Motoring
Complacency virus
Alan Judd
Iwrote in The Spectator 18 February of a friend who ordered a new Mercedes 320CDI E-class estate through an online supplier, www.multimarques.co.uk, thus saving himself £5,000. It was an anxious wait — was he mad to pay £30,000 for something he’d never seen, did this cyberspace outfit actually exist, what if the car turned up but not as specified? He is now a happy man: his long-awaited arrived on time and as ordered.
In fact, he is so pleased he hardly dares sit in it. It cocoons him in pleasure, a multifunctional high-tech sensual surround, a huge advance on its 1995 230,000-mile Mercedes predecessor. That’s not surprising; 11 years is two or three generations in car development these days. But it’s not only the electronic gadgetry, the vastly improved performance and the headlights that light up half the county that please him. It is, he says, ‘almost a sex change, with its art deco curves and glamorous interior. Less of the taut spare Wehrmacht major, more of the soft bosomy embrace of the Königsstrasse blonde... ’ His previous Mercedes — 1984, 1990 and 1995 models — were each an improvement on the last, but this differs more from all of them than they do from each other. Something big happened in that 11-year gap.
What happened was that Daimler-Benz merged with Chrysler and invested in the Smart car (almost disastrously), at the same time increasing production and introducing too many new models. It made cars that pleased accountants more than engineers. The result was the loss of its reputation for excellence, than which nothing — but nothing — is more important in manufacturing. Too many Mercedes buyers began finding faults with their new cars that they associated (by no means always correctly) with lesser breeds. The gold standard E-class and its electronics proved particularly vulnerable. To compound the problem, customers also found too many dealerships denying that any criticism of Mercedes could be reasonable, an unwillingness to admit to faults that reflected the attitude emanating from Stuttgart. Like empires, dynasties, nations, governments and rugby teams, successful companies are vulnerable to the complacency virus. The danger of this is that the victim is the last to know he’s got it.
The good news for my friend is that his car was built after the company realised it was ill and began taking its medicine. The dealer network has been overhauled, much money invested, complaints procedures have been subject to a cultural revolution, and engineering and quality control are being restored to their rightful eminence. With reasonable luck, my friend’s confidence in his three-point star will not be shaken.
But whether he’ll keep this car for 11 years and nearly a quarter of a million miles, like its predecessor, is an open question. There is no doubt that cars are vastly more reliable than they were. Most drivers of a certain age will recall the anxiety of damp mornings, the splutterings, coughings and non-starts, the cleaning and drying of plugs and points, the cranking by hand in cold weather, the inadequate dynamos, the temperamental fuel pumps (disciplined by a tap with a hammer), the jammed starter motors (put it in second and rock it). Modern cars work nearly all the time. The difference is, when they do go wrong they need your wallet, not your hammer. This applies even to the simplest things.
Another friend needed to replace the glass on the nearside headlight of his 1999 Mark IV Golf. Just the glass — the lights worked. His first unpleasant surprise was that it was a sealed beam unit costing £120. His next was that it was a main dealer job taking an hour and a half — they had to lower the bumper. The bill, including VAT, was £290.77. It would have been just the same for a new bulb. They tried to make him feel better by assuring him it would have been more if he’d had one of the new Beetles, because their bumpers have to come right off.
This approach to manufacturing does the consumer no favours. It might be acceptable in luxury cars, but it seems unreasonable to compel owners of cheaper cars — the Peugeot 206 is another example — to pay through their noses for basic maintenance. Does anyone nowadays produce a car that has ease of maintenance and servicing designed into it, with the owner in mind? Granted that many modern drivers don’t want to maintain their own cars, but many do or would, and many others can’t afford not to. You wouldn’t have to revert to the antique technology of my 40-year-old Land Rover — Meccano on wheels — to do that. You could still have black boxes, which are basically circuit boards and are repairable.
We are losing the ethic of repair, which is a human loss, not simply a loss of skill. It’s all replacement now, not repair, and it means we lose something of the relationship with things around us. Fundamentally, that is or was a relationship of care, a practical economy of conservation, a wise attitude to the world we now call the environment. We don’t have to go back to starting handles but we could make it easy for people to do the basics, not to mention resetting the clock without reference to the handbook. We’d get more pleasure from things then and there’d be some point in conforming to Continental laws obliging us to carry spare bulbs; we’d be able to fit them.
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