and here is my 'new' automatic Vectra 'Elegance' posing at the classico-modernist Holkham hall:
With 0.2 litre less of engine and 10 inches shorter you can see that this is tauntamount to the opposite of an enhancement pill. Getting a bit greener is a pretty sacrificial business. But is it an improvement? Stylistically I think 'No'. The Calton with its deeper (albiet less fashionable) window area not only afforded better visibility, but accentuated its sheer missile like length. And of course for a male sheer length is the meaning of life. The engine also sounded better, albeit a bit noisier and rougher; that perhaps may have something to do with the transverse arrangement of the Vectra engine and emission controls. However, although the Calton with its engine management and ABS was a high spec. in its day (long gone), the Vectra is festooned with even more gismos and this gives it an advanced feel: a product of a creeping information technology and marketing one-up-man-ship that attempts to fuel demand with a constant round of functionality upgradings. Can the human brain wrap itself round yet another thick manual of functionality? I'm still trying to get through the damn fat square manual that came with my wrist watch.
But the underlying technology of the latest vehicles, although highly refined, still comes out of the Victorian era of pistoned heat engines. Like a mine that has been thoroughly worked out and has now hit a period of decreasing returns, Internal Combustion can only be enhanced with increasing effort, research and investment. ICE vehicles are definitely on the refinement part of the development curve as computerisation attempts to squeeze out more and more from less and less. What a contrast the modern car is: an amalgom of the steam and the computer ages.
As for me I am still waiting for those revolutionary paradigm shifting atomic powered cars that they promised us on the sixties. Now that really would be a masculine statement: a car with a hull like a nuclear submarine. The Green party can go and hang.
