seriously.

JAGUAR XF

2010 JAGUAR 3.0 Diesel Portfolio

So Jaguar, it seems, was beleaguered the year the Berlin Wall came down. The XJ220 did not come out quite like the one I described in The Sunday Times on 10 December 1989. This was the year classic car prices peaked and convinced they were going to go on increasing, like art treasures, dealers were in a frenzy. I watched one sell a car in an afternoon, for £3,000 more than he had paid for it that morning. In the end all they were doing was selling cars to other dealers, only to discover that there were not enough “speculators” to go round, and the bubble burst. Even sober firms like Jaguar were tempted to join in, however, by the time the XJ220 got into production, with a turbocharged V6 instead of a V12, the price had gone up to £290,000. There was talk of a production run of 350 but only 280 were ever made.

Jaguar is still a bit beleaguered. Ford ownership came and went. The idea that it could go into the volume business against BMW and Mercedes-Benz came and went as well. Now it wants to compete at the premium end of the market with Porsche, all a bit of a change from when Jaguar challenged keenly on value, putting Armstrong Siddeley, Alvis and others completely out of the luxury car business. The answer to “How do they do it at the price?” was by reducing overheads; Sir William Lyons imposed strict control. Only the topmost executives actually got a Jaguar with the job. The Browns Lane car park was full of Ford Prefects and Hillman Minxes.

I have been driving the 2010 XF 3.0 diesel Portfolio at £41,500, half the price of a Porsche Panamera, but in driving quality surely a match. Swift, smooth, quiet, refined, Jaguar has long mastered the bugbear of so many competitors, road noise. Ruth thought there was a bit of rustle from the wind at motorway speeds but that was only because everything else is so quiet. Jaguars have been superior

The XF’s little ceremony when you press Start is engaging. The gear selector rises obediently out of the console, the air vents swing open, the facia display lights up and you feel at once in control. It is a bit of whimsy, yet part of a policy of lifting Jaguar into the 21st century after the misapprehension that customers wanted Jaguars to look the way Jaguars used to look. This did not give the engineering much chance to shine and I suppose that build quality and exclusiveness now compensates for the old bargain prices.

How astonishing that the E-type was introduced (inflation notwithstanding) for a basic £1550, or £2200 with tax. The XF’s naught to sixty in less than 7 seconds and top speed of 150 is about the same as an E-type, although not much else is remotely similar. The E-type did about 18mpg, the XF 42. The fuel tank size is about the same, 14 gallons against the XF’s 15.3, which gives the large 5-seater a range of 643 miles against the 2-seater’s 250.

If it keeps making cars like this, Jaguar will lift the beleaguredship.

SKODA: The Forgotten Years

Dark satantic mills wasn't in it. The first time I went to the Skoda factory at Mlada Boleslav in 1962, the communists were in charge, the cars were terrible and the factory was a ramshackle collection of timber-framed old buildings that all seemed to be on different levels. A lot of the 10,000 workers, who produced 200 cars every day, were women. Nothing wrong with that but a lot of the others were prisoners out on parole. Nobody could be sacked; even gross dereliction of duty only meant demotion, and the factory was plastered with pictures of President Novotny, Lenin and workers marching shoulder to shoulder clutching spanners. Red Starred exhortations to work for the glory of the CSSR might have been so much wallpaper, compared to the effect my official guide had on account of his position in the local ice-hockey team. Drab cars, drab place, and even if you had enough crowns to pay the hefty deposit adding your name to the Mototechna state car sales organisation, you still had eighteen months to wait for one of the spindly Felicias or Octavias. These were front-engined throwbacks to an earlier age, with swing-axle suspension and wobbly handling. The transverse leaf springing at the front was replaced with coil springs before Skoda went over to the rear-engined1000MB in 1965, which was an effort to copy a Renault Dauphine - not a good start. Astonishing to think they carried on making the wretched things until 1977.

Well it's not like that now. Last time I went, the factory was a model of what a car factory should be. A smooth-running production line with a horde of mini-factories feeding in bits made by outside suppliers at the appropriate moments. A lot of the workers were still women but the proportion of paroled prisoners was smaller.

It is quite easy to forget Skoda's astonishing industrial past. The Prague-born authors of the book (reviewed above in The Sunday Times, 15 November 1992) gave a splendid and well-researched account, going back to the long-established firm of Laurin & Klement, which Skoda took over in 1925. It detailed Ferdinand Porsche's connections with the armaments side of the company in the 1930s, one photograph showing Porsche at the wheel of one of his failures, a military cross-country tow truck, which churned to a stop on a muddy hillside during tests attended by Hitler. Pressed into service by the Nazis, the Skoda factory was bombed by the American Eighth Air Force. In the closing days of the war the fleeing Luftwaffe attacked it again to try and prevent its expertise and facilities falling into the wrong hands. Skoda's takeover by the Volkswagen Group, spiritual successors of Dr Porsche, was documented in the closing chapter of a book that was an important contribution to the history of the European motor industry.


This is not a Skoda. This is the wonderful Waverley, the world's last sea-going paddle steamer, in the Kyles of Bute. photo Eric Dymock