CONSUMING INTEREST
Crushing Response
By LESLIE ADRIAN
Seriously, a problem that it may eventually help to solve is that of the dumped car. Last year about half a million old cars were dumped by their owners, some of them in secluded parts of the diminishing countryside, many of them in the street. As the Cohen managing director, Jack Wellings, said at a press conference in London last week, The next one might be in your front garden or in mine.' He lives at Stoke Poges, but we London dwellers see rusty, disused heaps anandoned in residential streets,
if not actually in front gardens, every day.
In five or six years the number of rotting wrecks lying about the open-air car parks that we call cities could go up by as much as a million a year. By that time there may be several Proler plants to chew them into saleable frag- ments. But how will they gather up the fodder for this mechanical Moloch? When a car is abandoned. it is not like the waif left at the church door or in a Gladstone bag on the Brighton line. Nobody loves it. Most municipal authorities will not touch it (if they do, the law compels them to keep it for six weeks in case the owner claims it back, and they refuse to open used-car lots for unsaleable scrap). Yet the Greater London Council finds the dumped-car prospect 'frightening.' In some of the United States a car left on the street for more than twenty-four hours is dragged off to a compound for another twenty-four. If the owner claims it, he pays a $50 fine. If not, it goes to a Proler plant, new, old, Cadillac or deux chevaux.
The Proler-Cohen car crusher (Europe's first) will be able to chew up and spit out 400,000 vehicles a year, including five-ton trucks (and doubtless the Ministry of Transport could make some recommendations for candidates from that class). But sited north of London it will draw on only a hundred-mile radius, yielding in a vintage year about 175,000 not-so-vintage cars, so it will have to be kept busy with refrigerators, cookers and washing-machines. Unfortunately, the prices offered per vehicle will not suddenly bring into being a new breed of metallurgical Steptoes, beating the back areas of our big cities with cries of any crocks, bangers or heaps: for a Mini £2; for a Rolls £5. Even during a war that would hurt.
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