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.

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A warning: this has nothing to do with cars….

As some of you will know, I live on the edge of a tiny hamlet in country New South Wales, about 80km north of Canberra. It’s a pretty relaxed place that I like a great deal. Most people in the town with young children have one or two acres, and pet sheep are common. In fact, off hand, I can think of five families that each own a pet sheep. Good for keeping down the grass and, if reared from a lamb, sheep are surprisingly sociable and interactive animals.

Our sheep – Victor – came to us in a cardboard carton, a tiny, weak little lamb that had been abandoned by his mother.

Victor was fed milk replacement, and sheep pellets, and then lucerne, and then grass from the yard, and subsequently grew and grew. He was initially free to roam our block, but then he started to butt house windows and eat flowers and be a pest. So he’s now constrained to about 250 square metres – plenty of space for him… but not enough for another sheep.

So when another lamb arrived, it was never going to be kept. But boy, was I ever tempted! Why? Because I think it might be one of the luckiest lambs alive….

It was a Sunday afternoon, and my son, Alexander (aged 9) was playing in the yard. The front gate was shut, and he was using a rope to pull a skateboard up and down the dirt driveway. He’d run up the driveway, towing the skateboard behind him, complete with an action figure taped to it. The skateboard would leap and jump behind him, until he reached the end of the driveway, bent to make some adjustments, and then pulled it in the other direction, heading back towards the road.

And then, as suddenly as it sounds, a tiny lamb appeared just inside the gate, wandering about forlornly.

The gate was shut; no car had appeared; and there are no flocks of sheep within 2 kilometres that currently have lambs so young. The time window in which it must have appeared, what with Alexander running back and forth, would have been 10 seconds maximum.

The lamb – it just literally appeared.

Alexander ran to the house and said, “There’s a lamb in our yard!” 

My wife Georgina caught the lamb (easy: it was quite weak and slow), and fed it some water and then milk.

But where on earth had it come from?

The lamb had a few injuries. Its nose and mouth were a little bloodied, but the most interesting injuries were on its back. There, still freshly bleeding, were four small cuts, each perhaps 10mm long. They were spaced in two parallel pairs, on the very upper surface of the lamb’s back.

A few days earlier, circling on the thermals they ride, Georgina had seen a pair of wedgetail eagles. These are very large birds, strong enough to pick up rabbits and carry them away.

And perhaps strong enough to carry a lamb…

Anecdotally, many people suggest that wedgetail eagles can scoop up live lambs, but an authoritative reference I have on these eagles says that this is in fact a fallacy – that lambs are carried by wedgetail eagles only when they are dead, and so not struggling or running prior to being caught.

But we can think of no other explanation that would account for the lamb’s incredible sudden appearance from thin air, and its pattern of injuries. Furthermore, Alexander found four little depressions in the bark chips close to where he first saw the lamb, spaced to match the lamb’s hooves.

Had a wedgetail eagle grabbed the lamb, carried it a minimum of several kilometres, then settled on the bark chips in our yard to eat it – only to be disturbed by Alexander running with the skateboard? If so, that tiny lamb had just had the ride of its life….

But despite its cuteness, and its extraordinary mode of arrival, we couldn’t keep it – and after making half a dozen phone calls, Georgina found someone in our town who wanted a new pet lawnmower.

Gosh, if only I’d looked at the window a few moments earlier and seen the lamb arrive, carried by an eagle. That would have been something to remember forever…

So as I write this, I am just back from our four-week trip to Germany.

It was a trip made with the express intention of seeing as many fabulous technical, automotive and aeronautical sights as possible, and also seeing as many 1930s and 1940s historic sites as possible!

The trip was fascinating – and often rather surprising.

The revered Porsche museum is a self-indulgent wank, with history airbrushed and obfuscated to suit only Porsche and its created mystique.

The BMW museum is in the same mould: brush any commercial difficulties aside (the unsuccessful ETA engines? Never heard of them!) and just plonk cars into a space with almost zero context.

The Mercedes museum? Oh my gosh – what a stunner. Fabulous cars, lots of honesty, and lots of and lots of automotive history expressed in a cultural and technological context. The Mercedes museum is surely one of the best one-make car museums in the world – and boy, do they ever show BMW and Porsche how it should be done.

Another fantastic place to visit is the Sinsheim technic museum. It’s got cars (try some stuff like a Cord, lots of Bugattis, lots and lots of 1930s Mercedes, 1950s bubble cars, American cars of the 1960s – and on and on) and some aircraft (try a Concorde and Soviet-era Tupolev Tu-144) – and also  a whole bunch of military hardware.

Travelling as we did in winter, there’s barely a soul to be seen – so you can take your time, completely unhindered by others. It was so quiet that when looking at the outside military hardware at the Sinsheim museum, a friendly stray cat came up to visit!

Another absolute stunner is the Deutsches technical museum in Munich. I thought that the Science Museum we visited in London last year was good but the Deutsches is in another – even better – league. I defy anyone reading this to get through the content of the Deutsches technical museum in less than a full day. From the pile of Mercedes alloy V12 engine blocks in the section on metal casting, to the aeronautical display showing early aircraft wing sections as they were measured in contemporary wind tunnels, to the display on locks and keys, to the room full of machine tools of the 1800s and 1900s, to the full size stationary steam engines, the cutaway submarine (yep a real one) – it just went on and on and on.

And then when you’ve overloaded there, go to the specialised transport Deutsches museum, also in Munich….. that is also outstanding.

But we didn’t just go to museums. Going with my wife and 9-year-old son, we also visited the Lego Discovery centre in Berlin (pretty weak I thought), the Miniature Wonderland in Hamburg (the world’s largest model railway and quite fantastic), lots and lots of shops, went for  ferry ride on Lake Constance in the south – and also stayed at Zinnowitz on the Baltic Sea in the north.

Then there were the incredibly sobering Nazi-era concentration camps at Dachau and Mittelbau-Dora, the amazing architecture and feel of the Nuremberg Nazi party rally grounds – and a bunch of other stuff.

I’ll be covering a lot of it – with a huge number of pics – in a Germany Diary series we’ll be shortly running in AutoSpeed.

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So the other day I was in Adelaide for three days. Usually, I would hire a car, but this time a friend offered me something to drive.

The car was a 1998 Toyota Starlet, 2-door base model.

How base? No clock, no tacho, wind-up windows, manual (not power) steering. But equipped with a 4E-FE 1.3 litre DOHC EFI engine and 5 speed manual trans. I reckon the car’s worth about $1500.

Within moments of picking it up, I loved it!

What did I love about it?

Firstly, it was – to use an old term – so nippy! It was super responsive to the throttle, and I’d guess most of its city nippiness came from what seemed to be very low gearing. (No tacho, so I couldn’t tell for sure.) So, you see a hole in traffic to lane-change into – and pow!, you could be filling it.

And the car was small! You get so used to the apparently inexorable growth in dimensions of cars that you actually forget what a small car is like. The Starlet was small enough that a Toyota Echo alongside in traffic seemed huge. The Starlet wasn’t a joy to park (the manual steering being quite heavy at low speeds) but in traffic, and for that matter on winding roads, the small size made it a delight.

And the vision! I’ve written before about the stupidly small window area being used in current cars, and the Starlet was simply nothing like that – it showed how it could be done. Big rear glass, large side glass, thinner pillars….good vision everywhere.

I even got the opportunity to punch it along a tight country road – and again I thought it a lot of fun. On its tiny 165/70 tyres it did well, and the steering weight in that situation was perfect.

OK, OK – it sure as hell is a car I wouldn’t want to have crashed in. And its NVH was bloody awful – it was quite wearing to drive long distances.

Would I want to drive an old Starlet all day, every day? Not on your life!

But jumping into an old, basic car startlingly showed strengths that are being lost in current cars: throttle response, size, vision….and maybe just even just the element of fun.

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Hi Liam,

Thanks for your questions. I hope my answers help you in your Year 11 design and technology studies.

My designing is both a source of income and a hobby. I enjoy doing what I do: if I can make it both my work and a hobby, so much the better.

Initially, I started out doing things just as a hobby, but then I realised that by simply describing (in pics and text) what I had done, and selling it as a magazine article, it could pay me money as well.

I think I probably have been designing real things since I was about your age. In Year 11 I got an electric drill and then an electric jigsaw, and started building speakers systems and solar heaters.  My designs were thought-through, and then sketched on paper, before I started building. So they were projects that were designed – not just built as I went along.

I can remember designing things earlier than that – say, in Year 8 – but I never then actually made them, so I don’t think that counts.

That’s a really good question – one that I have not thought of before.

I think perhaps the thing that gives me the greatest satisfaction is designing and building something that lots of people say will not work, or is stupid, or is a waste of time – then finding that it works really well.

When I designed and built my first suspension trikes, everyone who knew anything about recumbent trikes said things like: “Why would you bother – trikes without suspension ride fine.” Now, about ten years later, I see plenty of mainstream trike blogs and sites reviewing commercial suspension trikes and saying how great they are!

It’s both frustrating and rewarding – frustrating when I come up with something I think is great, and then (eventually) rewarding when people recognise years later that what I said was great, was in fact great!

I think I most enjoy projects that involve vehicles – things you can pedal or drive on the road. I reckon that being in control of a moving thing that you designed and built (or even just modified) is the very best.

I also have designed and built electronic projects, pneumatic projects, speaker systems, solar heaters – and many other things… but I reckon that vehicles beat them all by a lot.

My favourite project is usually the thing I am currently working on.

So today I designed and started to build a trailer for my tractor lawnmower. It uses pillow-block bearings for the axle, hubs I machined on a lathe, and a 25mm RHS square tube frame, MIG welded together.

I have to do my “real” job tomorrow, but later in the week I want to finish the trailer, installing a steel deck and hardwood side rails.

I am also currently working on turbocharging my hybrid Honda Insight, and it’s been fun coming up with a water/air intercooler and new airbox for the car. I also made my own machine to place a lip on the intercooler tubes, to stop the turbo boost hoses blowing off under boost.

But this time last year, I was all excited about designing and building twin 15-inch subwoofers to put under the floor of my lounge room!

It’s good to be excited about whatever you are designing and building.

Here are my steps:

1. What functionality does the design need to have – what does it have to do?

2. What have other people done to address the same needs?

3. What aspects of their designs can I use, and what aspects can I develop that will better suit my needs and building capabilities?

4. What aspects from similar designs, but in completely different design areas, can I use? (So for example, when designing a stiff but light structure – what aspects from aircraft, from yachts, from airships, from skateboards, from bicycles, from rockets can I incorporate in my project?)

5. Can I build my design with my skills, money and workshop equipment? If not, how can I change it?

6. Now it’s time for sketches – lots of them.

7. Build the thing.

1. Follow sketches

2. Any design changes that I decide to implement during the build, I re-sketch and then consider very carefully before doing.

A really big project, like my three recumbent suspension trikes, perhaps 9 months to a year for each of them. My turbocharging (and intercooling, and fitting programmable engine management, and fitting a MoTeC dash, and full tuning, and tweaking the electric control system, and fitting a new HV battery pack) to my Honda Insight I’d expect to take 9 – 12 months.

I am a slow worker and will make a part again if I am not happy with the first version.

Form: I don’t consider aesthetics (how pretty it looks) much at all. Good design has an elegance and beauty of its own.

Function: is critical – it must perform.

Durability: in the sort of things I design and build, I look at durability in two key areas. These are high quality bearing surfaces (eg use of ball bearings), and fatigue strength (over-engineering to stop fatigue failures).

I like starting with a clean sheet and only then looking at what others have done. Sometimes I learn a huge amount by looking at others have done – other times, I think my ideas are better.

But always consider first what you want to do and only then look at what others have done.

The only computer modelling I use is in the design of subwoofers – I don’t use any other computer aided design at all.  This is mostly because I am very old, but also because I seem to better develop my ideas by:

1. Sketching – drawing ideas as I am thinking them up.

2. Making small models – that show (through destruction testing) how strong they are, where any moving parts will hit each other, etc.

3. Making rough versions and seeing how good they are before building the proper one. That’s especially the case in electronic and pneumatic systems.

I think if I were starting now I would be particularly interested in getting good skills in CFD (computational fluid dynamics – how fluids like air pass over objects), and CAD – computer aided design, especially in the stressing of parts.

One critical element in designing a suspension HPV (Human Powered Vehicle) is to use the lightest approach to achieving the outcome that you want – and you should be striving for an outcome where the suspension natural frequency is about 1Hz (for an explanation, see http://www.autospeed.com/cms/article.html?&A=112279).

If the suspension is sufficiently soft to absorb bumps, you then need very effective anti-roll capabilities to stop excessive body roll on corners.

Another critical element is to optimise steering – this is because the rider gets most of their handling feedback through the steering response and behaviour. Optimising this includes Ackermann, caster and trail.

But to make it all really simple – the HPV should always behave as the rider expects. Actually achieving that is incredibly difficult.

I finish one HPV project and start another when I think that starting from scratch is a better way of pursuing the next set of ideas.

o   Protect any intellectual property you develop?

o   Keep secret particular problems or solutions you have found?

o   Look at production of your design?

I have looked at doing all those things and have decided that it’s best for me if I just write (and photograph) my designs and run them in paying publications. I also always tell it like it really is – not trying to hide any problems or solutions.

Commercialising a new design requires lots of risk in terms of money, and the further ahead of the other competitors that the design is, the harder it is to get it accepted.

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Well, it’s an exciting automotive time for me.

I’ve been working hard on a project – turbocharging my little Honda Insight – that’s going to result in a whole bunch of interesting DIY AutoSpeed stories in 2014.

Yes, even if you’ve no particular interest in turbo’ing a hybrid!

So what sort of stories then?

Well, first off the rank, I’ve bought a TIG welder and have been learning how to drive it. I must say that it’s been a very steep learning curve: despite having experience in both MIG and gas welding, TIG’ing aluminium is a dramatic step up. I’d expect some time in 2014 to write a story about learning how to TIG weld – in the mean time, I’ve done a story for AutoSpeed on making a welding trolley to hold the unit and its gas cylinder.

One of the things I’ve been welding is a water/air intercooler heat exchanger. The Honda will use the intercooler to maintain a constant inlet air temp (eg 35 degrees C ) – not just to cool the air when on boost. This is likely to require passing engine coolant through the heat exchanger following start-up on cold days, transitioning to working as a standalone heat sink, then in hot ambient conditions to working as a conventional cooler with pump and front-radiator. The aim is to achieve best fuel economy, as well as avoid detonation caused by high intake air temps.

I’ve also made a new airbox, taking an unusual approach that is easy to build and uses a widely available, paper filter element. The result flows well, is compact and can be adapted in size and configuration as required for the particular application.

To connect the turbo to the intercooler and then the throttle body I need new intake plumbing – and I’ve been making that as well. I chose to use mild steel mandrel bends – and I’ve made a simple tool to place a bead on the ends of the tubes to stop the hoses blowing off. We’ll be covering the tool, that uses a hydraulic press to power it, in a story in 2014.

Not yet made as I write this, but on the list of things to do, is a new exhaust system. I want to incorporate something I’ve long admired – a variable flow exhaust valve. I’ve got one sitting on the shelf (taken, from all things, a Ferrari rear muffler!) and I’d like to be able to integrate it near the rear of the car.

Driving the engine will be a MoTeC M400 – initially I’ll be controlling fuel, spark, EGR, VTEC changeover and turbo boost. Sitting in the same box near my desk as I type is also a MoTeC CDL3 dash – it will be displaying as many bits of information as I can configure into it.

I’d like to later integrate electronic throttle control – but one step at a time.

And what of the ‘hybridness’ of the car? Longer term, I’d like to use a new li-ion battery pack and controller, potentially over-rating the 10kW electric motor for short term bursts. But initially at least, the car will run as just a turbo three cylinder without the hybrid system operating.

My ultimate aim is to maintain the car’s  unbelievably good fuel economy and have up to 40 per cent more power.

On a different topic, over Christmas and New Year I expect to be in Germany for a month – as we did this year for the UK, I believe that will result in some very interesting tech stories.

2014 is AutoSpeed’s 16th year of publication – it looks like there will be plenty of interesting content!

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If you follow cars in Australia, I am sure that you have heard the news. Ford has decided to stop building cars here, and unless there is a radical change of mind, production of the Falcon will stop within a few years.

This has occurred primarily because of dwindling sales of the Falcon – a car that went from selling around 75,000 units per year in 2002 to about 12,000 in 2012.

That is a tragedy: a tragedy for the workers directly employed by Ford, and also for the workers of supply companies that will now likely go broke. It is also sad for the country as a whole: having the capability to design and manufacture as complex an item as a complete car is not to be sneezed at.

But it is also the outcome of a bunch of utterly stupid management and product planning decisions made by Ford itself. For all the talk of high wages, the value of the Australian dollar and the like, no one should refrain from looking hard at what Ford in Australia chose to spend their money on.

The FG Falcon, released in April 2008, was a car characterised by utterly misplaced priorities, to an extent that was staggering then and remains staggering in retrospect. In 2008, the downwards trend in Falcon sales had been in place for four years. People were moving from the Falcon to smaller cars – or, conversely, to large and multi-purpose four-wheel drives.  Social and engineering change in the world of cars was profound: the Prius had been on sale for nearly a decade; fuel prices were only going to keep on rising; and people were looking for flexibility in their cars – the ability to carry five people one day, and then carry big items home from the hardware store the next. All of this was obvious… but not to Ford.

The day after the FG Falcon was released, I wrote in this publication:

It’s very hard to believe that the Falcon will not go the way of the Mitsubishi 380 – and for much the same reasons. High quality engineering directed in completely the wrong direction, aiming at a target that started to move a decade ago and has now gone…

After driving the car we published these notes:

Feels very much like Mitsubishi 380 in that the FG is a car that with exception of some minor electronics, could have been released a decade ago – nothing special in performance/economy, interior space utilisation, interior design, styling (inside and out). Highly competent car but at the things (eg handling, long distance cruising, NVH) that are not a priority for most people.

A ‘nothing’ car in terms of progress. Feels like design priorities were set for what would work in mid Nineties – RWD handling, long distance Australian road travel, inoffensive (and unexciting) conventional styling inside and out. Needs – far better fuel economy option (eg diesel, LPG on downsized engine), much better interior design (literally zero progress made here!), better centre dash ergonomics.

My summary in a full road test of the car was:

With the exception of crash safety and the electronic stability control system, the FG Falcon reflects the design priorities of a different era. In short, Ford apparently believes balls-to-the-wall handling to be more important than fuel economy, and in-cabin styling to be more important than practicality. Simply, the money could have been much better spent.

New engine options – including possibly a diesel – are apparently coming, but as the car stands right now, it’s the epitome of a botched opportunity.

Of course, the diesel never came. Instead, we had that Ford choosing to sell the car with an engine range that included two high performance, thirsty engines – a V8 and turbo six.

One hi-po engine – sure. But two? What did they think this was, the 1980s?

And the issue with wasting internal resources like this is that those dollars could have been put into something else – like fitting a four cylinder. It took until 2012 to do that…

In a column written in December 2009, under the heading of ‘Making very bad product planning decisions’ I said:

The car that this year amazed me the most was the Ford FG Falcon.

The model that I would think sells the best – the XR6 – was incredibly off the pace in the things that matter to most purchasers. All I can say is: what on earth was Ford thinking when they set the priorities?

But to be honest, I could not – and still cannot – believe how bad the FG Falcon is…. and ‘bad’ in the context of what the car is supposed to achieve.

Why on earth did the company spend lots of money on a new front suspension design and steering when out on the road, pushing the car to anywhere near its very high limits is illegal? To put this another way, in virtually all road use, what was wrong with the previous model’s suspension?

That (rumoured) $100 million spent on the new front suspension could have been used to make the air conditioning actually work and improve interior packaging – both would have had far more positive impact on potential purchasers than getting better turn-in at 150 km/h…

And the fuel consumption!

Forget the official government test figures: at a measured 12.5 – 13.5 litres/100km in the city, there appears to be no real-world improvement in a decade. That is simply unforgiveable.

The Falcon angers and frustrates me. The decisions that Ford’s myopic product planners took, in the face of overwhelming worldwide evidence, has cost this country – and Ford – a lot of jobs and money.

At the time these words were being published, our comments section (which unfortunately is not currently visible) was full of people saying how wrong I was.

The automotive journalists in Australia – every darn one of them – said how great the car was. Other than AutoSpeed, not a single publication suggested that the car was utterly wrong for the time and would be a flop – probably sending Ford under in terms of manufacturing in this country. “FG Falcon stuns” read one media test headline. Stuns for what – its inept direction? No, the test didn’t actually say that…

In fact, I was so amazed by the lack of criticism of Ford’s approach with the FG that I wrote a bitterly ironic column with the sole focus being how stupid the decisions underpinning the FG were. I called the Falcon The Ideal Car for the Times.

So why did Ford chose to make the decisions it did?

We will probably never know…. those who set the direction are hardly likely to confess – let alone, try to justify what they did. And sure, Ford was working within tight limitations regarding money and resources – but that just made it even more important that those product planning and engineering decisions showed an understanding of a changing car buying market – not to mention societal change on a broader scale.

But I honestly feel more depressed about it all than triumphant. I am sad to see part of Australia’s engineering and industrial heritage disappear…and once it has gone, you can be certain it will never come back.

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Well, today is an exciting one for me.

After a gap of quite a few years, today my most recent book was published. It’s called the Amateur Car Aerodynamics Sourcebook. I think it’s got lots to interest people who wonder how air flows over, under and through their road cars.

Specifically:

Section 1 introduces aerodynamic drag and lift. The language is simple and straightforward – but still includes concepts such as drag co-efficients, lift co-efficients and the different types of drag that affect road cars.

Section 2 is devoted to aerodynamic testing – directly measuring aerodynamic pressures, and seeing airflow patterns by the use of on-road wool-tuft testing.

Section 3, the largest part in the book, covers aerodynamic modification. Fitting vortex generators, testing different undertrays, reducing drag, using turning vanes in intercooler ducting – all are covered in detail. In addition, techniques are described for reducing wind noise, building an effective engine intake that breathes high-pressure cold air, siting bonnet vents in the correct location, and testing airflow through intercoolers.

If you have read absolutely everything I have produced on aerodynamics in the last decade you will have seen much of the material before. (That said, even I was surprised with some of the stuff I dug up – I’d forgotten I’d written it!) But I must say, having a copy of the printed book in my hand as I write, the usability of the information is so much higher when you have it all in one place, and can browse at will.

It’s my book so I am sure that you’d expect me to say how great it is, but I genuinely believe that it adds something worthwhile to the (very few) books published on the topic of road car aero modification.

If you are interested, it’s available directly from https://www.createspace.com/4201918

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Recently I thought it might be good to do some further tertiary study.

The topic? Transport history.

I like trains, cars, ships, hovercraft, airships and the like, and I read a lot about them, especially their technological development.

So I looked for a tertiary institution that offers a course in this area. I found one too, offered by distance education at a university in the UK.

I wrote to them, giving a little of my background (diploma and degree in education with majors in geography and sociology, graduate diploma in journalism, author of a tech book on cars, and longstanding journalist in the field of electronics and technology), and asked if their course would be suitable.

They were positive but pointed out that the course, a certificate, was taught at a level that may be overly simple for me. However, when I looked at the content, it actually looked really interesting.

The first year of the two-year course was based around content that traced the development of transport within Britain over the last few hundred years, and in the second year, students were able to write a dissertation on, the university said, any transport-related topic they liked.

The course was not cheap (around AUD$5000 a year) but as I say, it looked good – especially with the freedom in the second year. In fact, I mused, what sort of topic would I pick for that long second-year paper? I came up with three possibles: automotive front suspension design 1920 – 1950, aerodynamics of passenger cars 1970 – 1990, and development of the SR.N4 commercial hovercraft. Each I thought would be a worthy area of major study: I became quite excited at the prospect of the course on which I was to embark.

I wrote to the university, nominating these topics and asking if they’d be suitable.

But then things started going downhill.

Back came the reply:

“Technical subjects are, of course, very acceptable so long as the study contains analysis in the historical context. A straight story of changes in design with no linkage to social/economic/historical influences would not be acceptable.

The course convenor went on:

“In other words, we would not be interested in precise details of nuts and bolts but we would be interested in how and why it developed that way.”

Further, the lecturer nominated a link that, she said, showed the approach the university liked. The most interesting part of that link was at http://www.historyoftechnology.org/booklets_intro.html. Here is an excerpt:

Scholarly specialists now largely agree about what is called social construction: the idea that technologies succeed or fail (or emerge at all) partly because of the political strategies employed by “actors”— individuals, groups, and organizations—that have conflicting or complementary interests in particular outcomes. [….]  …there is no doubt that technological designs are shaped by ambient social and cultural factors…. the shaping of technology is integral to the shaping of society and culture.

In other words, the development of technology should be examined through a sociological rather than technical prism.

Now as I wrote above, I have a degree-level major in sociology: I am completely happy that a historical analysis of technological developments should occur in part within a sociological frame of reference. And  clearly, the success or otherwise of the technology, if assessed by the change it brings to society, is well measured and described by an analysis that takes into account the contemporaneous (and subsequent)  economic, political and cultural environments.

But to suggest that those responsible for the development of the technology are mere actors, implicitly of no great consequence – well!

The development of hovercraft technology very much reflected the economic, political and cultural environment of 1960s Britain – but crucially, without the ideas of one man, Christopher Cockerell, there would have been no hovercraft in the first place! Further, without the intellectual capital expended by engineers within Saunders Roe, bent on overcoming specific technical issues, there would have been no giant SR.N4 hovercraft – even if all this occurred in exactly the same sociological and historical environment.

You simply cannot exclude from the story the people who came up with – and refined – the ideas: they are integral to the technological development, as are the discrete steps they took in that process.

Furthermore, the suggested approach ignores the idea that there are objective measurable outcomes in technological achievement itself – it is not only within a social context that any worthwhile judgements can be made of technology.

Would Issigonis’s Mini have been less of a technological achievement if the car had been unsuccessful within broader society – something that, soon after its release, looked quite likely? If analysis includes objective automotive design criteria such as packaging efficiency, fuel economy, performance and handling – then no, it would have been just as great a technological advance, even if it had been a commercial flop with little overt societal impact.

So while I certainly understand the critical importance of a social context in terms of genesis, adoption and impact of a technological advance, to pay only lip-service to the nitty-gritty of the technology itself, and its process of development, seems to me to be missing a helluva lot of the wood for the trees.

It’s easy to be uncharitable: perhaps this approach is the one endorsed because people don’t want to be bothered understanding the technology – better to just accept that it would have come about anyway….so who cares how they actually did it?

But what an incredible belittlement of engineers….

Footnote: I’ve decided not to do the course.

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