COMMENT
14 AUGUST 2019 AUTOCAR.CO.UK 21
SUNDAY
Delighted to publish our nine-page all-Ford
extravaganza this week (see p53). The affairs
of the Blue Oval have been on our minds for
ages: this company has been building the UK’s
best-selling cars for 43 years and counting but
has lately released quite a litany of bad news.
Meanwhile, other big US players (GM and
Chrysler) have disappeared from our market
entirely. Is Old Henry’s company getting ready
to follow suit?
Mr Editor Tisshaw and I decided to hurdle
the Atlantic to put the question directly to the
company’s principals. You’ll fi nd their good-
humoured and mostly encouraging answers in
our story, but the short answer seems to be that
For d i s de t e r m i ne d t o k e e p it s fo ot hold i n Eu r op e
and maintain its good infl uence on our car
lives. Which, for someone whose grandad made
a living in the 1920s selling Model Ts to the few
in the Australian bush who could afford them,
i s v e r y go o d ne w s.
MONDAY
See the two-car picture on page 60? Our
photographer Luc Lacey shot it on one of the
wide avenues of central Detroit to help illustrate
our story: that’s Tisshaw in the mighty Mustang
GT500 and me in the new Ranger. But it nearly
didn’t happen. We manoeuvred in the back blocks
near the local baseball stadium so the cars could
run down the avenue together but inadvertently
drove through barriers being erected for crowd
control at the big game that night. It took some
fast talking – and help from Bill, our gun-toting
`
It took help from our gun-
toting minder to get us out
a
MY WEEK IN CARS
Tried Stockholm’s hire
scooters. They’re crude
but brilliantly show the
future. You pay and stop
paying by app, which
instantly shows where
you’ve been, what
you’ve paid and where
to fi n d a n o th e r. I t ’s a
view of our car-sharing
future I like a helluva lot.
AND ANOTHER THING...
museum, you see cars, for sure, but much, much
more. For instance, there’s the bus in which,
in 1955, brave Rosa Parks defi ed Alabama’s
segregation laws. In Greenfi eld village, you can
see the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, brought at
vast expense from Dayton, Ohio, where their fi rst
Flyer was built and perfected. You could argue
that nowadays you’d never move or modify such
precious artefacts. But in Henry’s day, they’d
otherwise have been summarily destroyed and
thus lost to us forever.
SATURDAY
Few days’ holiday wandering the Stockholm
archipelago with the Steering Committee but,
as usual, I couldn’t stay away from the cars. The
trends are interesting out here: you see plenty of
Teslas but no preponderance of public charging
points. VW seems to be the big car seller; Audi the
premium car of choice. But Volvo still does well.Sad as this sounds, I counted the car population
of two city blocks to calculate rough proportions.
Of 29 cars, eight were modern Volvos.
I once used this technique in the Falkland
Islands to establish that Port Stanley was the
Land Rover capital of the world. I stood on a
street corner and counted the fi rst 100 vehicles
to pass. A remarkable 92 were Landies, of which
64 were Defenders. That’s why I’ve never stopped
lobbying Land Rover to hold a new-model launch
there, but they seem to think it’d be a bit hard.
GET IN TOUCH
[email protected]^ @StvCr
Steve Cropley
ex-police minder – to get us out again. You
normally get several chances to create pictures
like this. Not this time.
THURSDAY
It wasn’t all talk in Dearborn. We were lucky
enough to visit The Henry Ford, one of the most
remarkable museums you’ll ever see, and the
next-door Greenfi eld village, an assemblage of
buildings collected and moved to this site by
Henry himself. Although far from perfect, Henry
Ford was amazingly conscious of the importance
of history’s lessons to modern life. In theUS Fo r d v i s i t to o k i n
the new and, at The
Henry Ford, the old