DAVE PHILLIPS

HISTORY is bunk, said Henry Ford in 1916. But he was wrong – and he even built a museum, 13 years later. If he’d known his history, he’d have realised that impulsive statements usually come back to haunt you. I love history. It’s a love that has defied all odds, because most folk don’t. They’ll tell you history’s boring, because they can remember the dreary lessons at school where they were expected to memorise the dates of ancient battles that had no relevance to their young lives. It was not the fault of the subject: it was the consequence of a flawed examination system that rewarded kids with good memories, above those with natural intelligence.

I was lucky to have a brilliant history teacher who captured my imagination by breathing life into the key figures involved. If you put yourself in their shoes, you soon realise that the answers to problems in the present and future can almost always be found in the past.

History teaches us that evil dictators like Adolf Hitler should be brought down, rather than appeased. Britain’s pre-war PM, Neville Chamberlain, obviously didn’t know his history. His successor, Winston Churchill, did.

In the automotive world, no history is richer than Land Rover’s. The company’s success has been down to identifying what people want – and delivering it. It started in the late 1940s with the Wilks brothers realising that British farmers wanted a 4x4 like the wartime Jeep; a concept that was expanded through the 1950s and ‘60s to embrace the multifarious needs of the armed forces, emergency services, forestry workers, tea plantation owners, explorers . . . You get the picture.

When the company realised there was a need for a dual-purpose 4x4, they introduced the Range Rover. A family-orientated 4x4? The Discovery. A small 4x4? The Freelander.

A performance 4x4? Range Rover Sport. And so on until you reach the stage today where every conceivable gap in the market has been filled, although I’m sure more new models would have emerged if the company had been left to do what it does best: identifying demand and fulfilling it. This, of course, is how most good businesses work.

Unfortunately, after more than 70 years of doing it that way, Land Rover have been told to do it another way. Instead of meeting the demands of potential customers, they must meet the demands of interfering politicians. And history will tell you that’s a very bad idea…

At around the same time as the first Land Rover was produced, in the late 1940s, a campaigning Labour government, under PM Clement Attlee, decided to make the world a fairer place. His successes included the founding of the National Health Service and the welfare state; the nationalisation of the major industries less so. It set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the 1970s with crippling industrial strife that destroyed most of the British motor industry. Happily, Land Rover is one of the few survivors.

History will also tell you that successful car makers don’t make sudden, impulsive decisions when it comes to new models. From initial concept to production line takes several years and massive financial investment. If the idiots in our current government had appreciated that, they wouldn’t have come up with the stupid idea of bringing forward compulsory electrification of new cars by 2030. That’s just nine years away – a blink of an eye in automotive development terms.

Are you a saddo like me that treasures all his old copies of LRM? If so, go back in time nine years and check out copies of the mag from 2012 for mentions of electric propulsion. I just did and I couldn’t find any. But there were plenty of mentions of the £500 million investment made in a new Wolverhampton factory, built to create the Ingenium diesel and petrol engines in which the company had entrusted its future.

Now go back five years to 2016 and you’ll still find hardly a mention of EVS. But you will read plenty of enthusiastic reports of those new Ingenium engines coming on stream.

Like many, I’m impatient with JLR for not acting quicker when it comes to EVS, but in truth they were shafted by a populist government hoping to steal a few votes by bringing forward the death of diesel and petrol to 2030.

JLR has been left feeling like a gambler who’d stuck half a billion pounds on the red-hot favourite, only to see it nobbled by an unscrupulous transport minister.

The motor industry is like a supertanker in that can neither do an emergency stop, nor a U-turn, without a lot of advance warning. Apart from specialists like Tesla, the entire industry is struggling to meet the government’s dictum – and JLR is suffering more than most, thanks to its massive investment in a factory built to create engines that were decreed obsolete before they’d even entered full production.

This scandal has been overshadowed by the coronavirus tragedy and the measures taken by the government to control the pandemic. We all have our views on how well or badly they have fared and I won’t comment further, except to say that history also tells us the ultimate fate of unpopular politicians.

“The motor industry is like a supertanker in that neither can do an emergency stop, nor a U-turn, without a lot of advance warning”