Motoring

Alan Judd

Do decades exist? Or are they a product of the fashion industry, an imagined division of time designed to get us to buy new clothes, cars, televisions or whatever, while the old ones are still going strong? As I look back, my own life doesn’t fall neatly into these ten-year packages, but progresses, or regresses, seamlessly through the years. The public perception of the Sixties is that it was the decade of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and flower power, but some of that was Fifties and some Seventies. It was possible to live through those years more or less oblivious to it all. I joined the Army.

But there’s no doubt that packaging the past into decades is handy. You could argue that modern motoring began in the Eighties, with the expansion of the Japanese car industry and the evolution of superminis such as the Metro (don’t knock it – it lasted well), the Peugeot 205 GTI and the Nissan Micra. It was also the decade when SUVS (sports utility vehicles such as the Land Rover Discovery) and MPVS (multipurpose vehicles such as the Mitsubishi Space Wagon) blossomed, with their descendants flourishing now.

You can find Eighties survivors that cope easily with modern motoring and expectations of reliability, whereas most cars of earlier decades have to be nursed along and bribed to get out of bed on cold, damp mornings. This is partly because that was the decade in which electronic ignition and fuel injection became widespread, taking over from carburettors, chokes and distributors, all vulnerable to wear.

Unlike some 1970s British Leyland cars, which rusted before leaving the showroom, bodies were made more durably, brakes, suspension, emissions and economy were improved, and safety began to be built in. Inspired by the 1977/78 Saab 99 and racing successes, turbochargers – hitherto confined mostly to diesels – spread through performance cars. The 1980 Audi Quattro combined this with permanent four-wheel drive, setting a trend for HPVS (high performance vehicles) that is with us still.

As for diesels, the Eighties was the decade in which they came of age in cars. Developed like petrols in the 1890s, their weight, noise and performance suited them more for heavy commercials, ships and trains, although Mercedes produced a series of efficient and robust car diesels from 1936. The Eighties, however, saw diesels break into the mass car market, due largely to development work by Peugeot/citroën for the deservedly popular Peugeot 205 and Citroën BX.

Perkins produced the durable and economical direct-injection Prima engine for Leyland’s Montegos and Maestros. These Eighties engines demonstrated that diesels could perform as well as petrols and far more economically, again setting a trend that was ever-growing until today’s sudden-onset emission panic. What this means for the bargain-hunter is that, if you want a car with performance akin to modern ones and with electronic reliability, look for something with good bodywork that was designed or built in the Eighties and produced before the mid-nineties, when computing complexities began.

Some might argue that the modern world as a whole began with the Eighties, citing the worldwide web (1989), the first, commercially available, handheld mobile (1983), the ending of the Cold War, the financial Big Bang and the rollback of the state. They might even claim the Eighties were as important as the Twenties (jazz, universal suffrage etc) and the Sixties in terms of changes in popular culture. Perhaps they were – but you have to believe in decades.