What's outside today 45 - 1915 Ford Model T

Outside Ford's Dunton Technical Centre last weekend, that is. This year is the 100th anniversary of the Ford Model T and Ford offered us the chance to use it for the Verdict, albeit on private roads. This is the car with Ivan Bartholomeusz, one of the people who looks after Ford's UK Heritage Collection, which is kept in a big warehouse in Dagenham, rather than in a museum.


This car is a lot of fun, once you get used to the bizarre pedal arrangement shown below. The left-hand pedal engages first gear in the depressed position and second gear (there are only two forward gears) in the raised position. Between the two is neutral. The centre pedal is reverse, and the right-hand pedal is the footbrake. The lever is a transmission brake - when applied, it also puts the car into neutral. The throttle is operated by a stalk on the steering wheel, rather than any of the pedals. It sounds absolutely impossible, but it's not too difficult to grasp with a bit of practice.


One interesting fact I picked up from the chaps at Ford; while these cars are very old and exceptionally appealing, they are in fact not worth very much. Ford simply made too many of them for them to be particularly valuable.

2007 Classic Car Show at the NEC

An absorbing few hours at this year's show. It's been ages since I attended any event at the NEC. I think the last thing I went to there was the last of the Birmingham motor shows before the shift back to London. Then, the NEC was very old and tired but now it seems to have had some sort of makeover - I have to say, I was quite impressed.

Hundreds of cars and a similar number of photos - hope to come back to some of those later. I'll just mention two highlights for now: the first was seeing the expensive sister model of the 1977 Capri II I've had on test lately, the 3.0 Ghia. As well as having a lot of extra kit and a motor that actually fills the engine bay, it had the one thing the 1.6L lacks that I couldn't really do without - head restraints, in this case built into the seat backs.

The other was an intriguing story about the return to production of a car that has always interested me and which I narrowly missed the chance to drive when it was still a current model. A possible for the Verdict, or maybe a feature, I think. As always with such shows, the entrance fee was worth it for the work ideas and leads generated - quite apart from pleasure of seeing the old cars of course.

What's outside today 30, Blast from the past 11 - 1977 Ford Capri 1.6L

A fine example from Ford's own collection.


Apparently it was donated by the proverbial one careful lady owner, and it's done only 25,000 miles from new.


Verdict testing this weekend in - where else - Essex.


From a driving point of view, the Capri really shows its age - especially where the brakes are concerned - but it has a certain charm, nevertheless. This 1977 model just predates the facelift that produced what was widely but unofficially known as the Capri Mk III, the one that featured so heavily in The Professionals.

Fifty years of Trabants

Tomorrow is the fiftieth birthday of the former German Democratic Republic's most famous automotive product, the Trabant. This gives us a useful reminder that while capitalism isn't perfect, it at least provides us with an enormous choice of excellent cars at reasonable prices. Imagine being a car enthusiast in the GDR and having to wait years - or even decades - for the privilege of handing over your life savings for a piece of crap like the Trabant.

That said, it should also be borne in mind that the makers and designers of cars in the old planned economies of Eastern Europe operated under severe constraints. Access to certain materials and mainstream western parts suppliers was limited, while funding was restricted to what could be squeezed from the latest five or seven year plan in a system that emphasised the collective and communal over the sort of individual aspiration and ambition represented by car ownership. I still think that the Skoda Favorit, for example, which appeared in the then Czechoslovakia in 1987, and in western markets from 1989, was a remarkable achievement, given that it was close to being competitive with western cars of the time, despite being developed under these limitations. Certainly, it was good enough to get Volkswagen interested in the company, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Of course, what made the Trabant famous wasn't its qualities as a car but its starring role in the film footage of the night the Berlin Wall came down - celebrated in this commemorative model, which I am sad to say, still sits on my mantelpiece gathering dust almost twenty years after the event.


Nevertheless, it's a pity that the grotty Trabant got the limelight when there were so many more interesting GDR vehicles - nothing you'd actually want to to have owned at the time, of course, but more interesting nevertheless. The Wartburg 353 for example, wasn't too bad when it was introduced in the mid-sixties, although it was hobbled by its two-stroke engine. The Barkas van occupied the same popular role in the GDR as the Ford Transit in the UK or the VW 'Bulli' van in West Germany, while East German trucks such as the IFA W50 and the smaller Robur were widely used not only in the domestic 'market' but in the Third World as well. The only East German brand that wasn't absorbed or closed after the Berlin Wall came down was Multicar, a manufacturer of very small vehicles for municipal use such as street sweeping. Anyway, more on some of this interesting stuff another time.

UK car production on the up

According to the SMMT, UK vehicle production was up 2.1% at the end of September on a year-to-date basis, at 1.29 million.

This means full year production is likely to be not far off the highs achieved in the early Seventies and then again in the first few years of this decade. Thats a remarkable achievement considering that the last few years have seen the closure of Peugeot's plant at Ryton, Vauxhall's Luton works, and the final car assembly end of Ford's Dagenham operation - not to mention the demise of MG Rover.

It is a little remarked upon fact that Britain has lost almost an entire car industry in the last twenty or so years but gained almost an entire new one as well. The old 'Big Four' volume manufacturers - Leyland, Ford, Chrysler/Rootes and Vauxhall, have with the exception of Vauxhall largely disappeared in terms of UK production. What we have in their place are new Japanese plants run by Honda, Toyota and Nissan, as well as revived, previously niche-bound but now massively expanded prestige operations such as Bentley, Aston, Rolls, Land Rover and MINI - only Jaguar isn't really living up to its potential, and even that may change once the new XF hits the market.

One by-product of this shift is that not only is the industry almost as big as it's ever been, but the average value of the cars being made is probably a lot higher. Notwithstanding the possible rationalisation of Land Rover's and Jaguar's production facilities after Ford has sold these off, I think we will now hold on to most of what is left of the British industry.

What's outside today 25 - Ford C-Max Flexifuel

Outside my parents' place in Gloucestershire, that is - Morrisons is slowly expanding its network of forecourts that provide bioethanol-based E85 but any test of an E85-capable car still means heading for East Anglia or the West Country where the main clusters of pumps are to be found.


Same story as before - the fuel is slightly cheaper than unleaded but not by enough to offset the typical mpg penalty suffered when running on E85 (variously estimated at up to 30%). More movement is needed on the tax front before E85 can really take off - but if the fuel pricing can be got right, the E85 thing is a great concept. Unlike, say, LPG, E85 doesn't require a separate tank; cars like the C-Max FFV can run on any mixture of petrol and bioethanol in a single tank. And Ford doesn't charge a premium for FFV models, so you can buy one and just wait for the price of E85 to come down. If it doesn't, you can just run on unleaded without any drawbacks.


BTW renewable fuels have come in for a bit of criticism over the last year or so. It's important to bear in mind that bioethanol has nothing to do with the recent fuss about palm oil, which is an issue connected with bio-diesel. I'm still convinced renewables are an important part of our motoring future - if we're to have one at all - as long as sustainable and efficient methods of production can be enforced, either legally or by pressure from well-informed consumers asking lots of questions.

UK bioethanol update

As I mentioned below, when I was out for a spin yesterday in the 93 BioPower, I filled up with E85 at Morrisons in Norwich. Morrisons is still maintaining the 2p per litre differential between E85 and unleaded (E85 is the cheaper) that it set at the launch of the new fuel over a year ago, at least in Norwich.

As I've said before, Morrisons and Saab, as well as Ford and Volvo have done their bit by making the cars and the fuel available but we probably still need the Treasury to give E85 a bigger tax break than it enjoys at the moment for the fuel really to have a chance of taking off (cars deliver far fewer mpg when running on E85).

I was slightly depressed to see that Morrisons had actually had to resort to padlocking the E85 pumps at Norwich, presumably to prevent motorists accidentally filling unsuitable cars with it. I didn't exactly get the impression that they were doing a roaring trade in the stuff, although one of the Morrisons staff told me that quite a lot of police vehicles were now using E85. I knew that Somerset and Avon police were using E85-capable cars but this was the first time I'd heard of Norfolk police adopting them as well. As usual, I got the feeling that the Morrisons staff had been well briefed about E85.

I'm doing this week's Verdict in Somerset/Wiltshire which is where one of the main clusters of Morrisons E85 pumps is, but I notice that the company has now opened its first outlet for the fuel in Scotland - a good excuse to get up there for the Verdict the next time a suitable car comes up.

Cool Wall Fridge Magnets (2)

Now had a chance to put my Top Gear Cool Wall fridge magnets up.

In my 'Sub-Zero' category, I've got the Aston Martin V8 Roadster, the Alfa Spider, the Alfa 8C, the Skoda Roomster, the Porsche Cayman and the Ford Focus ST.

There are magnets for the presenters as well in the TG set. I'm afraid that while Messrs Clarkson, Hammond and May are all brilliant at what they do, they are all in the 'Uncool' category on my fridge door. That's because they're all white middle-class, middle-aged men who are obsessed with cars - there's no way anyone who falls into this category (and I'd include myself in this) can regarded as cool. The mysterious Stig? Now that's a different matter - his magnet is in the 'Sub-Zero' section.

Anorak Corner 3 - Saab, Ford and their differing approaches to E85

Ford and Saab have so far been the front-runners in promoting the use of E85, a blend consisting of 15% unleaded and 85% renewable bioethanol. Both have introduced cars to the UK market that have been modified to run on this fuel. I understand that the main differences between these cars and the equivalent standard models are changes to the materials used in the various bits of pipework that make up the fuel system - E85 is more corrosive than the unleaded fuel most cars run on.

E85 also has a higher octane rating than unleaded - 105 is the figure that is usually quoted, compared with 95 for standard unleaded and 97 to 99 for super unleaded. Ford and Saab differ in how they handle this characteristic of E85. Ford sets up its engines so that they don't develop significantly more power when running on E85. Perhaps the company takes the view that there will be a higher degree of acceptance for E85 if the experience of driving a car running on the fuel doesn't feel different to that of driving one running on unleaded - a question, perhaps of not scaring the horses by giving them too many horsepower to play with.

Saab, by contrast, has years of experience with knock sensors and turbo-charging to fall back on and sets its engines up to exploit the higher octane rating of E85 - its 2.0t BioPower unit, for example, delivers 20% more horsepower and 16% more torque than the equivalent unleaded-only engine. This difference certainly makes itself felt on the road.


So which of these approaches is correct? I don't think it's possible to answer that question clearly at the moment. Saab's and Ford's current engines are very much the first generation of E85-capable power units; they are adapted from existing designs and aren't fully optimised to run on E85 as they still need to be capable of running on standard unleaded as well. But if E85, or even pure bioethanol becomes universally available, it looks like more drastic changes to engines could be introduced to exploit the higher octane ratings - small turbocharged engines with lots of power that minimise the fuel consumption penalty of running on bioethanol look like the way it's going.

A couple more points from Sweden

A very full and interesting day finding out about renewable fuels in Sweden - more detail later but just a couple of quick thoughts for now.

The first is that Britain is a long way behind not just Sweden but several other countries when it comes to policies on renewables. Remember that for all its faults, the UK is usually several years ahead of continental Europe in most areas of public policy debate. Privatisation, deregulation, public-private partnerships, labour market reforms and a genuinely open market for corporate control; all were invented or reinvented in the UK, and eventually copied just about everywhere else.

But when it comes to facing what is probably the biggest challenge of the lot, climate change, Sweden's impressively comprehensive package of measures is far superior to the UK's miserably timid and piecemeal efforts. Ford, Saab and now Volvo have done their bit by offering cars in the UK market that can run on bioethanol-based E85, while Morrisons has been offering the fuel for over a year now at a limited number of forecourts at a modest 2p per litre price advantage compared with unleaded. That's all that's left of the smallish 17p per litre tax break E85 enjoys when other factors such as the underlying price of E85 and the cost disadvantages of distributing comparatively small amounts of the fuel are factored in.

It's difficult to see E85 taking off in a big way in the UK unless a far more attractive tax regime is introduced - in particular, some way needs to be found to shift the basis of the UK car taxation system and the London Congestion Charge from tailpipe CO2 emissions (in fairness, this was considered a rather bold and imaginative approach when it was introduced) to some sort of 'well to wheel' measure that reflects the 'built-in' carbon offset provided when the crops that are used to make bioethanol absorb CO2.

The second thought is this. We've now covered a number of cars that can run on E85 on the Verdict, and this has provided an opportunity to explain the issues involved - namely the limited number of refueling points, the higher octane rating E85 provides compared with unleaded, the mpg penalty of running on E85 and the small per litre price advantage E85 enjoys. More E85-capable cars are coming onto the market but the pros and cons of these models compared with their petrol-powered counterparts are always the same, so it's difficult to take the story forward. I think it may make more sense from now on for us to treat the E85-capable version of any car as our default choice for testing so that we can be as green as possible, but no longer to make such a fuss of the fact that a particular car runs on the stuff.

E85 in Sweden

Just arrived in Sweden to see what Ford and Volvo in particular are doing with bioethanol/E85 here.

Sweden is a long way ahead of everywhere else in Europe when it comes to this sort of thing, so looking forward to an interesting couple of days - including, and this is the hot subject at the moment in this area, a visit to a second-generation bioethanol plant. Second generation = using e.g. wood waste etc. instead of plants that could otherwise be used as food. It's back to that distinction between good bioethanol and bad bioethanol again.

Blast from the past 7 - 'Ursaab'

Just getting ready to go to Sweden tomorrow, and this has put me in a Swedish sort of mood.

So here's the most Swedish of cars, the so-called 'Ursaab' of 1946. I think the prefix 'Ur' plays the same role in Swedish as it does in German; it's difficult to translate but in German, at least, it usually denotes that anything to which it is applied is very old, or a true original. That contraption that looks like a park bench with bicycle wheels that Mercedes claims was the first proper car, for example, is sometimes called the 'Ur-Benz'.

Anyway - back to the Ursaab. Project 92 was the first Saab passenger car and was developed over the years into the 93, 95 and 96 lines, which only finally bowed out in 1980.


Nobody could accuse this Saab of being a re-skinned Vauxhall - in those days, the design teams leant on Saab's aircraft experts for ideas rather than Opel, a fact that shows in the remarkable purity of the Ursaab's sleek bodywork. But let's not be too harsh on today's models for their part-sharing; Saab was always a small company before it was taken over by GM, and despite its distinctive identity, it often relied on links with other manufacturers to keep going. In 1966, when the two-stroke engine fitted to the 95 and 96 needed to be replaced, Saab bought in a V4 four-stroke from the German end of Ford. A little later, it asked Triumph to design the overhead-cam engine for the 99; this power unit, related to that fitted to the Dolomite, survived in heavily developed form until comparatively recently. And in the 1980s, the 9000 was the result of a joint development effort that also produced the Fiat Croma, Alfa 164 and Lancia Thema.

So Saabs have never really been quite the pure thoroughbreds some of us might like to imagine - but it would still be nice if they could recover a bit more of their former individuality.

Selling Jaguar and Land Rover - what does it mean for Ford in the UK?

I'll return to this subject again - there's a lot to say about how Ford ended up where it is today, who might buy these established British car-makers, and what their future prospects may be, but I'll restrict myself to one or two observations on the Ford rather than LR/Jaguar side of things for the time being.

If Ford really does end up selling Jaguar and Land Rover, that will mark the end of the US company as a big manufacturing presence in one of its best national markets for the first time since it came here in the inter-war period. Ford caused a stir a few years back by running down all production of Ford-badged cars in the UK (although the Transit is still being built in Southampton) but this was always balanced by expansion at Aston Martin (already sold), Jaguar and Land Rover. Apart from that, it's all engine production.

I've long maintained that the British are the world's first genuinely post-patriotic consumers. We really don't care that much where our cars are built, and give home players little or no preferment. Government procurement here is the same; our public authorities seem to be genuinely open in their buying, in a way that those of no other country are. The Ministry of Defence, for example, gave a huge truck contract to MAN not long after that company had effectively closed the UK truck-maker ERF, rather than go with other options such as a rival consortium including LDV that could have revived military truck building as an industry in the UK. That's all the more remarkable given that EU rules on open procurement don't even apply in the case of military contracts. The police seem to buy just about anything in preference to our home-grown cars, as well.

Ford twigged to this early on and suffered no real penalty when it ended UK production of cars bearing its own name. I wonder, though, whether with the sale of Jaguar and Land Rover, Ford is now testing this to the limit. When GM announced a month or two back that Ellesmere Port on Merseyside had been selected as one of the plants that would make the next generation of Astra, for example, it said, to my surprise, that UK production was still probably worth some market share here, even if the advantage was only one or two percentage points.

Of course Ford needs to keep its production costs down, which is why it has shifted the manufacture of Ford-badged cars to other countries (although why high-cost, low-flexibility Germany, where Ford's cars are a lot less popular than they are here, should be a beneficiary, I still cannot understand). But the main reason this is an issue is that mass-market badges like Ford can't really support decent pricing these days and need some sort of 'story' to keep themselves in the public mind, as well distinguish themselves from lots of other purveyors of cars as domestic appliances. The worry for Ford must be not so much that British buyers will suffer a sudden attack of patriotism and shun Ford products - more that factors like local production and links with fancier brands like Jaguar and Land Rover probably still help a bit in terms of generating press coverage and interest in the company, and this is being lost.

Without that sort of stuff, Ford is competing with no particular entrenched advantage, except perhaps the extent of its UK distribution network, against companies like Kia, which, with its generous warranties and low-cost production facilities in Eastern Europe, has a strong story of its own with which it can capture car-buyers' attention.

The footloose pragmatism of the British car-buying public is probably a double-edged sword for Ford. It meant we didn't decide against its products when blue-oval car production was ended in the UK, but it also means we won't hesitate to switch to something else that comes along if that looks more interesting. So far, the excellence of cars like the Focus has held the threat at bay. But it's going to get harder in future, I think.

What's outside today 3 - the Ford Focus Coupé-Cabriolet

This is the recently introduced convertible version of the Focus - the Coupé-Cabriolet (CC) designation signifies that it is one of those metal roof convertibles that are so popular these days. Interesting to see that although the two cars couldn't be more different in appearance, the Focus CC carries a Pininfarina badge on its flanks, just like last week's Verdict test car, the Alfa Spider.

Only two other thoughts at the moment.

1) the rather bright orangey beige leather seats are going to take a bit of getting used to.

2) it's not an ST - once you've had a chance to try one of those marvellous machines, other versions of the Focus, good as they are, tend to end up feeling just a little bit ordinary.

But we shall see.

Off to Yorkshire with this one.

Bioethanol conference at Imperial - a PS

Three more points from the seminar at Imperial.

Everyone I spoke to who had an opinion on the subject thought that the 18% fuel consumption penalty we recorded for running on bioethanol in the Saab BioPower was a bit on the low side. A man from Ford put the likely figure at 30% although I continue to hear suggestions - I'm not sure how well-founded they are - that this penalty can be smaller when cruising than in stop-start traffic, and that it may be lower in Saabs rather than in Ford's E85-capable models. Given that our test was in a Saab and didn't involve any town driving (it was a mix of motorways and twisty A roads but didn't really cover any town driving), perhaps our result wasn't too far out of line after all. Of course, our test was a simple brim to brim affair but at the seminar I met the man who used to do the AA's incredibly rigorous fuel consumption tests and now does similar work on an independent basis. He told me he was in the middle of carrying out one of his highly detailed tests on the BioPower. I will be interested to see what he comes up with, which I suspect will be the closest thing we get to an authoritative answer for the time being.

The second point concerns the possible damage to the Brazilian rain forest that may arise from increased demand for biofuels. Apparently this is a red herring because the rain forest isn't really very close to the best latitudes for growing sugar cane. What may do for the rain forest, so it is said, is the growing demand for protein and therefore soya. More generally, though, cultivation for ethanol is certainly in competition with cultivation for food, which could prove to be highly problematical in the long run.

The third thing to mention is that Britain is due shortly to get its first bioethanol plant using British sugar beet as a feedstock. It belongs to British Sugar and it's located in Norfolk.

Bioethanol and the Road to Sustainable Development

A fascinating day-long seminar on this subject at London's Imperial College today - I'm grateful to Saab for putting me on to this.

Several contributors from government, the private sector and the academic world explained the role of bioethanol in tackling climate change and future fossil fuel shortages. I can't possibly do all of the arguments justice here but I've picked out what I think are a few of the most interesting aspects.

The first thing you notice at any event on this subject is that a lot of the speakers are Swedes. That's because Sweden has aggressively embraced bio-fuels - the Swedish prime minister declared that the country would be independent of oil would by 2020, although it was a car dealer that got the ball rolling by importing suitably specced American Ford Tauruses in the nineties. This gave Ford an early lead that it was able to build on with bio-capable versions of the Focus produced in Europe. Saab is the other main player with the BioPower versions of its 9-3 and 9-5 models, while Scania has been promoting the use of bioethanol in bus and truck engines that operate on diesel principles. One of the best customers for buses running on bioethanol has been Stockholm's public transport company; buses with Scania's third generation ethanol engine - which should equip it to tackle longer out-of-town journeys - are eagerly awaited there. A Scania bioethanol bus trial is imminent in London too. Not every lesson from Sweden can be applied here, of course. The country has a low population density and a large forestry industry, for example, although I was slightly surprised to learn that the Swedish market uses bioethanol from Brazilian sugar cane (Brazil is the other trailblazer in the use of bio-fuels). I had thought the feedstock for Swedish bioethanol production was cellulose derived from the timber industry; this is however, expected to play a large role in future. Nevertheless, the Swedes' efforts put those of most other countries to shame.

An interesting snippet of information came from a representative of OKQ8, a fuel retailer with a 27% market share in petrol and a 40% share in bioethanol in Sweden - while flex-fuel cars that can run on E85 (a blend of 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol) get all the headlines, most of the use of bioethanol in cars in Sweden so far is accounted for by the small amount of bioethanol - 5% - that is added in to standard unleaded; this blend can be used by cars without modification. Bioethanol can already be added to standard unleaded in the UK I believe, and the forthcoming Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) will require us to be 5% renewable by 2010.

Another important point is that different sorts of bio-fuels are not all equally beneficial in their impact. Thanks to the work of academics like Dr Jeremy Woods at Imperial we seem to be getting a better understanding of the differences between so-called 'bad bioethanol' and 'good bioethanol', which is a function of a host of factors such as the crops used, the processes used and the extent to which fossil fuels are used in production and distribution. The UK RTFO can't stipulate that only good bioethanol be used as this would be against world trade rules. However, companies will have to document the provenance of their fuels under RTFO, and it will be up to us to keep them honest with our fuel buying decisions.