It wasn’t that there was too much wrong with my 2006 Honda Legend, but maybe I was just getting a bit bored with it.  While I think the Legend is a fantastically under-rated car – what with its silky 3.5 litre V6 and active all-wheel drive – after three years I was also starting to hanker for something else.

The buying criteria varied on the day of the week: one day something spacious and frugal like a Skoda Superb wagon; the next day something fast and fun like a Jaguar XJR. Or, more conservatively, a Falcon G6E, Camry Hybrid or Subaru Outback. But in all cases, the budget was under AUD$35,000, and the car had to be brilliant on the 150km round trip that I do when, for work, I go into Canberra. (This trip might occur two or three times a week.)

Out here, the roads are rough and demanding; you need big lights and the ability to out-brake a kangaroo hopping across the road in front of you. And you also need a car that is easy over long distances – when you’re feeling tired, you want the car to do most of the work for you.

So I looked and looked.

The X350 model Jaguars (2003 to 2007) greatly appealed. These cars are aluminium-bodied, riveted and glued together. They also all have air suspension, and are available with a 3-litre V6, a 4.2 litre naturally aspirated V8 or the mighty supercharged V8. Incredibly, the massive differences in price as new cars is not reflected 12 years down the track… depending on condition and kays, you can buy any of them for much the same money.

Three years ago, when I was deciding on the purchase that eventually led to the Legend, I also considered these Jaguars. However, the pick of the bunch – the supercharged XJR – was then around $50,000. Nowadays, they’re around $32,000. Unfortunately though, there were none available on my side of the country.

[And why have a budget of under $35,000 – in relative terms, not much money? Basically, I think that it’s now enough to buy a very good car. Why? Well, I am not convinced that there have been huge gains in new cars in the last decade or so. For me at least, the major technological improvements of the last 20 years were really good engine management (electronic throttle, variable valve timing, etc) and safety (lots of airbags, electronic stability control).  From a convenience point of view, I like navigation and a good sound system. Pick a prestige car of the last 10 or 15 years and you get all these. Pick a diesel and you’ll also get good fuel economy…]

So Jaguars were off the list, for now at least. So what about BMWs then? If old prestige cars fall badly in value, then 7-series BMWs fall catastrophically. We had a good look at one – huge diameter rims, massive interior space, very comfortable seats… and lots of broken bits and pieces inside. High kilometres too: this BMW reeked ‘money pit’.

And then suddenly one morning I made a decision. We were going to buy a 2010 Skoda Superb wagon, with the 125kW 2-litre diesel and all the fruit. There was one in Sydney (about three hours away) and it looked mint. At $22,000 (but negotiable) from a private seller, I figured twenty grand would get it. Roomy, reliable, reasonably quick point-to-point, well-equipped… yes, this was it.

We went and got $20,000 out of the bank, and off we went to buy the car. My wife, ten-year-old son and I, all very excited.

And in the metal, the Skoda looked really good. We already have a Skoda in the family – a diesel Roomster – so we’re familiar with the practicality built into these cars. The Skoda was huge inside and had lots of thoughtful touches – but it didn’t have navigation. Hmm, for me that’s a downer. (And yes I know I can use my phone but I much prefer inbuilt navigation.)

But what about on the road? I am unconvinced about the driveability of twin clutch autos and, as we moved away from a standstill, I could immediately feel the slightly unprogressive behaviour of this one.

“The transmission has been replaced by Skoda,” said the owner helpfully. He saw it as a positive, but with only 100,00km on the odometer, I just wondered.

The drive was around an industrial area, relatively new with well-surfaced roads. But even on these good surfaces, I could feel the bump-thump of the low profile tyres, and beyond that, the impact harshness was also high. Worse, the car pitched: in ride quality, it didn’t feel well sorted at all. Last time I considered buying a car, I deleted the Superb from the list because a local person with one has experienced dented rims on our bad roads….and driving this car, that wasn’t surprising.

So we said no, and off we went.

It had taken ages to get the money out of the bank (aren’t banks supposed to have money? – they never seem to make cash withdrawals easy) and my wife suggested that, rather than driving home, we stay the night in Sydney. I agreed: that meant we could spend the next day looking for cars – and so we hit the hotel.

That night, I browsed the web, creating a ‘must see’ list of Sydney cars for the next day.

There was a 2004 Mercedes E500 (V8 and air suspension), a 2004 Jaguar XJ8 (this one with the smaller 3.5 litre engine); a 2002 BMW 735i (perhaps this one would be in better condition); a 2004 Mercedes S430 (with V8 and 7 speed auto); a BMW 530 diesel from 2006; S350 and E320 Mercedes (from 2003 and 2004); and another Mercedes E500.  That’s right: no Camry Hybrids or Falcons or Subarus… they’d kinda gone from the list without conscious decision.

Incredibly – well, it seems incredible to me – all the prestige cars were at or lower than the $20,000 we’d got out the bank for the Skoda. I know that expensive cars have always dropped in value fast, but I don’t think in my whole driving life I have ever seen the quality of car now available for the price of an old Falcon or Toyota!

The next morning we were up bright and early – off to see the first on the list, an E500 Mercedes. From the W211 series (2002 to 2009), the E500 was the top of the W211 line (the supercharged AMG E55 excepted). It used a 5-litre V8 with 225kW (and an exceptional 460Nm from 2700 to 4250 rpm) and the first cars had 5-speed autos.

The car we were looking at was dark blue and had a black interior. It also had a panoramic sunroof and an interior that was mint. It also had full Mercedes Benz service history and had travelled just 127,000km over its 10 years of road registration. Surprisingly, it had the 7-speed auto – it must have been among the first E500s in Australia delivered with the better trans. Factory navigation, six stacker CD, nice mix of analog and digital instruments in the dash, superb woodgrain, full memory everything on both front seats. Even a split-fold rear seat (useful for us) and a large boot.

But what would it be like on the road? We took it for half an hour, allowed out with the car sans salesperson.

And the E500 was simply a revelation.

It had three settings for the air suspension; most of the time we left it on ‘comfort’. You could hear the impact of the tyres on small irregularities but could feel nothing. On large bumps, the capacity of the suspension to absorb vertical accelerations was extraordinary. And handling? Hard to find out on a half-hour city test drive, but I threw the car around a few roundabouts and it stuck well, body roll surprisingly low for the apparent softness of the suspension.

But I think that my wife and son were sold the minute I put my foot down: for the V8 cars with the 7-speed auto, the quoted factory time is 6.0 seconds for the 0-100 km/h… and it felt just like that.

We kept staring at each other in disbelief.

How could this old car, that inside felt and looked so modern, a car that went like a cut snake and rode like a limousine – how could this car be stickered at just $18,500? Hell, even if in the future you needed to replace the air struts, or the air compressor, or – well, whatever – you’d still be getting an incredible machine… even for the total outlay.

We offered $18,000 of our cash and the car was ours. That’s less than the price of a new Toyota Yaris….

• » Comments (5)

So in about 3 weeks we’re off on what has become, over the last few years, an annual trip: heading to another country to see the best engineering, automotive and technically interesting sights.

This year, though, it’s more than just ‘a’ country; the plan at this stage calls for travel through seven countries.

So where are we going – and what are we going to see?

The trip starts in Oslo, Norway. We don’t expect there to be long – just a day – before we head to Sweden. In Sweden we will go to the Saab museum in Trollhättan, and Volvo museum in Gothenburg. Also in Gothenburg is the Aeroseum aviation museum – a museum housed in a Cold War era underground bunker.

From there we head across the Oresund bridge (one of the most spectacular in the world) to Denmark, and then down to the Netherlands. In the Netherlands we’re going to the Louwman Museum in The Hague. With 250 cars on display, this should be stunning. We’re also going on a dusk tour of the Rotterdam harbour, the world’s busiest port. The Erasmus bridge, a gorgeous cable-stayed design, should able to be sighted.

From Holland we enter Germany, going back to see a museum we missed last time we were in that fantastic country. It’s the Technik Museum Speyer, an extraordinary collection of aircraft, cars, locomotives, a submarine – and so on. If it’s remotely as good as its sister museum in Sinsheim, it should be a fantastic day.

We then head to Switzerland, passing through the Simplon railway tunnel, one of the oldest and most famous railway tunnels in the world. In Switzerland we’re going to the Swiss Knife Valley visitor centre, where my 11-year-old son very much hopes to make his own Victorinox pocket knife. The Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne is Switzerland’s best-visited museum and looks spectacular – at least in the pictures! We also hope to have time to take the train to Jungfrau – Europe’s highest mountain station at 3454 metres.

Italy is next, with the Museo Auto Italy in Turin. It has what looks to be a quite awesome collection of cars. You’d expect that we’d also go to the Ferrari and Lamborghini museums, but I’d rather see cars that caused profound social and engineering change rather than supercars that, in the grand scheme of automotive things, have achieved little.

We’re also going to Pompeii and Herculaneum. We’ve become interested in Roman ruins as a result of watching an extraordinary series that covers the engineering design of these constructions. (Do a web search under “Great courses: Understanding Greek and Roman Technology”. And note that they discount the course periodically.) From there, it’s back to more Roman ruins… in Rome.

France is next – the Millau Viaduct (that I expect to be the most impressive bridge I have ever seen) and the Pont de Gard (that should be another stunning bridge, this time a Roman-era aqueduct). While in France we’ll also be attending the Cité de l’Automobile and Cité du Train museums.

Something else I am really looking forward to are the WWII Nazi submarine pens at Lorient, huge concrete constructions designed to prevent Allied bombers destroying the German submarines then berthed there. Of the same era in terms of historic interest are the Normandy landing beaches, the location at which Allied troops started their reclaiming of occupied Europe. We also hope to go to the Eiffel tower and the Louvre in Paris. Less well known but also in Paris is the Musee Air + Espace that we plan to visit.

From France it’s to our last country – the United Kingdom. There we will visit the Birmingham Science Museum (the home of the superb Mobil Railton Special Land Speed Record car), the Air Force Museum at Cosford, and the Cardington airship sheds – the latter almost the only remaining evidence of the major engineering effort the UK made over 85 years ago in lighter-than-air craft. I’d also like to go back to the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu (we’ve been there once before but I’d love to see the Donald Campbell Bluebird Land Speed Record car again) and then to the Haynes Motor Museum at Sparkford.

We’ll be taking trains, doing one internal European flight, twice hiring cars – and no doubt walking a lot. The travel, accommodation, money – all the logistics, really – will be in the immensely capable hands of my wife Georgina. (And thank God for that!)

Have we bitten off more than we can chew? We’ll see – people have implied that about our other overseas trips, but we’ve always managed to get through everything on the itinerary.  On the other hand, there’s never been quite so much on the schedule as for this trip…

Next year I hope to bring you in AutoSpeed a ‘diary’ series on the trip, and no doubt in later articles I’ll be covering specific cars, aircraft and technical sights that I’ve seen.

• » Comments (3)

The other day I went and saw Buzz Aldrin.

Yes, that’s right, the second person to walk on the Moon, the pilot of the Lunar Module, and a man who today is 85 years old.

I don’t think in my life I have ever gone to ‘an evening with’ type of show, let alone one hosted by Ray Martin (a local Australian TV celebrity).

I had no idea what to expect, but my wife, 11-year-old son and I all went down to the Melbourne Town Hall. There were two chairs on the stage, and a large backdrop onto which stills and video could be shown.

The show started at 8pm and finished – I reckon – at about 10.45…. so it was no 10 or 15-minute chat.

Ray asked questions – largely banal, and at times ill-researched – and Buzz occasionally answered them. Usually, though, he treated Martin with veiled, slightly amused contempt – and talked about whatever he felt like.

The first half of the show – all about the Moon landing – was just riveting. I have a technical and biographical library on space travel (perhaps 50 books) and so many of the names and events that Buzz mentioned I knew something about.

But this was from the man himself!

Whenever I started to half relax, Aldrin would come out with something that entranced me.

Earth from the Moon looks about twice as big as the Moon looks from Earth.

On the day of the launch, Aldrin paused near the top of the mighty Saturn rocket. He looked down at the tens of thousands of spectators, and thought: I need to remember this; I am going to the Moon.

I liked the man’s humour – very, very dry – and his absolute lack of the need to say something that big-noted himself.

After the break, he returned to talk about how he’d like to see people travel to Mars. A man who did his Doctor of Science in lunar rendezvous, he had plenty to say about rendezvousing on the way to that planet. Martin was completely out of his depth – he didn’t even understand stuff that was explained to him quite simply – but kind of tried to hold on. Buzz got excited – he’d obviously rather talk about the future than the past – but I am more interested in what he did, than what he thinks we can do.

The evening drew to a close, but not before some questions from the crowd. Buzz again tended to ignore the questions and just say whatever he liked, but the questions were sufficiently open that he could do that and get away with it. He leapt to his feet and prowled the stage, gesticulating and motivating.

An old, feisty, out-spoken man, brilliantly intelligent, funny, warm and… and… one of the most extraordinary explorers we have ever had.

He was just wonderful.

• » Comments (3)

These days I seem to spend a lot of time flying from place to place, waiting in airports and so on. I used to read a lot of books (and still do) but with a smartphone, obviously your options are much broader.

One thing I’ve been spending a lot of that time doing is watching video courses. I initially thought I’d find plenty of free stuff online (you know, where professors have put their university lectures up) and while there is some of that around, very often the production is terrible and the lectures, well, pretty boring.

But there is one source of educational material that is proving to be a triumph. It’s not free and it’s not for everyone, but I thought I’d tell you about it. It’s the company ‘The Great Courses’, that sells video and audio material that comprises exactly what the name suggests – great courses.

I first bought one – Understanding the World’s Greatest Structures: Science and Innovation from Antiquity to Modernity – a few years ago and watched it with great enjoyment.

All the presenters for The Great Courses are university professors and the sections of the course are dubbed ‘lectures’. And in effect, that’s what they are. While there might occasionally be some video snippets and photos, the lectures are mostly the lecturers talking to camera in a studio. Boring? Nope! The World’s Greatest Structures has 24 half-hour lectures that cover everything from loads and structural systems to trusses, use of concrete and great bridges.

I thought it was pretty good but when I saw that my ten year old son was choosing to watch the same series that I’d dumped on his phone, I realised that the lectures were capable of working on all sorts of levels.

Another series, and from the same professor, is Understanding Greek and Roman Technology: From Catapult to the Pantheon. This course again has 24 half-hour lectures.

And I am not kidding in saying that this series has changed my life. I was never much of an ancient history scholar and to me, Greek and Roman ruins were basically just jumbles of old rocks. But interpreting Greek and Roman history through a mechanical and civil engineering perspective has made the history come alive. We’re aiming to go to Europe at the end of the year and we are now placing ancient technology sites on the itinerary, purely through having watched this course. (Yes, we’ve watched it as a family – it’s so interesting. And I have watched it all twice!).

Interestingly, having become excited about Roman times, I bought a book on it – but it was just as I remembered Roman history, a boring coverage of a sequence of emperors. Back to the technical videos!

Which brings me to the current course I am watching – Understanding Modern Electronics. It’s pitched at an interesting level. If you are a real beginner, I wouldn’t recommend it but if you know the basics of diodes, transistors, capacitors and circuits, it’s very good. For example, while I knew you could use circuit simulators, until the lecturer was constantly using them, I didn’t understand how effective they could be. (That is, free, online circuit simulators.) I am now up to the intricacies of op amps – while I previously understood them in general terms, I certainly couldn’t then have designed circuits with them. Now I can.

All the great courses are really expensive – until you get on the mailing list and buy them when on special. For example, as I write, one of the courses listed above is AUD$75 as a video download (AUD$85 in DVD form) and at those prices, it’s a bargain. (Normally, it’s $250 and $300, respectively.)

Especially if you travel a lot (or commute on public transport), I highly recommend these courses. No vested interest – just a happy customer.

• » Comments (1)

Automotive aerodynamics keep changing.

Recently I read a paper on the development of some late model Audis. Much of the rationale behind the aero development was as you’d expect – minimising flow separation, keeping the area of the wake low, using a smooth underfloor – stuff like that.

However, a significant amount of effort was directed at reducing the size of the vortices being shed from the angled vertical surfaces – the C pillars in sedans and the D pillars in hatchback (or wagon) body styles. After all, if the wake size has been minimised, any further reduction in pressure drag comes from controlling these vortices – the whirling ribbons of air being dragged along behind the car.

Interestingly, much of the technique in reducing these vortices occurred under the car – the shape of the rear diffuser influencing the size of the vortices that were being shed. In fact, the differences between the body shapes (eg sedan and hatch) was such that the underfloor attachments needed to be tailored to suit.

And you can see another, more visible change, in aero occurring as well.

For a long time, the trailing edge of the upper car surfaces has been sharply cut off to promote better flow separation. So think of the roof extension spoilers used on the trailing edges of hatchbacks, for example. Or boot lid extension spoilers on sedans.

However, now the focus has clearly moved to additionally promoting clean separation on the side panels of cars. Take a look at the rear three-quarters of newly-released cars and you’ll often see a vertical crease on the corner of the car. This crease causes flow separation to then occur cleanly at this point, rather than the airflow wrapping around the rear edges. In fact, one Honda Civic I saw had a small vertical spoiler mounted at this location. I thought this factory attachment looked pretty trick – and doubly so when you think of its function.

If you do a lot of driving in slow-moving traffic, looking at the different styling approaches that manufacturers are using to achieve this clean side separation can keep you entertained for hours!

And finally, the way in which front and rear coefficients of lift are regarded is changing. The traditional wisdom has been that a low coefficient of lift (eg at the rear) promotes a stable car, and that a car with a higher coefficient of lift will consequently be less stable.

However, Mazda research indicates that this may not be as valid as first thought.

The trouble is that coefficients of lift tend to be averages – rather than taking into account fast changes in lift values that may occur due to transient changes in local airspeeds. What sort of transient changes, then? Well, the wind does not blow constantly as a steady stream: it contains gusts and other fast speed changes caused by roadside obstacles (and other vehicles) creating turbulence.

It is suggested that the reason that some cars are more aerodynamically stable than others – despite both cars having ostensibly the same lift figures – is due to differing behaviour under these rapidly changing conditions.

Car aero is a fascinating subject….

• » Comments (2)

Well, it’s nearly the end of the year, and I have been reflecting on my busy car modification 12 months.

All the modifications I have done have been to my little Honda Insight.

Fitting a turbo, water/air intercooler and making and fitting a new airbox. Installing a MoTeC M400 ECU, and then doing all the engine mapping on the road. Fitting a MoTeC CDL3 dash, and then upgrading to an ADL3 dash.

It’s been a huge amount of fun turning the all-alloy, two-seater Honda hybrid into a fuel-efficient turbo with about 70 per cent more power than standard from its 1 litre, 3-cylinder engine.

None of these mods was cheap, but all gave the results I’d been hoping for.

And in the last few weeks I have been playing with the suspension. And, so far, this has been cheap! I calculated the required specs for new springs front and back, sourced them at near zero cost, then installed them. That step was very successful, so then I fitted a new rear antiroll bar – this time, for a cost of less than fifty bucks.

The car is absolutely transformed in both ride and handling – and I am yet to fit the new dampers, which at the time of writing, are on their way from the US.

Sitting in the corner is the next Insight modification – a Tritium Wavesculptor200 high voltage electric motor controller. It will be used to run the Honda’s standard 10kW electric motor, although not always at only 10kW. Given the nature of electric motors, I should be able to over-rate it for short periods, gaining perhaps 20kW for huge short-term torque.

I plan on controlling the Wavescluptor200 using outputs from the MoTeC ADL3 dash. The dash – really, a digital control system that happens to have a display – has a full range of programmable maths functions and can use 3D look-up tables.

The new high voltage battery pack and battery monitoring system? I am yet to decide on these things.

I don’t know if I will achieve my final aim of 0-100 km/h in the Sixes and fuel economy in the high Twos (litres/100km), but the challenge is enormously exciting and rewarding.

In the meantime, we’re off to the United States for five weeks. We’ll be concentrating on the eastern side of the country, and have on our itinerary a long list of technical and automotive sights – and sites. We hope to next year bring you a series in AutoSpeed that describes some of what we see.

Finally, I also published another three books this year – if you are interested, search on Amazon under my name.

Have a safe and happy Christmas and New Year, and remember: for fun and challenge, nothing beats modifying your car!

• » Comments Comments Off on My year

Never have I had such fun when playing with a car! So what am I excited about?

Tuning programmable management on the road.

Regular readers will be aware of our Honda Insight series. As you’d expect, the publication of the articles in that series lags well behind where I am actually up to with the car. (I don’t want to run into a problem and have a big gap in the middle of the series, so it’s best from a publishing perspective that I take this approach.)

So I am around three months ahead of the series in what I am actually doing – so explaining my recent tuning of the MoTeC M400.

In the last month I’ve been tuning crank and start, fuel, ignition, idle speed control, turbo boost, exhaust gas recirculation, acceleration enrichment, wide-band closed loop feedback and lots of others.

All has been done in my shed, driveway or on the road.

It has been an immense learning curve – I’ve never before tuned a programmable management system – with some problems to overcome along the way.

But what I have found so rewarding is the degree of control that you can have over how the car drives. Tuning an interceptor (that I have previously done) or making minor tweaks to factory ECU inputs and outputs allows you to do lots of things, but tuning programmable management allows you to do so much more. (The same would also apply to factory ECUs where the software has been cracked – not the case with the Insight.)

Having so much control means that you can stuff things up absolutely mightily. I am not talking about blowing the engine (though that of course isn’t difficult with wrong timing or fuel figures) but how the car can be made to drive so badly, so easily.

Or, more positively, you can tweak and tweak and tweak until you achieve things that appear initially impossible.

The Insight is running without its hybrid electric assist at this stage, so the bottom-end torque normally provided by the electric motor is missing. With just a 1 litre engine, very high gearing (especially in first and second) and 4800 rpm peak torque, getting the car tractable around town has been no mean feat.

That’s especially the case when no ‘start-up’ map exists for this car – the MoTeC has had to be programmed literally from scratch.

The excitement of activating and then mapping exhaust gas recirc that boosted part-throttle low-rpm torque to a major degree was sensational; getting acceleration fuel enrichment sorted so the turbo boosts much more quickly after a throttle movement was fun; mapping the control of the water/air intercooler pump so that the pump works only when needed was intriguing; and designing the boost table in three dimensions to give exactly the boost behaviour I want was exciting.

I can now see better why a friend of mine years ago talked about driving to work each day, laptop on the passenger seat and making tuning tweaks at every set of traffic lights! With literally thousands of data points able to changed, and often interacting with each other in the driving, getting the perfect tune could be a lifetime pursuit.

But in the mean time, it’s a helluva lot of fun.

• » Comments (2)

When is enough clearance sufficient?

If you’ve modified a lot on cars, you’ll have come across this question. It might be the clearance between the exhaust the bodywork, clearance of a driveshaft at full suspension bump with a chassis member or subframe, or even clearance between a large turbo and bodywork.

Years ago I read an excellent book written by an automotive suspension engineer working in the 1950s. In it he made the (almost throwaway) line that there’s no need to provide tyre clearance at full suspension bump AND full steering lock – the idea being that this situation almost never occurs, and if contact did in fact occur in that situation, the car would be moving so slowly that it wouldn’t matter much anyway.

These thoughts are intruding because at the moment I am massaging a turbo dump pipe so that it clears a steering tie-rod, with the greatest potential conflict occurring at full suspension droop and with full right-hand steering lock.

At full droop but with the wheels pointing straightahead – no problem. And at full steering lock and with the wheels at normal ride height – again no problem.

It’s just at that particular combination – one that again is very unlikely to ever occur – that I have the issue.

I am concerned because if the car has to undergo full engineering approval, I can just imagine an engineer saying something along the lines that conflict should not be able to occur at ANY combination of lock and suspension movement….

And even if clearance is achieved, how much clearance is enough? If I were ornery enough to throw in maximum engine torque reaction movement at just that moment, perhaps another 10mm of clearance would be needed.

But hold on! How could the engine be developing maximum torque if the suspension is at full droop? After all, in that situation there’s very little – next to none in fact – of the car’s weight on the tyre… so how could it transmit the torque anyway? No torque transmission means no transverse engine rocking!

Hmm, what about if the car has an LSD, and a very stiff front anti-roll bar, and is cornering hard enough (at full lock!) to lift a wheel? Then I suppose one could imagine a situation where something like contact could occur.

Aaaagh!

• » Comments (5)

So now no cars are going to be built in Australia.

Rather deafening in its quietness among the population at large, and car enthusiasts, is the simple question: does it actually matter?

Obviously, for those individuals who lose their jobs, yes it matters. But that’s the case equally for anyone who loses their job – how does being in a role associated with car building in Australia make those jobs special cases?

So does it matter for those who love cars – car enthusiasts? Perhaps – at least for that minority of enthusiasts who like buying the (mostly) large and powerful cars that have been made in Australia. For the vast majority who over the last decade have never bought a new Australian-made car, and who never would, it’s hard to see that it matters very much at all.

And what about for the country?

Who thinks the future of the Australian economy is predicated around manufacturing? To believe that, you’d have to be blind to the employment patterns over the last 50 years. As a proportion of total employment, manufacturing in all western countries has fallen steadily over that time. The idea that all countries must make things, and that a service-based economy is intrinsically weak, is rather out of keeping with easily demonstrable statistics re individual country wealth, standard of living and so on. To take just one example, look at the export income earned in Australia through servicing overseas tertiary students – it’s massive.

And what of the loss to the country of a skills base? Well, which skills are we talking about?

To suggest that those working on production lines are highly skilled is patently ridiculous: to those who say they are, what is these employees’ formal trade? Their tertiary qualifications? The entrance criteria for such a position? The years of training required before they can perform the role?

But what of those people working in the industry that in fact do have high skill levels – say, the production engineers and the automotive design staff? It’s hard to believe that these people will find it difficult to gain work elsewhere – they have marketable and transferable skills. Therefore, they will not be lost from the pool of available labour – and furthermore, engineers and technically skilled people will continue to be trained… car building industry or no car building industry.

And is it important that we are losing the capability to design and build complex items? That is, it is vital to Australia that we retain these high-level skills? Yes, perhaps – if in fact they were world-competitive, high level skills!

But are they?

If our car designing and building skills are (were) of such great magnitude, wouldn’t we be a world leader in car design? That’s obviously not the case, so to imply – as some are doing – that we will be fundamentally limited in the future if we aren’t designing and building cars here, simply doesn’t reflect reality.

Cutting edge automotive design and development doesn’t exist in Australia – instead, we’ve got the technologies that the overseas parent companies have chosen to begrudgingly dole out.

(Don’t believe me? Well, name an automotive technology invented and developed in Australia that has subsequently been adopted widely. I can think of only one – Orbital stratified fuel injection.)

In fact, the opportunities that are now available make the end of car building in Australia a good news story. Now, finally, state and federal governments are released from the previously politically impossible action of moving massive subsidies for car production to industries that can actually flourish over the medium and long term. Those are the industries where Australia has a competitive advantage – one that’s due to its relatively educated, literate and numerate workforce, all positioned near Asia.

What an extraordinary opportunity to invest in start-up (and existing) companies performing R&D on renewables and medical technologies; to invest in knowledge-based exports like tertiary education and high level IT services; to upskill the workforce through training and further education.

Closing of car manufacturing in Australia has released us from an albatross around our necks: now we need leaders with enough gumption to take advantage of the opportunity that the massive amount of freed resources can give us.

But will I look nostalgically in 15 years’ time at a mint condition Falcon XR6 Turbo parked by the side of the road? Yes, I sure will. But that’s no reason to keep subsidising car manufacturing at the expense of other employment and growth opportunities far better suited to Australia in this century.

• » Comments (11)