Rose Tinted Memories

The passage of time does wonders for clouding our sensibilities and I think we can all agree that we tend to view the products of the past with a certain misty eyed affection that places them on a pedestal that they do not necessarily deserve. There are obvious candidates in the form of children’s toys, which I think we can all agree seem to have been cost reduced to the point where they arrive in the box, ready broken, thus circumventing the point ten minutes later when the wailing cries of “It wasn’t my fault!” can be heard after the opening of a new present.

Downfall is a case in point. If you don’t remember this particular game, it involved players sitting either side of a plastic “wall” that contained little wheels featuring slots in which the player’s pieces would drop into if rotated to the correct angle. The aim of the game was to get all your pieces from the top to the bottom by careful rotation of the various differently sized and positioned wheels. The twist was that rotating a wheel on your side of the wall also rotated the wheel on the other player’s side. This meant that you could inadvertently aid your opponent. It really was a tremendously enjoyable game in an innocent age before happy slapping and pre-teen sex.

As I recall, the Downfall of my youth (no pun intended) was constructed of weapons grade plastics of the sort that would ensure that they will be choking up landfills until the end of the universe. Therefore, it was with initial delight, quickly replaced by indignant horror when my niece received a modern day version of this trip down nostalgia lane as a birthday present. Now I appreciate that at 6ft 2” and 15 stone, I’m not the fragile little eight year old I was the first time I helmed the “wheels”, but I was aghast at just how small the modern day version has become. At first I had to double check the box and make sure it wasn’t some kind of pocket travel version, but no, this was the proper “Full English”. Not only had the size reduced considerably, but so had the build quality. It featured that infuriating modern day mix of flimsy parts that wouldn’t fit together resulting in constant near disasters during the assembly process. Then, when after much swearing I’d finally managed to get all the recalcitrant parts together we were simply presented with a solid lump in which the wheels didn’t turn, which seemed to somewhat undermine the entire core of the game.

Truth be told, despite various build issues marring the experience, in this modern age of massively interactive video games and personalised music collections that can fit on players the size of a large postage stamp, games like Downfall just don’t seem to have the ability to captivate like they did 30 years ago. So with a heavy heart and the oft used declaration of “They don’t make them like they used to” I discarded it to one side and turned my attention to unwinding the millions of twistix ties holding my niece’s Bratz doll and each of the individual accessories to the cardboard packaging.

Video games are another example of the ever marching progress of a medium. If you were to frequent many of the internet gaming forums, you would get the impression that video games “just aren’t as good as they used to be”. Internet forums are chock full of conversations between gamers stating that they spent years of their life on game “X” and nothing in the modern day realm can hold their attention to the same level. However, the wide availability of emulators allows us to revisit many of the games of our youth and the one bit of advice I would give you is, DON’T DO IT! Memories should be just that, memories. Revisiting a 20 year old game is only going to destroy the once iconic status that it held. Let’s face it, what was once ground breaking quickly becomes mundane or positively archaic. A friend of mine and I recently made the mistake of revisiting some of the games of our youth via the numerous emulators available and the evening resulted in us sitting despondently on the sofa beers in hand and our memories in tatters. Memories should be talked about and no more; that way we can relish in all the positive feelings that they instil without bringing them into the cold light of modern day which would rudely cast them into comparison with their modern day contemporaries.

This brings me neatly(ish) to memories of one of my favourite cars of my past, the Renault 25. If you’ve just spat your hot tea over yourself, I do apologise, but please, allow me to continue.

Now I appreciate the R25 shouldn’t be considered a classic, but for me, it falls into the same category as other guilty pleasures, such as Smokey and the Bandit (and therefore the 77 Trans Am), that have indelibly lodged themselves in my childhood brain that even to this day refuse to loosen their grip.

I can remember on my paper round seeing pictures of the R25 and it just seemed impossibly ahead of its time compared with the immediate competition. In an age of rather dull and boxy looking Granada’s, Senator’s, Merc’s and BMW’s, the R25 seemed to have arrived straight from the future. Admittedly, this was a future that seemed to borrow quite heavily from Citroen and Rover, but nevermind. It featured cutting edge technology like remote central locking, finger tip controls for the 6 speaker stereo and a dashboard that did quite a good impression of a music studio mixing desk and was far more interesting to behold (possibly at the expense of use) compared to the usual black cliff faces of its competitors, even more so at night, where it took on the look of the deck of the Starship Enterprise.

I even tried to influence my dad’s company car decision making process by leaving magazines and newspapers open on adverts for the Monaco edition, thinking the standard leather seats would impress him, whilst not appreciating that the metallic brown exterior finish was probably not to his taste. Dad’s excuse at the time was that he didn’t want a foreign car and then proceeded to tick the box for a Rover 800, by origin, a Japanese car with all the reliable bits replaced with items from the Lucas parts bin. So daydreams of cruising around in an R25 would have to wait until the miracles of full time paid employment, bank loans and the ravishes of depreciation finally brought R25 ownership within my grasp.

And so, for the princely sum of £1700, C222 DYA, a metallic burgundy, phase one, 2.2 litre GTX proudly secreted its fluids outside my parent’s house. Many of my friends at the time had somewhat more mundane (read insurable) cars, so the Big Regie was something of an eye popper for them. Here was a car that had a speedometer that rose quicker than the rev counter on their Belmont’s and Nova’s, had a thumping stereo, without the need to remove and replace the interior in order to fit something from Halfords, seated five in chain smoking comfort and featured a huge boot with drop down rear seats that turned it into a mobile home at music festivals. Sweet!

Performance (at the time) was superb and I can remember blitzing many an XR2 driver at the traffic light grand prix and even ditching the odd Golf GTI driver down some of my favourite twisties (although in hindsight this may have had more to do with my sense of immortality than the car’s abilities). I freely admit my example wasn’t in pristine condition. In my feverish state to take ownership, it wasn’t until I got it home that I realised the glove box was missing, although a quick visit to the local breakers soon fixed that. Another problem (although this had been pointed out by the seller) was that the fuel sender tended to stick when the tank was empty. Filling the tank to the brim seemed to release the sender, but occasions when I could afford to do this were rare, so in my tenure, the fuel gauge only worked for about a week (i.e. until I’d drained the tank after the one and only time I’d brimmed it). For the rest of the time it reported the tank (verbally by the inbuilt voice synthesiser) as being resolutely empty. The usefully accurate average mpg readout and my ability to remember how much I’d put in, meant I only ran out of fuel twice.

Ownership was hardly trouble free and visits to the Renault parts counter usually resulted in me being carried out on a stretcher after some open wallet surgery, followed by much tittering from my Ford and Vauxhall owning mates who would finally have something to crow about as they pointed out that a similar part for their car cost three and six pence. And yes, when the front shocks needed changing, trying to find someone other than Renault (and their exorbitant labour rates) to undertake the work did prove to be something of a trial; I also become so adept at taking the instrument binnacle out to change an ever expiring collection of bulbs that I could do it blindfolded (probably), like a green beret stripping his rifle. That there was nowhere to put you left foot, headroom was tight and on cold mornings, the constant squeaking from the replacement glove box was the cause of many near misses as I kept leaning across to give it a corrective bang were also a constant in my ownership experience. Then there’s the time that after a high speed run up the M1, the radiator hose let go and it stranded me by the roadside and I had to wait for two hours for the AA (to the sound of much derisory honking from motorists I’d “blitzed” sometime earlier……). Plus there was the time in London on a scorching hot day whilst performing a three point turn in a side street, the radiator fan fell off, stripping all the blades and resulted in a drive home with the heaters full on to prevent overheating (plus yet another visit to the breakers). One evening my friend managed to crash into it whilst he tried jump start his car (another R25), backwards, down a hill (needless to say, there’s a story behind that). That was probably the closet I’ve come to tears that something of mine has been damaged since I was about six and my sister fell on my cash till from a great height (there’s a story behind that too….).

But these are all mere details smoothed over by the passage of time that are now just part of my soft focussed memories. Equally, I can remember all the times I’d shown a clean pair of heals to some ill advised young blade in their asthmatic nova with a cherry bomb exhaust. A particular point that sticks out in my mind was the time at the local jet wash. A rather “moneyed” woman, in her 40’s I imagine (and not unattractive as I recall), was waiting behind me. She had a Merc, can’t recall the exact model, but I think it was an E-Class of the W124 variety. To this day I still remember her comment of “nice car” and I kid you not, she wasn’t being condescending. This was a genuine compliment. I like to think that this lady of means and taste felt compelled to comment that someone of youth (and thus usually devoid of all taste) had purchased a car of (relative) style and not gone down the usual “Essex” route for their choice of wheels.

Unfortunately, C222 DYA came to a rather ignoble end. A year of being thrashed to within an inch of its life had taken its toll. The retention pins on second gear had become a little less than steely of grip, so full bore blasts from the lights often resulted in the gearbox being thrown into neutral. Whilst driving in the torrential rain down the M4, the onboard talking computer suddenly announced that there was an electrical malfunction. Erring on the side of caution I pulled over to the hard shoulder to investigate if there was some loose connection, but as I opened the door an articulated lorry was passing and the slipstream ripped the door from my hand. The force of this bent the hinges sufficiently that the leading edge of the door fouled the trailing edge of the front wing, bending it inwards. The final death knell came a few days later when a miscalculation on my part resulted in my second (and final) inadvertent draining of the fuel tank contents. Unfortunately, on this occasion dirt had obviously clogged something in the fuel system, because after this, the car wouldn’t idle without stalling. A temporary solution on my part was to fix the accelerator cable so that the car idled at a not inconsiderable two thousand rpm; fine once up to speed, but start / stop motoring proved to be a tad stressful to say the least. So an accumulation of abuse on my part meant that C222 DYA was part exchanged for something more modern but decidedly less interesting from the local Rover dealer (there’s a story behind that too…..). I only saw her again once, travelling in the opposite direction on the A21. Some months later, my girlfriend of the time said that she had seen it at the local supermarket car park, but that it had been the subject of a rather Heath-Robinson crash repair, so it was probably best that I hadn’t seen it.

So a rather apologetic end to what had been a glorious year of motoring. Even the bad bits, whilst annoying or stressful at the time, were not without their endearing and / or comical moments. It’s strange to feel guilty about how you treated a collection of metal, rubber and plastic, but with the benefit of age and hindsight, I often have some “if only I’d…” moments and that’s not something I’ve felt about any of my subsequent cars over the years. Cars are getting better all the time. Better built, more refined, more economical and faster, but this constant smoothing of the edges has definitely taken away a lot of personality. Most modern cars can (and should) be admired for what they achieve, but there are very few that you can say have true character in a way that tugs at the emotions. I admire what the Japanese and Germans can achieve, but they’re not countries that I want to visit, efficient but without soul. The motor industry’s obsession with aping the output of these two nations seems to be responsible for the sea of efficient but identikit cars that surround us today. Where’s the passion? Where’s the soul? Where’s the emotion? We’re fast approaching a time where cars will be driving themselves, or at the very least, will be so heavily computer monitored / controlled / overridden, that the joy of motoring will be permanently diluted. Before we get there, it’d be nice to if the motor industry could regain its sense of passion and have a rummage in our pants and tug at our hearts and not focus quite so much on “out cup holdering” each other. Or I could just have my rose tinted spectacles on, remembering a past that I thought, but never really, existed.

The Car Insurance Scam

A colleague at work the other day had his car written off and subsequent conversations about “gap insurance” illustrated once again just how often the modern motorist is constantly being short changed.

Said colleague was sitting at home watching TV when he heard the unmistakable sound of screeching tires and then a sickening crash. The scene outside was that of minor devastation. A car had left the road and in the process just missed a head on impact with an unyielding tree to then hit my colleague’s and his neighbour’s car. The driver of the offending car was found sitting shaking on a wall. Police and ambulance services arrived and the driver was taken to hospital for a check over. The driver was fine and it turned out that he was diabetic and had passed out due to a low blood sugar level. All in all, it was very fortuitous that no one had been hurt or killed, including the driver of the car and any passersby.

Once the dust had settled (sorry, couldn’t resist), the thorny issue of insurance had to be addressed and thus leads me back to my opening statement with regards gap insurance (which fortunately my colleague had in place). It’s always amazed me that car insurance unlike any other form of insurance doesn’t provide a like for like cover. For example, the carpet in my house is old and not in the best condition, but if some unfortunate mishap were to occur (and it often crosses my mind that it’s due some kind of misfortune) then the insurance company would pay for a brand new carpet to be fitted. The insurance company wouldn’t put conditions on the fitting of a carpet. The insurance company wouldn’t suck its metaphoric teeth and say, “well, sorry but you’ve been walking on that carpet and it’s ten years old now, so we’re going to reduce your payment accordingly”. No, the insurance company will pay out the going rate for a similar, but new, carpet to be fitted.

By the same token, if you inadvertently knock your laptop off the table, even if it’s now an obsolete model, the insurance company will pay out what you paid for the laptop originally, which in turn means, you will probably end up with a better specification laptop (as fitting with current standards) compared with the model which was broken.

This doesn’t happen in the motoring world. If you pay twenty five thousand pounds for a brand new car and that car gets written off, based on what happens elsewhere in the insurance world, irrespective of whether the accident happens one week, one month, one year or one decade after you first bought the car, you would fully expect to receive a replacement car of the value for which you originally paid. But unlike “normal” insurance, motor insurance always leaves the victim short changed. Despite stating that the value of your car is twenty five thousand pounds at the point you take out the insurance, this valuation is meaningless. At the point of claim you will be paid the trade value of the car based on its age and mileage. This means that you won’t even receive enough to purchase a car of similar age and condition to that which has been lost, leaving you to make up the difference. Unlike household insurance, you certainly won’t be offered a modern equivalent of the car you lost. However, what the motor insurance industry does offer is gap insurance. This allows them to charge you even more on your premiums to make up for the fact that the policy you’ve taken out with them, won’t pay out sufficiently at the point of the claim.

And it’s not just car insurance that’s giving us a raw deal. We’re all fully aware that hardly any of the “road tax” we pay actually goes back to maintaining the road network, which in turn results in damage to our vehicles. The fact that the majority of the cost of fuel is duty is also well documented.

The motor industry, like the chancellor at the annual budget giveth with one hand but taketh with the other. A car of ten to fifteen years ago would need servicing every six thousand miles. A car of today needs servicing only every eighteen thousand miles or so. To compensate for these less frequent visits, the motor industry has increased their hourly rate to astronomical levels. So yes, your car doesn’t need servicing as often, but it still costs just as much. Plus, the clever thing is that because the hourly rate is now so high, any unscheduled activity not covered by your warranty is going to have you looking at which family member you’re prepared to sell to fund the bill.

Car manufacturers are also getting sneaky with their designs. Cars such as the Honda Jazz and Renault Megane (or least the previous generation that I had) are engineered in a way that even changing a blown headlamp bulb requires (for the average motorist) a trip the dealer. So what should have cost about five pounds and about sixty seconds of you life, will now cost you at least fifty pounds and the inconvenience of having to book your car in with the service department.

But what’s the alternative? Politicians would point you to public transport. But of course politicians don’t have to use public transport, so are unaware of its cost and shortcomings. In addition, they work in London, which is one of the few places in the country where public transport makes sense and actually works, so they have a rather clouded and ill informed view of what it’s like for the rest of us “out in the world”. It takes me about twenty five minutes door to door (in rush hour I might add) to travel the ten miles to my office. Via public transport, the journey would require at least four bus changes and about two hours (each way!). It would also require planning of a level that would put the D-Day landings to shame. If things go a bit pear shaped in the office and I have to work late, then my chances of getting home that evening would reduce to nil.

How about cycling? Pur-lease. Don’t get me wrong, I like cycling, always have. A cycle ride with family is great fun, safe in the knowledge that I don’t have to be somewhere at a specific time and that a shower will be available if necessary at the end.. But having to leave the house even earlier than I do now means that there won’t be much point going to bed of an evening, plus getting to work all hot and sweaty and peppered with a fine coating of diesel fumes is not conducive to keeping you focussed on your job. You’ll just be sat at your desk with a burning face, slightly noxious aromas emanating from your armpits and in damp clothes.

So it means that as always, we’re stuck. There isn’t an alternative, the government and the motor industry knows this all too well. They’ve got us by our short and curlys and we’ve got to put up and pony up.

Corporate Identity Is Killing Design

Saw two things that struck me on my drive into the office today, a cliché and how corporate identity ruins true design flair.

First the cliché. In the words of Mark Lewyn’s character in the film Disclosure, how does a cliché become a cliché? Well that was ably demonstrated this morning by a fellow motorist. I’d say, mid forties, overweight, hair cut super short in an attempt to disguise the receding and greying hair line and those Oakley style wrap round shades with reflective burnt orange lens that look ridiculous on anyone over the age of about twenty five. Not only was the look a cliché, but so was the driving style. At each roundabout on the journey in to work I would see captain cliché wait until the vehicle approaching from the right (and thus whom had right of way) was almost on top of him before pulling out in front of them. Can you guess what car he was driving? Much as I liked my three series at the time, I always felt uncomfortable with the “BMW driver” stigma associated with its ownership. It’s a shame that the image of such a good product is tarnished by the actions of a few.

I saw my first phase three Ford Focus in the metal this morning. It was one of the cars that captain cliché cut up on my drive in this morning and I ended up following it for the last few miles into the office. What an awkward and yet surprisingly dull looking car. As with most new cars today it conforms to a standard brand design identity. Basically, the company start with the optimum design for the new corporate identify, such as the Golf, or the Fiesta or the Porsche 911 and then attempt to stretch or shrink that optimum design to fit all the other models in the range. Gone are the days when manufacturers would design each model in its own right. Now the entire range must conform to some homogenous corporate brand design.

Some things can handle being scaled whilst still maintaining their original design aesthetic. An iPad for example is just a scaled up iPod Touch and it looks just as sexy. A Porsche Cayenne and Panamera on the other hand are inflated / stretched versions of the 911 “optimum” design and they look bloody awful. But corporate management don’t care about all their different model ranges looking the best that they can be, just that no matter what model you see or buy, that it looks like every other model in the range, so that you know what company made it. I always thought that’s what the badge was for, but what do I know?

And so it is that Ford are the latest culprit to a release a product that is hamstrung by having to apply corporate design identity to a body shape and size for which the original optimal design, the Fiesta, was not intended. The Fiesta is a cracking looking car, almost certainly the best looking car Ford make at the moment (the other bizarrely being the S-Max). The proportions and the design details are spot on. No, it’s not the most spacious model in the range, but the compromise is well worth it when it looks that good. If all you care about is interior space, just forget any attempt at style and get a Toyota Yaris Verso. But with the Focus, Ford have managed to take what is the probably the best looking small car, stretch and inflate it and ended up with something that just looks plain and odd (or just plain odd). And what’s with all the chuffing creases and angles? You know what it reminds me of? a piece of paper that’s been scrunched up and then allowed to spring back to a crumpled shadow of its original pristine state.

I can just imagine the designer sitting at his desk sketching out a bigger version of the Fiesta, not liking what he had drawn, scrunching it up into a ball and chucking it in the corner. He then sat there forlornly looking at the scrunched up ball as it slowly unfurled and had a Eureka moment. That’s it! That’s the new Focus! Grabbing the scrunched up piece of paper he ran up to his bosses and presented them with the design for the all new Focus, The management were pleased because it looked like a big Fiesta so sported the corporate design identify and all those creases and angles made it look thrusting and exciting and not awkward and over designed at all. They then shipped the design down to the marketing people and instructed them to come up with some catchy sound bite name for all the creases and angles, because “scrunched up ball of paper” doesn’t quite have the ring to it that they were looking for. Something like “Dynamic Surfacing™” or “Flaming Blades™” would fit the bill.

When the original Focus came out it looked like nothing else on the road. More importantly, it looked like nothing else in Ford’s model line up. Sure some people took a while to warm to it, but everyone came round eventually. Look at the Chris Bangle Five series, that looked a complete mess, topped off by Dame Edna Everage’s glasses as headlights, but that went on to be the best selling Five series to date. Most importantly, the original Focus was the optimum model for the design (so long as you ignored the god awful looking saloon and estate variants). Sensibly, Ford didn’t try to apply the Focus design verbatim to the rest of its range so the original design excellence wasn’t diluted or sullied.

Just to compound the issue further, I stopped off at the local Asda to get my lunch and pulled up next to a black three door Fiesta Zetec. It looked superb and highlighted just how wrong the new Focus looks.

I’d like to hope that one of these days a car manufacturer will have the courage to design each model to look the best it can without compromising the design by forcing a standard corporate look, but I fear those days are long gone.