Geek out! How to truly cock it up

Many years ago a friend of mine, at the time engaged in the entirely un-stupid task of studying medicine at Cambridge, strolled down to his local shops, bought a snack and a stamp for a very important letter, then absent-mindedly stuffed his food wrapper into a post box and dropped his very important letter into a bin.

I like this story because it reminds me that even really clever people can sometimes do profoundly stupid things. And the same is true of car companies.

We know that large organisations can be blitheringly useless, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had to deal with an energy provider whose name rhymes with Pottish Scower, but building cars is really complicated and time consuming and involves an awful lot of people, many of them palpably smarter than the average bear. Yet still the cock ups come. So, a bit like my friend outside a Cambridgeshire post office, let’s rummage in the bin of history to marvel at some of these unforced errors.