Another COTY winner

COTY jurors aren’t voting for Car of the Year. They are voting to look Green. Why else would they have elected the Ampera in 2012? They surely can’t have expected it to sell more than a handful. They’re not that stupid. No, they are spooked, along with governments round the world, by what WS Gilbert called greenery yallery Grosvenor Gallery foot-in-the-grave young men. Or women.

Opel and Vauxhall dealers, who hadn’t a lot of choice perhaps, accounted for the first year’s 5,000 or so Amperas. That sank to 3,184 last year and collapsed to 332 in the first five months of this, of which only 46 were in its German home market. GM Vice Chairman Steve Girsky vented frustration at Geneva: “All the governments in Europe said, ‘We want EVs, we want EVs.’ We show up with one, and where is everybody?” The answer is that they were off buying something else, real cars mostly.

COTY jurors are like governments appeasing Green voters with inglorious wind farms and wasteful subsidies. By any standards the Ampera was a disaster. Production is stopping and although GM will redesign the broadly similar Volt next year it won’t come to Europe.

There wasn’t much wrong with the Ampera. It was sensibly-sized and quite handsome, drove smoothly and quietly and as a hybrid didn’t have the range anxieties of milk-floaty plug-in electric cars, attracting complaints now about how costly they are to top-up. Apparently charging stations take money by the hour, without knowing how much electricity is actually being used. The cost can be just as much for a battery flat or near full.

I have said before that there is a FIFA flavour about Car of the Year. In 50 years COTY has never elected a Jaguar, Range Rover or Land Rover. It can’t be anti-British-ness. Munich doesn’t come off well either. There has been no BMW; a range that goes from Rolls-Royce to Mini has never made the grade except for second last year for the i3. It elected an electric Nissan yet COTY doesn’t do safety. Volvo and Saab never featured. Engineering excellence? Bentley has never made it. Production quality? There have been no Hondas. Value for money? No Skodas, no Seats but 9 Fiats, 6 Renaults and 5 Fords. I can’t understand why manufacturers get so excited by it.

Intrepid diver

The TV ad for the pillarless Ford B-Max is real. No tricksy photo-shopping. Bobby Holland-Hanton really did go head first through the 1.5metre gap of a suspended B-Max to show Life-Is-An-Open-Door. Viewers see him climbing stairs to the diving board. However he was really suspended from a crane for the stunt proper. Bobby works on Bond movies so, on this occasion, the only shooting was by the camera.

Of course, pillarless 4-doors are by no means new. They were relatively easy to make when any self-respecting Rolls-Royce or Daimler had a stout chassis to keep them from sagging when the doors were open. Their structure had the integrity of a railway carriage and your footman turned a stout handle to latch a door. One did not stoop; one preserved one’s dignity getting in or coming down.
But come cars with unitary bodies it wasn’t easy to make. Doors were getting smaller and not many were able to dispense with the B-pillar. Fiat had the pillarless Ardita in 1934, and persisted with pillarlessness until the 1100 of 1952. Triumph tried it in Britain and Licorne in France, but structures tended to wilt with age. They rattled and leaked; a middle pillar held the roof and floor together. Or apart.
MG K-types (top) came in two wheelbase lengths, 9ft, or 7ft 10-and three-sixteenths of an inch. It was not a monocoque. It had a chassis and bodywork that owed something to the ash-framing and bespoke panel-beating of the coaching era. Rods inside the doors fitted catches in the roof and floor and access was relatively easy, despite the car being barely 4ft 6in tall. A long 6-cylinder engine, even of a modest 1100cc, put a premium on passenger space, so reaching seats without dodging round a middle prop was vital. The engine was a Wolseley-derived cross-flow, you could have a Wilson preselective gearbox instead of a non-synchromesh manual, but suspension was by cart springs.

The Lancia Aprilia of 1937-1939 was a little masterpiece. All-independently sprung (sliding pillars in front, transverse leaf and torsion bar at the back) and a narrow-angle ohv V4 engine, it had hydraulic brakes and was good for 80mph. A striking looking car, some 15,000 were made before the war.
Ford’s B-Max has a rear door that slides. Mazda’s RX7 (below) has a small half rear door with a concealed handle, exact, precise graceful. It’s an ideal formula for a small, perfectly proportioned sporty car barely 4ft tall. Surprising, really, that Cecil Kimber never thought of that dinky back door.

see diver

Fiat 500 Twin Air

With a facia like a Roberts radio the Fiat 500 Twin Air raises retro to new frontiers. Italian engineers at the press launch this week could not resist congratulating themselves on a conspicuous success. It sips fuel by the teaspoonful and has the lowest exhaust emissions of any production petrol engine. Even climate-change sceptics can not gainsay free entry to the London Congestion Charge zone, with 95kg/km of CO2 from the exhaust.

Pert, pretty and engaging, Fiat 500s have form. Remember 13bhp. The first 500 of 1936, the Topolino or Mickey Mouse, had a 569cc side-valve 4-cylinder at the front driving the rear wheels, independent suspension by transverse leaf spring, weighed 535kg (1179lb) and did about 53mph and 45mpg. More than half a million were made. Recreated in 1957, the engine was changed to a 479cc overhead valve vertical twin, put at the back and shorn of a transmission shaft its weight was reduced to 470kg (1035lb). It still gave only13bhp so it didn’t go much faster but it used less fuel; 50mpg against about 47mpg.
Like VW, with the born-again Beetle, the 4-cylinder retro-styled Fiat 500 of July 2007 shifted the engine to the front again, driving the front wheels. Safety equipment and crash protection made it heavier and now we have another vertical twin with a chain drive ohc to 4-valve heads. It is now 900kg (1984lb) but this little jewel of a car has a turbocharger, and with 85bhp and five gears will do 108mph and, on the extra-urban cycle, 76.5mpg.

At 60mph the new Twin Air burbles along at a restful 2,500rpm in fifth. Dr Lanchester’s clever balancer shaft hasn’t quite smoothed out the beat of the two cylinder engine but it is not an unpleasant buzz. You can’t call it swift at 11sec to 60mph and the gearshift is a bit woolly but what a little charmer. People smiled at in picturesque Berkshire, where the local authorities are speed camera-mad, obsessed with chicanes, road humps and so-called traffic-calming, outdated and largely discredited safety measures, which must do little for the residents’ peace of mind.
Veteran Fiat PR Peter Newton runs well-organised, informative launches, packed with information. Based at the splendid Forbury Hotel, cheek by jowl with Reading Gaol, well worth a Ballad.

The heart of rual autumnal Berkshire