THE JOY OF MOTORING
Smaller, safer, slower
Al, the first car-registration number in Britain, was issued to Frank Russell, Bertrand's elder brother, who had stayed uP all night to get it. He was regarded by his parents as 'a limb of Satan'; his colour- ful career included being sent dawn from Oxford for 'malpractices' and imprison- ment for bigamy. But he had a passion for cars and, although an earl, claimed to be a Professional electrician. He was known to the police as a 'hooligan driver', was an early member of the RAC and encouraged the spread of `motorism'. It is perhaps symptomatic of British ambivalence towards cars that in the early days it was raffish gentlemen and aristocrats Who were largely responsible for getting our car industry going. We talk of our love affair with the car and, recently, of the decline of the British motor industry as if it were a cherished part of our national heritage, but we have often done as much to punish as to encourage it. In some ways, we still do. In 1896 the then Tory government `road the Red Flag Act under which road locomotives' had to be preceded by a Pedestrian carrying a flag. This was the best-known example of restrictive legisla- tion which, combined with patent prob- lems, social and financial structures and an excellent Victorian rail network, made this country an unusually slow starter in the motor industry. In other engineering fields ships, steam engines, bicycles — we pro- duced world-beaters, but in the new indus- tcl rYa. combination of government and social attitudes ensured, to the vocal dismay of !arlY motorists, that we played uphill against our industrial competitors. ised the forerunner of the RAC organ- the Emancipation (London to righton. ) Run to celebrate the demise of the red flag, their cars were cheered through the streets, but deep suspicion remained in government and elsewhere. There was a 12 mph speed limit, outraged letters in newspapers urged pedestrians to use their pistols against the crews of the offensive iron monsters and Scotland Yard's first Flying Squad was issued with egg-bombs of green and white paint to throw at fugitive vehicles. Many resented the noisy intrusions into what Thomas Hardy called the 'tomb-like stillness' of Britain's rural highways, deserted since the decline of the coach. The approach of a car on country roads, Charles Rolls recorded, caused every other man to climb `up a tree or a telegraph pole — every woman ran away across the fields, every horse jumped over the garden wall . . . and every butch- er's cart . . . bolted off, scattering various spare parts of animals about the road'. But the combination of fashionable sta- tus and increasing practicality, allied with the near-universal desire for independent mobility, made the car ever more in demand. The first world war and American mass-production techniques introduced by Ford at Old Trafford brought an end to the expensive mechanical idiosyncrasies of the Edwardian era. Unhindered by government intervention, this country's natural entrepreneurial genius produced shoals of car-makers between the wars and, although most were swept away, the successful ones made the British motor industry the second largest in the world after the American by the late 1930s. (My borrowed bible, the 1974 Complete Catalogue of British Cars, lists some 689 British car-makers.) For a while after the second world war we were the world's largest car exporter and it is probably from this era that the popular tra- dition of a dominating British motor industry dates; import penetration in 1974 was a mere 222 vehicles. But the writing was already on the factory wall: 19 American manufacturers produced more than four mil- lion cars a year, with 42 basic models, based on a huge domestic market; an unsustainable 20 British manufacturers produced fewer than 400,000 cars a year, with 51 basic mod- els, based on a modest domestic market.
Then came the dreary decades of decline and merger, of union demagoguery and myopia, of management either incompetent or competent but prevented by government from taking hard decisions. The industry was seen as a yardstick for industry as a whole and decisions were made on grounds of political expediency rather than commer- cial viability. Attitudes changed, and a coun- try whose industrial strength and reputation had been built on reliability and attention to detail became notorious for its automotive shoddiness and complacency. There were innovative, world-class designs but many of the people who bolted them together, and many of their managers, weren't particular, and weren't bothered. In the end, neither were the customers.
Recent events at Longbridge and Dagen-
THE JOY OF MOTORING
ham may be seen as the tail end of this pro- cess, but that is only part of the story. Like Britain in earlier decades, the world now has too many car-makers. Overproduction is the problem, along with enormous devel- opment costs thought to be sustainable only via economies of scale.
Is there a future for a serious British car industry? First, we should appreciate that we already have one, so long as we count foreign-owned companies manufacturing here as British. In recent years some 25 firms have produced more than 1.5 million cars a year in Britain. Second, government has to ensure light labour regulation, finan- cial flexibility and efficient communica- tions. Third, it has to allow all manufacturing industry to benefit from technological development, by, for exam- ple, not insisting that companies pay higher costs in order to subsidise outmoded means of power generation. Fourth, car compa- nies must heed what their customers, by their behaviour, tell them. The fact that Rover sales have accelerated during recent uncertainty points to a big, simple truth cut your prices and you sell things.
And the government needs to rid itself of ambivalent thinking on transport. In theo- ry, it approves of prosperity but disap- proves of there being so many cars, which is a direct consequence of prosperity. It doesn't like spending money on roads and clobbers us — pushing up all industrial costs — with the highest. fuel prices in Europe. It needs to accept that only the car gives us the mobility we crave and that we want ever more of that. Even if we're forced to stay at home or wait for the bus, others won't be and we'll be relegated to the industrial Middle Ages. What govern- ment should do is keep out of the way of initiative — by not, for example putting red-flag tax barriers in the way of renew- able fuels such as bio-diesel and give thought to the sort of regulation that our probable car-per-person future demands.
That future could make our automotive present look like a dangerous, polluting, anarchic free-for-all. Cars could be smaller, safer, slower, and run on renewable fuel. Accidents would be rare, thanks partly to radar guidance, and access to major roads would be controlled; once on them, though,, journey times would be pre- dictable. We probably had the best and worst of motoring in the last century. This one will be more efficient but less fun.
And the Frank Russells of the future? Perhaps they'll start getting airborne. Per- sonal, reliable, affordable air transport may seem fantastic now, but no more so than the modern car would have seemed in 1900. Crowded skies are a horrid thought, but think of the howls and hand-wringings from nature's planners and regulators. It's almost worth sticking around for.
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