Opinion

There was a good column in The Times recently about the state of Britain's roadsides, which frequently are liberally strewn with litter.

It suggested that we get serious about cleaning it up. Any campaign to get that done would receive my support, too. But I don't know that we should feel quite so much shame about litter's existence as we sometimes do. I bet that, fly-tipping aside, most of it gets there by accident.

I can't place a bin bag outside my front door late at night to carry it to the wheelie bin at the end of the lane in the morning because by then a rat or a crow will have taken a few chunks out of the bag and everything inside will have started blowing around the garden.

And there's a lay-by down the road from me where I often see black bags left poking from the top of the wheelie bins. I'm sure the intent is good, but it's not likely to end well, given that Britain is a windy island in the North Atlantic with plenty of scavenging wildlife.

Similar bin-cramming happens in town centres; stuff is placed near the top of those bins that have an opening on both sides, creating the perfect wind tunnel for sucking lightweight rubbish precariously placed in them.

So by all means let's get Britain's roads tidy again, but at the same time let's make a plan to prevent it going wrong again.

Often it's thoughtlessness over malice. So let's have more bins, better designed, more frequently emptied and with big signs about not overfilling them. And make local amenity tips free again, too.

Last week, Lotus announced a new programme called Chapman Bespoke. It promises to offer greater personalisation and unique options, right up to the production of one-off cars, for your Lotus.

What would Colin Chapman, Lotus's founder, after whom the scheme is named and whose signature adorns its badge, have thought?

No idea. Never met the bloke. One of my least favourite phrases in motoring hackery is "so and so (company founder] would have approved".

It's usually proclaimed definitively at the end of an article to show that a car is a true thoroughbred and that it's fit to wear the name.

But honestly, how are we to know what WO Bentley or Charles Rolls of Rolls-Royce would seriously have thought about the cars that come out of their company's respective factories today?

Big cliché. Silly phrase. I've vowed never to use it so, aside from the occasions where I probably already have, never will.

Anyway, famously, Chapman said things about simplifying cars and adding lightness, which is certainly something he did on cars made for and derived from racing, like the Lotus (now Caterham) 7, which was a path followed by the Lotus Elise after his death.

And given that he sketched out his first cars by hand and built them much the same way, Lotus thinks he would have been into this Bespoke idea. Chapman was also partial, like most entrepreneurs, to making a few quid.

Allowing somebody to paint their Lotus the same colour as their favourite nail polish and finishing the interior with gazelle hide if they're prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege (Bentley makes an average of £34,000 per car from its Mulliner programme) sounds like the sort of thing that he might have been absolutely fine with too.

As I've already established, I wouldn't dare say whether Chapman would have 'approved' or not, but if it makes Lotuses more desirable, and particularly if somebody has an idea for a dreamy new lightweight one-off supercar for us to drool over, it sounds all right to me.

Last year was Bentley’s second most profitable year yet.

Though, speak to boss Adrian Hallmark – who has just announced he will be taking over as boss of Aston Martin – and you get the sense that the pride comes not from what the final profit figure was, but from knowing how bad it could have been.

The previous six years on Hallmark’s watch have been fruitful in setting the company up for success even in challenging market conditions. Last year was indeed challenging for Bentley and all other luxury car makers. Hallmark said global demand for luxury cars was flat, and the only growth came from premium cars with luxury pricing - the likes of Range Rover and high-end Mercedes models.

Yet Bentley was able to prosper, for three key reasons: a restructure in 2020, increased pricing structures on its cars, and an increase in the amount of bespoke content fitted to them.

Hallmark took over Bentley when it was loss-making and in his first full year in charge in 2019 (he joined the company in February 2018) made a €300 million swing in profitability to take Bentley back into the black. Last year’s profits were almost 10 times more than 2019’s €65m figure, at €589m, even though volumes were only up just over 2500 cars to 13,560 units.

The first underlying trend in its success is the long-term impact of a successful restructure of the business in 2020 as part of Bentley’s ‘Beyond 100’ plan to prepare the business for going all-electric and paying its own way to do so, something that would require huge investments in technology and facilities. 

Linked into this was the need to make each unit sold more profitable, to allow the firm to not be so reliant on simply increasing sales as a way of growing profits and revenues.

“It's a great indication of the business model that we've created over the last four years after restructuring,” Hallmark said in a briefing call announcing Bentley’s latest financial results. “We’re just a few thousand more cars than we used to sell in the 2000s, but we’re now making three to four times the profit per year that we used to make.”

Hallmark is simply selling every car Bentley makes for more money, something not achieved by upping list prices but by increasing the amount of bespoke Mulliner content - on top of the factory-fit options that are offered on standard price lists. 

Each Bentley comes with around €39,000 of factory-fit options, and 70% of cars have bespoke Mulliner content on top of that. The Mulliner business has developed to the point where Bentley is able to integrate some bespoke processes into its production lines.

“We managed to industrialise some of these technologies and options and fit them in the same process that we do regular options on a production line,” he said. “So the quality is the same, the speed of fitting them is the same and it means the customers can get them without delays, and we make very personal bespoke cars without any fuss.”

One buyer of a £250,000 GT Convertible managed to pay the list price again solely in optional bespoke content on top. “Special paint, special embroidery, veneers from specific trees in his own forest, including tree emblems on the headrests…”

More limited-run special models like the £2m Batur and Bacalar models have also been made to boost exclusivity and profitability. 

“In the old days, it would be one person in Brunei,” said Hallmark. “Now, we’ve got a handful of people we actively engage with creating unique cars just for them.” 

They’re priced for scarcity but even these models can be made more exclusive – and expensive – still. One customer has been quoted €400,000 on top of the list price for what they wanted to do to make it their own. “A lot of that was carbonfibre… everywhere,” said Hallmark.

While labelling the firm’s results as “fantastic”, Hallmark still noted there were huge challenges in selling cars in 2023. “We ended up still with a good order bank but not as strong as we started with, but with a great performance overall.

“China had a terrible time in the first half, but recovered in the second. The US was similar. The UK and Europe had a decent first half but suffered in the second half. So we had uneven performance for the first time in about four years.

“We started to see volatility in the order intake rate and volatility around the world as a result of economic challenges, geopolitical issues and rocketing interest rates, even though our customers can still afford our cars.”

Hallmark said the increase in interest rates had added as much as $1000 to monthly payments, making for a “level of emotional sensitivity that slows down the demand for what we're now seeing”. Things have now stabilised, he said, “and we're actually back on the up”.

This year won’t break any records for Bentley, given it is a changeover year at Crewe for every model apart from the Bentayga. Hallmark expects the firm’s sales to sit between the 15,000-20,000 marks once the fifth model line (a new electric car) is launched from 2026, averaging at around 17,000 units, and profitability will be further solidified by a desire to put Bentley back into higher-priced segments. It certainly won’t be dropping down the pricing ladder below the Bentayga.

“There is no numeric limit to exclusivity other than don’t oversupply the market. That’s something we are absolutely committed to maintain.”

I don’t use a dashcam, despite how useful they can be to prove one’s innocence following a collision.

That’s partly because of the faff of setting one up every time I test a different car, but mostly because of who I might become.

When dashcams first appeared, I didn’t anticipate how they could turn a number of us into – how to put it? – such antagonistic snitches. A bunch of lowdown grasses. Squealers. People thriving on catching other road users making errors and then taking delight in fessing them up online. Could I be that kind of person? Perhaps. Best not find out, I think.

So popular, if that’s the word, is the pastime that it’s encouraged by police services, who appreciate us doing the legwork. They even later release YouTube montages.

In the past week, I’ve also seen videos of a motorcycle rider and a driver both prosecuted for bad behaviour. And in both cases bang to rights too: one careless, one incredibly aggressive.

Both were encouraged into it by the poor behaviour of those around them, either by failing to enter a dual carriageway safely, or by hanging around in the wrong lane until they were undertaken, but that doesn’t excuse the actions. These were rightful, well-deserved prosecutions.

But I’m not sure they’re the only guilty parties in those incidents. There are thousands of videos online uploaded by people who would rather be involved in than avoid an incident they can plainly see coming, just so they can gleefully say they were right when it happens, like a child who taunts a sibling into finally landing the thump that gets them sent to their room. “Ha! Look what I made you do!”

As a motorcyclist and cyclist, I’d rather stay wronged but upright. “I was right” makes for a gloomy epitaph.

It suits police chiefs to appeal for this footage and to use it for prosecutions, though, because it ups their rate of motoring convictions, which, aside from speed camera fines, has stagnated as a result of decades of unforgivable cuts to traffic policing levels. Traffic police represent less than 4% of all police officers – and most are ‘double-hatted’ rather than exclusively policing roads.

In 2017, I interviewed an officer who said I would be “shocked” at how short-handed traffic services are. In his patch, there were frequently just three or four officers for an area of 1.4 million people plus a good stretch of four surrounding motorways. It takes at least four to make a tactical stop. “Without traffic officers, roads become the playground of criminals, idiots and drug/drunk drivers,” he said.

A 2020 report by the Parliamentary Advisory Committee for Transport Safety (PACTS) agreed. “As the number of dedicated roads policing officers has fallen, so too has the number of motoring offences detected, precipitously so for some offences,” it found. 

Worse: “Since 2013, there has been no significant reduction in road fatalities related to contributory factors that might be associated with offending.”

Between 2010 and 2014, there was a 22% reduction in dedicated roads policing officers, with a further 18% reduction from 2015 to 2020. So despite cars becoming ever safer, and more cameras to catch specific offences, the risks remain unchanged. Cameras, official or public, might catch individual indiscretions but clearly aren’t improving the whole. In short: to improve matters, we need more traffic police. Senior officers told the PACTS report as much.

Police chiefs know the risks of trial by camera. At a pro-Palestine demo in London recently, a bloke holding a sign saying ‘Hamas is Terrorist’ was wrongly arrested, then later de-arrested, for which the police received a barrage of flak online.

On the defensive, Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, responded by saying that the police operate in “the glare of hundreds of people who were ready to film their every movement” and that “there aren’t many professions [where one is] filmed and then critiqued by an army of armchair commentators”.

No doubt. But it would be easier to sympathise with the argument if it wasn’t how many police services now outsource prosecution of motoring offences.

Last year was Bentley’s second most profitable year yet.

Though, speak to boss Adrian Hallmark – who has just announced he will be taking over as boss of Aston Martin – and you get the sense that the pride comes not from what the final profit figure was, but from knowing how bad it could have been.

The previous six years on Hallmark’s watch have been fruitful in setting the company up for success even in challenging market conditions. Last year was indeed challenging for Bentley and all other luxury car makers. Hallmark said global demand for luxury cars was flat, and the only growth came from premium cars with luxury pricing - the likes of Range Rover and high-end Mercedes models.

Yet Bentley was able to prosper, for three key reasons: a restructure in 2020, increased pricing structures on its cars, and an increase in the amount of bespoke content fitted to them.

Hallmark took over Bentley when it was loss-making and in his first full year in charge in 2019 (he joined the company in February 2018) made a €300 million swing in profitability to take Bentley back into the black. Last year’s profits were almost 10 times more than 2019’s €65m figure, at €589m, even though volumes were only up just over 2500 cars to 13,560 units.

The first underlying trend in its success is the long-term impact of a successful restructure of the business in 2020 as part of Bentley’s ‘Beyond 100’ plan to prepare the business for going all-electric and paying its own way to do so, something that would require huge investments in technology and facilities. 

Linked into this was the need to make each unit sold more profitable, to allow the firm to not be so reliant on simply increasing sales as a way of growing profits and revenues.

“It's a great indication of the business model that we've created over the last four years after restructuring,” Hallmark said in a briefing call announcing Bentley’s latest financial results. “We’re just a few thousand more cars than we used to sell in the 2000s, but we’re now making three to four times the profit per year that we used to make.”

Hallmark is simply selling every car Bentley makes for more money, something not achieved by upping list prices but by increasing the amount of bespoke Mulliner content - on top of the factory-fit options that are offered on standard price lists. 

Each Bentley comes with around €39,000 of factory-fit options, and 70% of cars have bespoke Mulliner content on top of that. The Mulliner business has developed to the point where Bentley is able to integrate some bespoke processes into its production lines.

“We managed to industrialise some of these technologies and options and fit them in the same process that we do regular options on a production line,” he said. “So the quality is the same, the speed of fitting them is the same and it means the customers can get them without delays, and we make very personal bespoke cars without any fuss.”

One buyer of a £250,000 GT Convertible managed to pay the list price again solely in optional bespoke content on top. “Special paint, special embroidery, veneers from specific trees in his own forest, including tree emblems on the headrests…”

More limited-run special models like the £2m Batur and Bacalar models have also been made to boost exclusivity and profitability. 

“In the old days, it would be one person in Brunei,” said Hallmark. “Now, we’ve got a handful of people we actively engage with creating unique cars just for them.” 

They’re priced for scarcity but even these models can be made more exclusive – and expensive – still. One customer has been quoted €400,000 on top of the list price for what they wanted to do to make it their own. “A lot of that was carbonfibre… everywhere,” said Hallmark.

While labelling the firm’s results as “fantastic”, Hallmark still noted there were huge challenges in selling cars in 2023. “We ended up still with a good order bank but not as strong as we started with, but with a great performance overall.

“China had a terrible time in the first half, but recovered in the second. The US was similar. The UK and Europe had a decent first half but suffered in the second half. So we had uneven performance for the first time in about four years.

“We started to see volatility in the order intake rate and volatility around the world as a result of economic challenges, geopolitical issues and rocketing interest rates, even though our customers can still afford our cars.”

Hallmark said the increase in interest rates had added as much as $1000 to monthly payments, making for a “level of emotional sensitivity that slows down the demand for what we're now seeing”. Things have now stabilised, he said, “and we're actually back on the up”.

This year won’t break any records for Bentley, given it is a changeover year at Crewe for every model apart from the Bentayga. Hallmark expects the firm’s sales to sit between the 15,000-20,000 marks once the fifth model line (a new electric car) is launched from 2026, averaging at around 17,000 units, and profitability will be further solidified by a desire to put Bentley back into higher-priced segments. It certainly won’t be dropping down the pricing ladder below the Bentayga.

“There is no numeric limit to exclusivity other than don’t oversupply the market. That’s something we are absolutely committed to maintain.”