Steve Cropley
High hopes for hydrogen fuel cells
WEDNESDAY
Office banter about the nature of true luxury in cars made me recall my thrilling drive in the Mclaren 720S, which combines huge poke with unique driving ease. In the two weeks since the Macca adventure I’ve driven seven or eight other cars, some powerful, but none with the 720S’s instant, intuitive, perfectly weighted accelerator response. This must be one of the finest foot controls ever put into a car. Lots of today’s loud pedals are passports to shattering performance but this one, which practically whispers the engine’s innermost secrets into your ear, strikes me as a more luxurious feature than all the wood, leather and carbonfibre you could climb over.
THURSDAY
Remember our ‘three-car garage’ story a few weeks ago? It was an innocuous tale of carowning Autocar hacks, but it had an amazing effect on readers Niall and Jenny Milner, who 10 years ago hired and greatly enjoyed a Mini Cooper S Convertible as part of their wedding celebrations. Niall and Jenny noted that each hack in our feature seemed to possess at least one car for which there was no clear ownership case. This set them thinking about owning an ’06 Cooper S Convertible of their own, for sentimental reasons. Amazingly, a casual internet trawl turned up the actual wedding car, now with 82,000 miles on the clock but fundamentally healthy. The Milners bought the Mini and now have their own collection of three motors, one of which is rather special.
FRIDAY
Talking Minis, it was fun meeting David Brown, the straight-talking Yorkshire entrepreneur behind the new Mini Remastered (story on p62), which aims to put top quality, re-engineered versions of the Issigonis original on the market before the year-end. There has already been a stampede of would-be customers. I admire Brown, whose businesses have done him very well. He could easily sit back and be a consumer of big-note luxury cars, but he’d rather be a car creator and this eye-catching Mini is his latest step along the road. More steps are planned.
MONDAY
As someone who has got religion on hydrogen fuel cell cars, I’m delighted to hear VW’S Herbert Deiss has renewed his group’s commitment to them. Even so, there’s still a weird disunity about expert attitudes to the notion of a hydrogen society. Many credible voices say it’ll never work, but Korea is talking of a 500,000-strong hydrogen fleet, while Norway and Australia are in the process of positioning themselves to become hydrogen suppliers to Japan, which is convinced it will need huge quantities of the stuff quite soon. Seems to me hydrogen opinion has gone from all negative to part-positive in just a few years, so I’m now feeling optimistic.
The Mclaren 720S has one of the finest accelerator controls ever put into a car
TUESDAY
If I tell you I spent the day at the Niche Vehicle Network Symposium, I wouldn’t blame you for dialling out. But it was held in a swish conference centre right next to Williams F1’s museum, and featured most of the principals of the sort of lowvolume sports car companies we love (Westfield, BAC, Caterham, Ginetta, Ariel, Morgan). This was a chance for network members to explain how they’d used the public money – nowadays available as grants from Innovate UK – to improve their businesses. Best thing was seeing first-hand the spirit of co-operation that co-exists with competitiveness in an exciting but perilous field. Gives me hope for a low-volume future.