Simon Taylor Full throttle
‘Mundane vehicles leave the factory looking as though they have already been involved in a minor traffic accident’
Abad-tempered column this month, because I’ve just made it home after spending an hour and a half covering eight jammed miles of west London. Grumbling along at walking pace I realised that, on our choked urban roads, today’s cars are simply too big. I was totally out of place anyway, because I was in my AC Ace, breathing in the fumes, and it was tiny beside all the steel boxes that were half a century younger.
We all know about the plethora of safety requirements with which beleaguered manufacturers now have to comply. But let’s remember this: the original Mini was 4ft 7in wide and weighed less than 600kg. Today’s Mini Countryman weighs more than twice that at 1440kg, and it’s an unbelievable 6ft 7in from mirror to mirror. That’s two feet wider than its brilliantly innovative predecessor of 60 years ago. No doubt the 21st-century Mini has its supporters, but why does the owner, BMW, have to insult Alec Issigonis and his vision by using the same name, and feeding off its reputation?
Looming over me in the next lane was a hulking great Rolls-royce Phantom. You see quite a few of them in London. I looked up at its stony-faced driver, cocooned in double-glazed, air-conditioned silence, and passed the time by doing some mental arithmetic. My quick sum told me that his car was occupying no less than 125sq ft of road space.
And looking around the jam, I was reminded that most modern cars, from hatchbacks to so-called crossovers, look depressingly the same. Stylists, or whatever they’re called these days, aspire to superficial individuality by decorating their cars with curious creases in the sheet metal that seem to have no relationship with the overall shape. In some cases – Toyota and Vauxhall come to mind – otherwise mundane vehicles leave the factory looking as though they have already been involved in a minor traffic accident.
Since time immemorial cars have had a ‘face’, with the headlights as the eyes and the air intake as the mouth. Some of today’s efforts resemble a Star Wars stormtrooper or a cartoon monster with its jaws dripping aggression – Toyota again. One or two manfully try to recall the identity of several generations ago, such as Alfa Romeo’s triangular grille and the two lozenges at the front of BMWS. And the once proud Rolls-royce radiator continues in caricature today. It awkwardly plays its part in the styling of all the current Rollses, particularly that vast, dreadful SUV thing. Its name, Cullinan, is apparently Gaelic for ‘good-looking lad’. That sound you hear is Sir Henry Royce spinning in his grave.
Back in the days when headlights were round and bonnets stood tall, a car’s radiator proudly flew the flag of its marque. Every small boy could tell them at 30 paces – the point at the top of the Riley radiator, the twin flutes of the Vauxhall, the double chevron on the Citroën. Packards had a distinctive ridge that ran down the bonnet to the radiator, and Daimlers had their wrinkled top, which recalled the cooling fins on the first cars, and continued as a detail until Ford bought Jaguar and killed off the name.
My favourite as a lad was the Wolseley, whose badge lit up when the sidelights were on – a charming idea that could easily be copied by a car maker today. Most of all, it was the inverted horseshoe of the different Bugatti models that populated my boyhood fantasies.
In the 1950s, the tall radiator gradually disappeared from most makes or continued only in embryo in others. But cars still seemed to look different from one another. You wouldn’t have confused an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire with a Humber Super Snipe, or a Standard Vanguard with an Austin A70 Hereford. But then, you wouldn’t have been sitting in a 5mph jam.