The Expanding Car
With cars getting increasingly huge, what to do? Give the people what they need…
Have a look at the footprint on the road of the current E92 3-series, and compare it to the original 5-series. For cars a class apart, the 3-series appears to be suffering from middle age spread. Only it’s not just the 3-series, almost every car released seems to be bigger than the model it replaces, and pushes ever nearer to the class above. Ignoring the odd evolutionary error (the Golf Plus for example, for those who want something bigger than a Golf, but smaller than a Passat) we’re getting stuck with bigger, heavier cars. The only way out of this is use of lightweight material, which is expensive, or fancy power sources, which is expensive.
We need to think recycling.
I’m not referring here to scrappage schemes and the like, either. Cast your mind back to when Daewoo first emerged onto the UK car showroom floor with a car that looked suspiciously like a mk2 Astra, and another one that could have been a Citroen if you squinted a bit. They were unexciting, appeared to be have been designed by an unimaginative four year old, but they were cheap. It was the historical underpinnings that lead to that low price. So why not recycle old car designs?
The original MX-5 would be a great candidate for such a venture. It still looks cute and funky, and has an engine bay flexible enough you can put anything (up to and including a GM LS series V8…) It’ll need a little re-engineering, sure, to meet modern crash tests, and maybe a fixed head option to cut down costs and insurance groups. It would be basic, there would be exposed metal in the cabin, and the handling would be muted slightly to make it easy to drive, but in doing so a whole raft of low cost, high fun two-seaters would be put on the road. It would also put money in Mazda’s pocket for the tooling and rights to the design, and because it is intrinsically lightweight it would also be cheap to run.
It’s not going to happen of course. People want big cars, lots of airbags, 17 speaker surround sound, and lots of sound deadening. Manufacturers will fiddle the design so it appears economical, and fleet buyers will keep buying the Mercedes E-Class until a single estate has a road footprint equivalent to three quarters of Hertfordshire. People will buy what they think they want, not what they need.
Unless they buy a Mercedes, in which case they think they need a five seater saloon, but come away with a 7 seater people carrier, with raised suspension, a 6.5 litre V8 and suspension so hard that Bruce Lee would go “Oooh, the primary ride is a bit hard.” Mercedes, I realise there are 26 letters in the alphabet, but this does not mean you need to make 26 classes of car. Spend all the development money on McLaren instead, they need the help at the moment…