Opinion

I wonder if anyone outside of the world of printer sales is sad that we’re buying fewer of them. 

In its annual ‘How We Shop, Live and Look’ report in October, the department store John Lewis said that its sales of home printers had fallen by 26% during the past year.

It even conceded that the printer is “resented… a destroyer of homework, voracious devourer of ink” – and it usually tries to be nice enough about things it sells that you will buy one.

Is there a more hated domestic device? The printer industry has a horrible reputation for adopting the worst bits of the tech world, trying to control our behaviour by forcing the purchase of specific expensive ink cartridges, even if the colour you need hasn’t run out, automatically updating software to reduce capability, locking out microchipped cartridges and trapping us into subscriptions. My toaster doesn’t do that. 

“The band Rage Against The Machine never specified which machine they were furious with, but I bet it was a printer,” said one online wag. There are even ‘smash rooms’ where you can pay to beat the living daylights out of one. No other domestic appliance is so despised.

But then I don’t suppose a car is a domestic appliance as it tries to tug the steering wheel from your hands or bongs at you for looking at a scooterist who you’re trying not to run over.

Yes, the latest batch of the European Union’s General Safety Regulations legislation (GSR2), which the UK has adopted too, will come into force in 2024, and it’s now starting to affect the latest cars (plus has necessitated some going off sale). And I fear that it’s going to give the car industry a printer moment.

As our correspondent John Evans recently reported, drivers are finding some of the latest safety features annoying, to the apparent surprise of those who helped to mandate them.

They’ve come from good intentions – printer accidents don’t kill more than 1500 people in the UK each year – but they don’t work well enough, mostly by pinging too many false positives.

“There’s a worrying trend of media and social channels encouraging drivers to turn [safety systems] off,” says Euro NCAP secretary-general Michiel van Ratingen. I suppose that’s us. Me. But what would you do with a system that pulls at the wheel unnecessarily, says you’re speeding because it can’t read road signs, thinks you’re tired when you check a blindspot or threatens to brake when you pass a parked car? You would either turn it off or get out and set fire to the car.

There are automotive engineers who know this too – and those who know that, developed as well as these systems are, they’re not good enough yet. But the industry, still smarting from and rightly humbled by fallout from the Dieselgate emissions scandal, is wary of upsetting regulators.

Former Citroën CEO Vincent Cobée told me he “wouldn’t talk about [Euro NCAP]”. Dacia did when it defended its right to offer cars cheaply and with as few safety systems as it could legally fit. Euro NCAP quickly and widely shamed it and parent firm the Renault Group by reassessing the ageing Renault Zoe and awarding it zero stars, stating that “safety had become collateral damage in the group’s transition to electric cars”. Is it any wonder others won’t step out of line?

But while the industry may not want to upset the regulators, the public are less bothered. The two-star-rated Dacia Sandero is the most popular privately bought car in Europe. As printer manufacturers are finding, you can’t make people buy things they hate.

I was pleased to hear Porsche GT line boss Andreas Preuninger say he didn’t know the new Porsche 911 S/T’s Nürburgring lap time (First drives, 27 September).

That doesn’t mean nobody knows; a Porsche engineer confided in a colleague that they did time the S/T during testing, but they still wouldn’t say what it was. Good.

Preuninger’s point remains. Times aren’t relevant to the S/T’s ethos. It’s a road car meant for drivers. It has a manual gearbox and is bound to be slower than, say, the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, with which it shares its engine but not its aerodynamics.

The influence of the ’Ring potentially harms a sports car’s development. There are hot hatches designed primarily to set a time there, then sold to people who will probably never go to a track and wouldn’t time themselves even if they did.

Anyway, rather than all that, I would like to talk about another issue with the timing malarkey: consistency between track visits. 

At a recent round of the Australian Supercars Championship, the whole field of 25 went out for a qualifying session. At the end, the top 10 were invited back for a one-lap ‘shootout’. Between qualifying and the shootout, though, drift cars went out to entertain the crowds.

They shredded their own kind of rubber and thus changed the surface. So the first out during the shootout quite suddenly found they had less grip than a few minutes earlier. Drivers variously called it “pretty dumb” and “like driving through oil”.

Over what would normally be a 1min 12sec lap, the differences added almost two seconds. It also made for notable inconsistency, because the drivers cleaned the track as they went, meaning those who ran later were able to go faster.

Those changes happened in just a fraction of a day on a very short circuit. Then consider the Nürburgring, with days, weeks or months between competing lap times.

Volkswagen test driver Benjamin Leuchter once found he was eight seconds slower in a Golf GTI Clubsport there than he had expected to be because of the conditions.

It can be dusty or sappy if nobody has raced on it recently and the ultraviolet radiation of harsh sunlight can bring greasy oils to the surface – and if it has rained, the surface gets washed of things both good and bad.

Leuchter felt it was best shortly after a race, late enough to be dry but early enough that dense air would help an engine make power.

In short, it all sounds like a large pain for not much relevance or benefit. The rather small elephant in this room is that we set lap times at the Horiba MIRA proving ground in our road tests.

In mitigation, we drive to a consistent, repeatable, 80% level, aiming to give a broad measure of performance, rather than a one-lap qualifier. It’s a barometer, not a competition. Plus the track never gets race rubber, gets regular moderate use, isn’t dusty and has no overhanging trees.

Besides, the owner is about to build a solar farm on half of it anyway, so the point will shortly become rather more moot. 

Correcting past mistakes 

I sold you a duff stat about the Hoover Dam in my recent Hyundai Santa Cruz feature (27 September).

So busy was I calculating how long it would take for a convoy of Santa Cruzes to fill the dam’s reservoir, Lake Mead (38,860 years, given one load-bay pour every 30 seconds, by the way), that I misread and didn’t double check the dam’s hydroelectric power output.

I said it was 2.08MW; it’s actually 2080MW. Very sorry. For reference, that’s the same output as 9952 of those four-pot pick-up trucks running at maximum power. 

You see it regularly with EVs: the national grid will blow up, they’ll conk out on you, you won’t be able to drive to see Granny in Scotland at a moment’s notice, they'll catch fire, they’ll collapse car parks under their extra weight…

Public perception of electric cars has become particularly topical this week following the fire in a Luton Airport multi-storey car park. It started when a single car caught fire and the Twitter police had already decided it was an EV, as they seemingly catch fire more. That it proved to be a diesel car was moot - the news agenda had moved on and mud sticks.

Seeing the reaction brought the words of Mike Hawes, SMMT boss into view, who said “we must add carrots to the sticks” to incentivise the switch to EVs. At the moment, a wider interpretation of government messaging around a switch to EVs is that people needn’t bother for another five years, yet the reality, of course, is that with the ZEV mandate car makers need car buyers to buy EVs - and fast.

Hawes says buyers will need encouragement to do so, but at the moment none is forthcoming and the reputational damage EVs are suffering with stories like the Luton fire, and no fightback or counter campaign forthcoming from legislators, that job is getting harder on a daily basis. For private buyers EVs remain a more expensive purchase, and in a cost-of-living crisis they’ll need convincing otherwise. Stories like the Luton saga will not make this any easier.

Another industry trend highlights the importance of identifying disinformation: the rise of Chinese cars on our roads. We’ve had media reports already this year of these cars spying on their British drivers, and even how the Chinese state can take control of them remotely and put the brakes on. Quite why they’d do either of these I don’t know, but articles like this will have been the only exposure many casual observers have had to Chinese cars.

While the industry is united in encouraging the uptake of EVs, it is less so for Chinese cars. Some leaders have called on tariffs to be applied to them to level the playing field with European-made EVs (which don’t enjoy the same favourable labour rates and raw material costs) - and therefore lower prices. Others have said the arrival of the Chinese is no different to that of Japanese or Korean cars on our shores. Ultimately, it will be consumers who dictate the success of Chinese cars, and that price advantage will be compelling.

It was therefore fascinating to spend some time in the company of two Chinese car makers and their latest models at a recent Car of the Year test even in Tannis, Denmark. BYD, the world’s largest electrified car maker that launched with the Atto 3 in the UK this year, and Nio, a true premium alternative to the likes of BMW and Audi, were both present with their latest models.

It’s driving them back-to-back with their European counterparts where you realise just how good Chinese cars have become to drive. In the case of Nio, it has also cracked a final frontier for Chinese cars: good branding and desirability.

Given this list of qualities, it’s hard to see what could stand in the way of the success of Chinese cars now, but one for thing: disinformation. Will mud stick here too?

Two miles from my home, HS2 has carved a scar across the landscape, across which trains might eventually take passengers between London and Birmingham more slowly than they do today.

What’s surprising is that, despite a local village effectively being cleaved in two, one sometimes could find, if not wholehearted support for HS2, at least shrugging acceptance that people needed to go places and that maybe it would all be for the greater good.

Not anymore. Given its stratospheric cost rises, which have spiraled from an estimated £30 billion in 2011 to more than £100bn since the project started, it’s currently unclear whether HS2’s Birmingham to Manchester leg will ever be built. Or whether the line will end in Old Oak Common, rather than central London.

The leg to Leeds has already been scrapped. If you were to go looking for any goodwill for this shambles locally, you would find that it had evaporated. 

Not just locally, in fact. This week, Lord Hague called the project a “national disgrace” and the director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, told Times Radio that it was always “obviously” going to be of “little gain relative to pretty much anything else you could have done with the railway or transport system, whether that’s making rail connections across the north vastly better or actually building a bunch of bypasses and improving the roundabouts in the road network”.

There’s the nub. Next time you’re sitting near a town centre you would’ve rather driven around, adding to local congestion and making life worse for residents but having the kind of day in which you couldn’t take public transport if you wanted to, just remember that every man, woman and child in the UK will pay £1500 to build a railway from Birmingham to Wormwood Scrubs.

There’s a feeling that Britain is uniquely bad at infrastructure, although I find this offensive to a country that hosts some of the world’s finest engineers. What we seemingly do routinely is allow greed, incompetence and laziness, or a costly – and deadly – combination thereof, to be rewarded or go unpunished.

That’s how we’ve ended up with the cladding scandal, the Post Office scandal, the sewage scandal and more, all dragging by for years without those responsible being held accountable.

When I was much younger and a little more zealous about the automobile, I used to imagine Tarmacking over railways with a network of toll roads reserved exclusively for trucks and buses. One can easily wait for 45 minutes for a train holding 1000 people, which goes from somewhere you weren’t to somewhere you don’t want to go.

It would be much more convenient to board a semi- or completely autonomous bus, taking a dozen of us from where we are to where we need to be, which could merge onto a geofenced, moderate-speed highway, then divert off without stopping every vehicle behind it.

As time goes on, it becomes more technically feasible than ever: we have the batteries, fuel cells, geofencing, apps, wireless network connections and autonomous driving technology to allow it.

Trains are extremely energy-efficient, it’s true (that they roll so freely is why they can’t follow each other closely), but in a world of effectively limitless renewable energy, if we’re prepared to use it, that matters less than convenience.

Obviously, my idea was a daft one that wasn’t going to happen when I was young and won’t in the future. And we probably couldn’t enact it if we wanted to. But as I sit, wondering where my £1500 has gone, it feels less barmy than ever. 

Such a long time ago darling, I know, but do you remember then energy secretary Grant Shapps talking about the 2030 pure-combustion car ban?

“We’ve always been more forward-leaning on this stuff than the EU,” he said, a whole 182 days and two cabinet jobs ago. But if you thought then that his words sounded like nothing more than glibness and bluster, it turns out you were right.

There’s plenty of news and analysis elsewhere in this mag on the week’s zero-emission realignment, so I won’t dwell on what it means for mainstream car makers and energy sellers, whose reaction is dependent on how it affects their bottom line: JLR is pleased it will have more time to develop an electric Range Rover that doesn’t require an HGV license; others are upset because the British buy expensive new cars.

A few words, though, if I may, on the specialist car sector. In March, Shapps was talking about a proposal whose small print said micromanufacturers, even those registering just a handful of cars per year, needed to fall into line with the big players in 2030.

A kit car built in your shed in 2031, then, would have needed to be zero-emission, despite its overall environmental impact being minuscule even if petrol-powered yet likely worse, even over the longer term, if it used today’s battery tech.

Britain has the best specialist car makers, and more of them, than anywhere else in the world. And for them, the UK market and its legislation are critical and far from being a minor spreadsheet readjustment.

Now – or ‘for now’, perhaps, because it turns out that proposals due to come into force in 2024 hadn’t even been finalised, let alone those that will now arrive a decade later at best – it seems they can take stock.

Micro-manufacturers are dependent on big companies to supply their technology. There are exemptions in EU legislation, which the UK might eventually opt to follow, that will let them move to new energy when it improves the product by being available at the right price and the right weight. That, at least, whatever the rights and wrongs of the rest of it, is sensible.

The Stonehenge conundrum

The West Country roadside megalith complex that is Stonehenge re-entered the news this week because Unesco – which regards the monument as a World Heritage Site – thinks the proposed A303 tunnel that will run beneath the place is worse news than the way the current road layout runs. Or, rather frequently, doesn’t run.

Campaigners are thrilled, for they oppose the development, albeit often using disingenuous distraction and subterfuge such as claiming that the tunnel will only reduce the average journey time from Guildford to St Ives by eight minutes, while surely knowing full well that the average time isn’t the problem. Peak time delays are the issue, most notably for those who live locally and have to make the journey with sufficient regularity that the congestion blights their lives and affects their businesses.

The A303 runs poorly in several places, but plenty of locals think the traffic problem around Stonehenge is particularly bad because many drivers slow down to have a look at the stones as they pass.

If we are, then, to endure another legal challenge to the tunnel proposal – and it seems that we must – can we not use the time to plant some hedges or leylandii that will block the view from the road and see if that resolves the issue to everyone’s satisfaction?

If it doesn’t, for the sake of the south-west, we’ve got to spend a few quid and get on with something.