When I worked on the old Top Gear TV show one of my jobs, as the office’s self-elected nerd king, was to write briefing notes on the cars we were planning to film. These would start with all the basic stats about power, performance and so on, then move on to nuggets of less-well-known trivia in line with our belief that the show should provide ‘pub currency’ people could use to impress their mates when they went for a pint later. I would lose myself in press packs and other sources, put the whole thing together and then share it with the presenters so we could decide what we wanted to put into the script.
In one series, and this dates things immediately, we planned a road trip across Ukraine in three affordable hatchbacks – a Ford Fiesta, a Volkswagen Up and a Dacia Sandero. I put together my usual document on the cars and shared it with my colleagues after which I received a puzzled message from TV’s Jeremy Clarkson which simply said, ‘There seems to be a lot about electric window switches’. I suspect he regretted raising this since my reply was an impassioned and slightly-too-long explanation which could have been summed up simply as this; you can tell a lot about a car by its electric windows.
In the case of the three hatchbacks, I remember that the Sandero’s were controlled by switches in the middle of the dash, an immediate giveaway that money had been saved. Switches on the door need to be handed for left- and right-hand drive, they demand extra wiring to extend into both doors which adds complication during the assembly process and cost, and they have to be capable of working perfectly after getting a bit wet in case someone leaves the door open in a downpour. Embed the switches in the middle of the car and you avoid all of this, saving a few pennies which become many pounds over the production life of a popular car. The way you dropped your window in that generation of Sandero was a subtle but important clue as to how Dacia was able to sell the car at such an attractively low price.
