Alan Judd

New York Two men prostrated themselves before the new Freelander — in gratitude, presumably, for anything more reliable than the previous model — but it turned out that the turntable on which it was displayed had jammed. On the Hummer stand another man went from car to car covering the filler caps with sticky tape. I had no idea these were so desirable, but then this was the New York Motor Show and they were expecting 200,000 visitors. The filler cap is indeed satisfyingly chunky but the rest of the car looks as if it’s trying to be more than it is, like a man with shoulder pads. Over at Mercedes there was consternation when the roof leaked on to the C50 Sport Sedan.

‘Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in trust I have found treason.’ ‘Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in trust I have found treason.’ Thus spake Elizabeth I, that font of pithy regal eloquence who learnt such worldly wisdom without buying or selling a single car. (If she had, her merry quip — ‘I will make you shorter by the head’ — might have been deployed more frequently.) It’s usually easier to buy cars than sell them, of course, but it’s still an anxious process. Most of us like to think we’re getting at least what — if not more than — we’re paying for, and fear we’re getting less.

There’s a fascinating new book about a man with a passion for a house which he lost and regained, brick by red Jacobean brick. The house was Thrumpton in Nottinghamshire, its devotee the late George Seymour, a complex man whose daughter, novelist and biographer Miranda Seymour, tells all with elegance and insight in In My Father's House (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). ‘All’ includes George’s later passion for motorbikes and a couple of the men who rode them. Whenever I met him, we kept to safer subjects — cars, mainly Jaguars.  He had owned several and knew Sir William Lyons, who founded and ran the company. George’s penultimate period Jaguar was a Mark 2 3.

Chugging up the drive to a friend’s shoot in the ancient Land Rover, the first two guns I saw were men of about six feet seven. My immediate thought was that all the guns, bar me, had been chosen for their height. If so, the line would look pretty impressive until it reached a mere six-footer (or less — I’m shrinking). They would presumably also have the advantage of being nearer their quarry. Fortunately, the rest of us were in the 90 per cent of humanity that car designers cater for. I was placed next to the elegant wife of one of the tall men, who was shorter than me but shot better. Her husband and his vertically unchallenged companion fell to discussing my Land Rover, as people often do (usually by expressing surprise that it arrived unaided).

The car manufacturer of the year has to be JCB. I’ve long wanted one, of course, and it’s not hard to find them in the local classifieds. What is hard, for we unlucky enough not to be digger drivers, is to know what you’re buying. It’s not only the nomenclature — what exactly is a four-in-one bucket? — but also knowing how to assess the condition. You see some rusty old dinosaurs lumbering happily across the landscape, digging up mighty chunks to eat, while hearing horror stories of expensive hydraulic and oil-pump failures on other creatures that, to the unpractised eye, look pristine. And they’re not exactly easy to tow home when they break down. Fear is another inhibitor.

Ford recently declared losses of £3 billion in three months and is to ‘restate’ its earnings since 2001. According to my (failed) eleven-plus maths, that’s around £30 million a day. How long can any company survive such haemorrhaging? All right, it includes one-off job-shedding and writing-down asset costs, with provisions for restructuring and 30,000 redundancies. But, even allowing for that, it’s still losing around £6–£8 million a day, with no end in sight despite new CEO Alan Mulally’s prediction that North American operations will return to profit in 2009. Conventional wisdom has it that Ford’s problems are structural and deep-rooted, worsened by US pension, medical and legal liabilities.

We don’t often get second chances. Education, the direction of your career, first love, life itself — they’re none of them dress rehearsals, unless you’re lucky with the first two. And if they were, would we do any better? Best not ask. That’s one reason why it’s always so much more cheering to think about cars. They’re repeatable, easily obtained and easily disposed of provided you don’t dwell upon the loss. If you can’t quite recall what it felt like to drift-slide your first Hispano-Suiza out of a tight right-hander, you can simply borrow, buy or pinch another. Or sometimes even get the old one back (that beats most first loves).

Am I an anorak? An uncomfortable thought, like discovering that some feature you had never noticed in yourself — your Adam’s apple, perhaps, or your ears — is what people always remember about you. I wore an anorak, long ago during my teenage motor-scooter period. That comprised Lambretta 1, which cost £8, was a slow starter and died of engine seizure, but not before it had caused my motorcycle test to be abandoned by an impatient examiner known locally as Failer Fowler. (That in turn provoked me to remove my L-plates and ride illegally for the rest of my brief two-wheeled career.) Lambretta 2 cost £3 and ran faultlessly until I sold it for £8. The anorak ended up as the thing I used to lie on during the many hours spent beneath my first car.

Since its launch in 1989, Land-Rover’s popular Discovery has demonstrated that critical issues for motoring correspondents, such as handling and reliability, count for little when it comes to looks, comfort, usability and aspirations. Actually, that’s a little hard on the dear old Disco of that era. The V8 petrol version performed well and, although the early 200Tdi sounded and felt somewhat agricultural, it did the job after early problems were sorted out. The 2-litre petrol version is best ignored. The wallowing, on-road body roll of those early Discos — a consequence of their design for off-road excellence — never bothered owners as much as it did the motoring press.

There died last month the doyen of British motoring writers, an idiosyncratic, eloquent, deeply informed, erudite enthusiast: L.J.K. Setright. A bearded patrician, elegant and opinionated, intolerant of fools, mysterious and forbidding, his detestation of speed limits was as passionate as his fondness for strong Sobranie cigarettes (he died at 74). His style varied from the high-flown to the acerbic and was peppered with quotations from rabbinical and classical texts. He was proud to be told that he once held the record for appearances in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner. When asked by a motoring editor to tone down his style, he submitted his next column in Latin (a translation followed).

It’s often said that the best time to sell your convertible is during good summer weather. This may be so; or it may be one of those self-sustaining beliefs that appears true because so many sellers act on it, i.e., more rag-tops are sold because more are for sale. There’s no doubt, however, that hot spells such as we’ve recently endured incline many towards wind-in-the-hair motoring fantasies (although if your aim is to keep cool you’re better off in an air-conditioned hard-top). But not all soft-top sellers will be pleasantly surprised if they put their pets up for sale.

Years ago, when the Times was a newspaper for grown-ups, it was said to have published a letter illustrative of our misuse of statistics. This was to the effect that there were about 3 million people in Wales, of whom about 3,000 had one leg and 300 no legs at all. Thus, the ‘average’ number of legs per person in Wales was 1.99 whatever, and therefore ‘most’ people in Wales had fewer than two legs. We read such basic statistical errors daily. Even the sad figures for road deaths over the Christmas period — intended to shock — are sometimes misleading, albeit differently, because it’s not always pointed out that Christmas figures are usually significantly lower than those for other times of the year.