The fatal flaw

There’s a phrase I used to hear quite a lot in my early years in the business, but less so today; which is good, because then as now it annoys the hell out of me – albeit for subtly but significantly different reasons.

The phrase is: ‘there’s no such thing as a bad car any more.’ Junior road testers (and some senior ones too) used it to justify their generally benevolent view of the cars they were charged with testing. ‘Yes there bloody is,’ I would fulminate, before explaining that it was natural for standards to improve and should therefore be no less natural for us impartial observers to raise our expectations by a commensurate amount.