Motoring The Ideal Car and English Comfort IT is inevitable
that at just this time of year every owner of every sort of car should begin the winter-long game of designing his own ideal. Perhaps it is not so much a game as a protest. The motor-show, though it has long lost the last vestige of its glamour, is still remembered as a place where all sorts of ideas were to be seen in tangible form. The owner remembers some of them and is sorry that features A, B and C find no place in his own car, a sparkling 1935 or a dingy 1925, but gives thanks that D, C and E and perhaps the rest of the alphabet do not He remembers the extravagant statements that filled the papers and clouded his judgement during those exhausting 10 days and wonders that anyone could for one moment have been taken in by any of them. He has seen some of the newest marsiels on the road, may even have heard the first ugly stories about them, and he remembers again that every year it has been the same thing : the ideal ear is not one but a thousand, and his utterly different from all others. - And at the same time he envies sundry owners many of the tricks and fancies of their latest idols. Another reason why the dark months are mainly devoted to passionate criticism is that motoring is then generally rather disagreeable. Saloons and other forms of closed cars are certainly far pleasanter places in which to travel through December murk and cold than their predecessors, but if you are ever going to find out just how uncomfortable your fashionable car can be, it is now. It is not, as a rule, really uncomfortable, but no man is fit to judge a car or anything else in life when the wind is in the east. You discover that draughtsfind their way past all the clever barriers set up by the most intelligent designers, that the best windscreen wipers are incapable of dealing with a heavy flurry of snow or the rain that is flung in solid sheets at the screen by a sou'-westerly gale, that you do, after all, get cramped or tired or both after 100 miles. In all probability things are not nearly so bad as you make them out to be, but the fact remains that in winter you are in fault-finding mood. Justly or not, you think of a dozen ways in which the best cars in the world can be immediately improved and you wonder what designers do by way of earning their doubtless enormous salaries.
, And so you begin to design. the car which, if it is not everybody's ideal, you think anybody ought to be able to buy in any shop anywhere. And you begin by writing down everything it must be or have. I do it myself every year,
sometimes more often, and so I can • sympathize whole- heartedly with The Spectator reader who wrote to me last week from the Transvaal. He gave me a formidable list of things he wanted. All of them were perfectly reasonable things for any man to want in 1935, but, as I was obliged to tell him, few if any cars made today contained them all. In fact, I could not think of a single one, from the cheapest to those that are so expensive that people are never quite sure, within a hundred pounds or so, exactly how much they do cost. I routed out Show catalogues, disinterred Show articles from the decent obscurity in which they had been laid away for reference in another year's time, rang up all sorts of innocent people to make what must have seemed to them idiotic inquiries, I remained as wise as I was before. The ideal car is not yet.
Much, naturally, depends upon what you or I call an ideal car today, tomorrow or next week. To take a very simple instance, I thought for about six months that a freewheel was quite a pleasant gadget to have about the car. That was until last week, when, while trying a rather expensive, not to say pretentious, car, I suddenly discovered that if there was one new thing really superfluous in a properly designed car it was a freewheel—superfluous and on the whole risk-making. You, on the other hand, may look at it from the opposite point of view. It saves your transmission and your engine, it soothes the nerves of the fussy passenger, and you piously hope that it saves petrol and oil. It is well worth while to you. Next week, on another car, it may seem to me to be an admirable fitting, It is absurd to make hard-and-fast rules about gadgets.
In course of time and point by point I hope to construct, on paper and without the handicap of " costing," the sort of car I think most people will want by the end of next year, the sort I want for myself today. It is easy and it is difficult. This I have learnt anew from my Transvaal correspondent. Individually, the things he and I want, and two or three more I want besides, do not or should not cost very much, but I understand very well that it might not pay to incor- porate the lot in one car priced at less than several hundred pounds. In the meantime I have lately taken out two cars that embody two of the essentials of my ideal car. That memorable machine will have a driving-seat exactly like the one they provide for you in the Humber " Snipe" saloon which has four windows.
Now that is among the three first essentials of the ideal car, always supposing the car to be so noble a machine that you are unhappy when you are not driving it, feeling its mouth, as Stevenson might possibly have said, as he did of a schooner, divining its temper. And it is, so far as my experience goes, particularly an English essential. I have sat in good English driving seats, in abominable travesties, in Little Eases, in makeshifts that were neither one thing nor the other, just as I have endured the same in foreign airs ; but when it comes down to absolute comfort, which is the main essential to safety, the English coachbuilder 6 unbeaten.
He is unbeaten in the 14-h.p. Rover, but for a different reason. As driver you sit well enough, as you do when dozing blissfully in the back seat, but in no car that I have yet tried are all four occupants so cleverly arranged. The back axle is behind you all and not actively agitating your spine. I do not pretend to know how it is done, and I do not think it matters at ail. The fact remains that the passengers of the 14-h.p. Rover are taken proper care of and the• driver of the Humber " Snipe " need not shift his position by so much as half an inch in a day. I had no need to and I am not easily pleased.
Another outstandingly English essential is to be found in these two very nice cars. They are both very quiet, quiet by English standards, which is to say that they arejust about ' as quiet as any modem car can be. If you look back upon the story of the car from the days when there was about one ' English car of any use to about six foreign ones, you must remember that we have always made a fuss about -what we called silence, a lower power of noise, as it were. It was a good fuss to make, and today it is true that the least noisy cars, in both engine and gear, are English. The Rover has always been quiet (the new type, I mean), and this year's entry is strikingly so. The " Snipe " was noisy at one period of its deselopment, and it is now as quiet a really fast car as I know. At all engine-speeds you hear very little from the bonnet and not much more from the gear-box. It will do over 70 miles an hour and climb a very steep hill as if it were no more than a traffic-hitch, effortlessly and with just a pleasant hum. Power for power, the Rover does the same things. In neither do you feel the impulse of the engine or the drive of the gear.
English comfort, English efficiency. They must both be found in my ideal car. I must also have the " Snipe " spring- ing, which 1 thought exceptionally good. The prices of both are just about right-8490 for the 24-h.p. car and £318 for
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