Progress report

They’re safer

Yes, yes, I know that here at Ti we regularly bang on about how modern cars are too big and too heavy, and I am the first in line to grab the drumsticks. And yes, very valid arguments can be made that lighter, better-handling and better-steering cars could help us avoid crashes in the first place. Eyebrows can be quite justifiably raised at the current EuroNCAP push for so-called ‘active’ safety systems, like the Lane Keep Assist that quite rightly made Andrew’s hit-list – it’s a feature that is often badly implemented and whose safety benefit is debatable (unlike Automatic Emergency Braking, whose benefit is clear).

But, leaving all these ‘buts’ aside, there is no doubt that decades of work by the car makers themselves, regulators and by bodies like NCAP and Thatcham, have made cars much, much safer, in the event of an accident. The numbers are stark – take those for the US, for example. In 1945, 100 people died in the States for every billion miles travelled. By the late Sixties, that had been halved. And today, that number is about seven deaths per billion miles travelled: still far too many, but a full order of magnitude better. The absolute numbers in other markets may differ, but the tendency is similar: vast progress.

You can see where you are going at night

Modern lighting, wash-wiping and climate control systems are marvels of under-appreciated engineering. Driving even a relatively recent car – from the Nineties or early Noughties, say – on a damp winter night will quickly remind you of just how weedy these systems were not so long ago.

They stop – fast

We all dislike car journalists, right? Pampered folk who get to ride around all day in the latest supercar, and then complain if the foie gras at the press launch dinner is not quite gras enough. But here’s an area where technical progress can be directly attributed to the ladies and gentlemen of the press. Or, more accurately, to the Frauen und Herren of that eminent German magazine, Auto Motor und Sport.

You see, they invented what’s become known simply as the AMS brake test. It’s wickedly simple – accelerate to 100km/h, then stamp on the middle pedal until the car comes to a complete stop. Repeat nine times, for a total of 10 stops, then measure the stopping distance on that last, 10th, stop. This is the ‘AMS’ stopping distance. The speeds may seem modest, but the repeated max-decel stops, with no time in between for the brake system to cool, is a hideously sadistic test for any car.

It’s not unusual to see clouds of smoke billowing out of wheel arches, or even tongues of flames licking out of callipers, as organic compounds and paints burn off brake pads. Sub-30m stopping distances are the reserve of only a few, relatively light and superbly braked supercars such as the Porsche 911 GT2 and GT3 RS. But here’s the surprising thing – this test has also percolated its way down into ‘normal’ cars. Many OEMs are quite obsessed with this test, and try to design even their modest family-haulers to have respectable AMS stopping distances. As a result, the brake systems in most modern cars are remarkably good. You are very unlikely to run into brake ‘fade’ or any such orifice-tightening phenomenon anywhere away from a race track. Most reassuring.

They work, every day

I can hear some unfortunate reader sharpening their digital pencil to write irately to the editors (Prosser has two ‘esses’…) ‘Dear Sirs, that chap Twohig persists in talking rubbish. The engine of my brand new insert make and model here just dumped its innards all over the M40.’ But generally speaking, modern cars are boringly reliable in their fundamental mechanicals. They start, as predictably and reassuringly as the Shipping Forecast, even on the coldest winter morning, or when you come back to them in the dank long-stay car park of some Godforsaken airport after a few weeks away. Pistons rarely seize, heads no longer ‘coke up’, and cylinder walls no longer need re-boring at 100,000 miles.

They don’t rust

Remember the last time you saw a really rusty car on the road? You know what I mean – one with holes in the door lowers? Sills bubbling like porridge just coming to the boil? Orange streaks trickling from the lower corners of the front or rear screens? No, neither do I. Okay, we can’t put this down purely to technical progress by body and paint engineers. It’s largely due to the various scrappage schemes of the recent past that killed off many of what we used to call old bangers. But the basic point still holds – steel technology, joining technology and especially paint technology has advanced in leaps and bounds since the late Seventies. Our cars last longer and look better when they are 10 or 15 years old.

They’re good when we’re bored

Andrew Frankel has written and spoken eloquently about the joy of setting his alarm clock to jump in his Caterham to drive off into the dawn, with no objective and no planned route – just for the sheer hell of it. We can all relate to that.

But sadly, we often get to choose neither the time nor the route for our daily drives. They may be long, boring motorway hauls. Or those soul-destroying urban trawls, stop-starting along with the lumpy flow of a thousand other congestion victims. Modern cars are really good at this horrible stuff. The latest generation of automatic transmissions, love them or hate them, undeniably combine efficiency and effortlessness in traffic. Active cruise control that can smoothly maintain a safe gap, even down to zero-speed, takes care of the boring task of simply following-my-leader in a long line of cars.

Enormous improvements in NVH and in seating make cars less tiring over long distances. And features like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, although still far from perfect, make it easy to access all the music ever recorded and all the pods ever casted to keep us informed and entertained on these thankless trips that, unfortunately, make up most of our driving lives.

But as well as these direct ways in which cars themselves have improved, the industry that produces them has itself progressed in many ways. Having spent three or so decades of my working life ‘on the inside’, here are a few ways in which I would not wish to turn the clock back…

Better for the planet and all that jazz

Don’t worry, I’m not going to deliver the usual guilt-tripping lecture about climate change here. I’m not going to go there on the debate about the environmental benefits of EVs, let alone open the PHEV Pandora’s Box.

But aside from the debates about motive power that occupy the headlines these days, the modern car industry is genuinely a lot ‘greener’ than it once was. The so-called ‘End of Life’ Directive (EU 2000/53/EC) defines how car makers must plan for how their vehicles will eventually be scrapped, specifying (among other things) that over 95 per cent of the vehicle must be recyclable.

Less well known is a raft of legislation using catchy acronyms like ‘REACH’ (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation of Chemicals) or ‘GADSL’ (Global Automotive Declarable Substance List) which, in short, control the Bad Stuff that car makers liked to use in the past. OEMs can no longer use a long list of substances in the manufacture of your car – from obviously toxic things like lead (yup, there is no more lead used in the solder of the electronics in your car, for example) to potentially carcinogenic substances like vinyl chlorides, right down to specific isotopes of certain elements – like the particularly nasty Cr6+ isotope of the metal chromium. This latter ban made the industry completely revise the industrial processes that produce the brightwork on your car.

They’re built in nicer places

Now, I love car plants. I can’t quite explain why, but I get a thrill every time I walk through the – usually tatty – turnstiles, feel the ground shiver with the impact of the heavy artillery of the press shop and hear the high-pitched bark of the pneumatic guns. But I never allow myself to forget that these were, for many decades, pretty brutal places. The work was grindingly hard. Workplace injuries – both physical and mental – were commonplace. Noise levels were, literally, deafening. Lighting was patchy, which helped hide the general filth. They were places where machismo was a badge of honour and, in many countries, breeding grounds for serious industrial and racial tensions.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not going to claim that car plants are some worker’s paradise these days. The average line-worker still can’t take 10 minutes for a relaxing chill-out on a Google office-style beanbag, or decide not to finish fitting that dashboard right now, because they need to do their daily Headspace meditation session. But they have much improved. More than lip-service is paid to operators’ health and safety. They are airier, better lit, cleaner and quieter. Job rotation is planned, training is better structured and career prospects mean something other than planning visits to the osteopath because your knees and shoulders are shot.

They’re bought (and sold) in nicer places

I might love car plants, but if I never had to go to a car dealer again, I would shed few tears. And that’s not good. Because I am exactly the type of person that should like going to a dealer – a middle-aged male car enthusiast; precisely the demographic that is likely to have the best experience. But for me, as for many customers, that ‘main dealer’ experience is a curiously archaic one – a mid-20th century experience that has failed to move on with the times.

Of course, there are exceptions – some dealers, especially smaller or independent outfits, are still very cool places to spend time in, staffed by genuine enthusiasts, keen to make sure their customers get the right car at the right price. But these are unfortunately few and far between. The good news? I can now research, configure and order a car from the comfort of my own home. I may even be able to arrange for it to be serviced at a distance, without having to drop it into a dealer and go home in some embarrassingly bestickered ‘courtesy’ car. And when I’m done with it, there are any number of websites that will buy it directly from me, without having to spin the roulette wheel of advertising it to the general public, or of submitting to the merciless trade-in arithmetic of the dealer.

To sum up, Andrew English is right. Many features of modern cars are bloody annoying: either fundamentally bad ideas that somehow made it to production or – worse – good ideas that are maddeningly badly executed.

But here’s a positive thought on which to end. Some cars manage to combine the best of the Good Old Days with the best of the Good New Days. Mazda MX-5, anybody? Small, light and nimble like an old MG Roadster. But it starts, stops and was built in a relatively ethical way in a fairly pleasant factory. And it will last forever. Dare I mention the Alpine A110? Obviously inspired by its beautifully delicate ancestor the Berlinette, but fully exploiting all the technical and social progress of the 44 years that separate the two cars. It’s true that the challenge gets tougher every year, but I’m still hopeful that these will not be the last cars to apply modern technology, but without forgetting the lessons of the past.