The Americans, certainly the most automobile-obsessed people in the world, were always big on everything because their country was so huge. So naturally they built the most humungous, luxurious and lazily powerful cars going.
Being easy-going themselves, and rather spoilt, they have automatic everything in their dinosaurs, and soft, cushy suspension systems so that you could possibly get seasick rather than carsick while on a drive. And being very rich, they didn’t mind it very much that the fuel consumption of their automobiles was better measured in gallons per mile than miles per gallon!
And today, to show the world how powerful they are, they like grunting around in monster Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs), like Hummers, which are better suited to the Rambo and Schwarzenegger types than moms dropping their kids to school.
The Europeans, living in much smaller, crowded countries, naturally built smaller cars, and hated American cars because most of them were larger than their houses and you couldn’t do a `U’ turn on their streets.
But by and large, they went in for hard engineering. The British peaked in 1906, (when their Empire was going strong) with the legendary Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which was described as "the best car in the world" and snobbishly believed that they had nothing more to prove to the world.
They had a couple of big world hits after that like the Mini and the Landrover. But they don’t tell you that the Mini was designed by a non-Brit and the Landrover was inspired by the World War II American jeep.
And as they are eternally optimistic about the weather (and so many of their children’s books begin with the lines, "It was a lovely day and the sun was shining", which nine and a half times out of 10 is not true in England) and have their fabled sense of humour, they specialised in building small, nippy open tops like the MG and Morgan and Triumph, and yes, Sunbeam (!), which you could drive (nine and a half times out of 10) in the rain!
The Germans, who built the first practical car, were all stainless steel and top class engineering. Rock solid, from bumper to bumper, coldly competent, no-nonsense and great to drive for a 100 years, but perhaps just a little soulless, you might think? Perhaps — and they even had that one delightful exception that proves the rule — the Volkswagen Beetle, which had the hippies swooning over it, and which was, of all people — Hitler’s lovechild! How he must have turned in his grave.
The Italians, of course, built cars just like they are. Highly emotional, prone to tantrums, screamingly fast, with engines that sound like opera singers — and looks to kill. No one built better-looking cars than them — just look at the Ferraris and Alfa Romeos and you’ll know what I mean. Style came naturally to them — who’s bothered about substance?
The French, who were pioneers in auto-engineering, were very clever indeed. They put rocket-science technology into cars that resembled prams or duck-billed platypuses and sat back smugly and said "beat that"! And these ingenious runabouts (like the fabled Citroën 2 CV and Citroën DS) were equally at home cruising on the motorway, as bucketing across a ploughed field scattering seeds (or sending a satellite into orbit!)
The Japanese, of course, did what they do best — shrink everything. They miniaturised American cars, made sure that they never broke down for 100,000 miles, and never needed petrol for 100,000 miles and sold them 10 times cheaper… (All of which was very useful, when the prices of oil shot up). Only now the Koreans are doing the same thing, 20 times cheaper.
Ah, and what about us? We of course are past masters at assimilation: we took the Morris Oxford of 1957, and made it our fabled Ambassador. Today of course, we have the Tata Indica and Indigo, which are perhaps our first true homegrown products. Not entirely, because the Indica was designed in Italy, and I hope our politicians don’t have a problem with that!
But all this is changing, and cars are losing their old identities. Across the world, rich car companies are gobbling up poorer ones and taking their national identities too. Rolls Royce is now German; Daimler-Benz (Mercedes) is making American Chryslers. Some Mercedes models are not actually made in the U.S., and many Japanese cars have American brand names — it’s a proper hotchpotch out there! And like a master crook, a single model may have six different aliases in six different countries! Names and marquees have little meaning.
In one sense, that’s sad, but looking at it another way, may be not. May be people round the world should also start breaking down national boundaries and identities and become global citizens. Like that Beatles song went; `Imagine there are no countries… ‘
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