Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [20]
Another one for a stationary moment, or even for children in the back. Take an irrelevant page from the owner's handbook – say the one about the dangers of eating any part of the battery – and tear it into thin strips, three per player. Find a role of sticky tape. The object of the game is to secure your three strips to your personal air vent and adjust the airflow and angle such that the paper strips form a perfect Prince-Of-Wales feathers display. Best one wins.
Dashboard spot-the-difference (2 players)
Player 1 studies the dashboard and centre console for 15 seconds, noting the position of all knobs and switches and the reading on any displays. He then looks away while Player 2 alters one thing. On a given signal Player 1 then has another 15 seconds to spot the difference. Things that may be changed include settings for heater controls, the time, the radio display, the position of column stalks and so on. On old Range Rovers some knobs can be removed altogether. This may happen anyway.
My, how the long miles fly past!
THE TECHNICAL REVOLUTION IN THE TOYSHOP
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the motor industry is at the molten core of that white heat of technology thing we've heard so much about. But I'm not so sure.
A cursory investigation into the progress of the car reveals that it has actually been a pretty cautious and conservative affair. There have been a few highlights, such as the Mini and the Citroen DS, but none of the quantum leaps we've seen in aviation. And so much of what we considered new developments in the car – supercharging, turbocharging, fuel injection, variable valve-timing, anti-lock brakes, composite materials, sat-nav, fuel cells – were handed down from above.
Now it turns out that the situation is worse than I thought. I recently worked on a BBC programme about my favourite childhood toys, and it transpired that much of what the motor industry has touted as new ideas over the last decade could be revealed as old hat after a quick rummage around the attic.
Take the business of platform sharing. If this has ever confused you, I should explain that a car's 'platform' is essentially the floor of its bodyshell, plus perhaps a bulkhead or two. The platform is responsible for much of a car's structural integrity and crash-worthiness, and therefore its design consumes a disproportionate amount of the total engineering effort. Sharing them between several models makes obvious sense.
Students of fashion and advocates of greater choice will say this is a good thing, since it spawns a greater variety of cars. The Audi TT, for example, is essentially a Golf underneath, and would probably have died on the drawing board but for this simple manufacturing expediency. The outgoing Alfa Spider was based on the Fiat Tipo, and the previous generation Porsches Box-ster and 911 were more closely related than you might think.
Meanwhile, connoisseurs of the car say it's a bad thing, because all these so-called 'niche models' are hamstrung by the dynamic attributes inherent in the common platform. Both groups have a point, but neither should imagine this is anything new.
If you have a Tri-ang Flying Scotsman kicking around the house (it was their best seller, so you may well do) you already own an exemplar of platform sharing; by which I mean the platform on which the engine is built, not the one at which it stands. At the advent of Tri-ang Railways in the early '50s, the model railway was already a very old idea, but model railways were either very crude or very expensive. Tri-ang's genius was in producing something convincing and accessible, and they did this by reducing the number of rolling stock 'platforms' they needed. With a relatively small handful of locomotive chassis, electric motors, coach bogies and wagon frames they produced the biggest range the world has seen. It was all affordable, too. Closer to home, Scalextric was up to something similar. And VW thinks it's been clever in using that Golf platform for a handful of Skodas.
'Modularity' is something else that the motor industry