Survey of another sort

Sir,

Thank you for seven years candid and interesting comment on motoring and motor cars; I look forward to my Motor Sport each month and am rarely disappointed. I would, however, make these suggestions :

1 Please stop: (a) telling me that :

(i) Citroen make the World’s most advanced motor car;

(ii) Alec Issigonis is a genius.

Neither is disputed but you have made your points.

(b) “ELW” printing phrases like “Parnell pitted his Lotus with acute water shortage”

(c) “ELW” inventing horrible nouns like “retiral.”

2. Please continue: (a) Your excellent coverage of the sport;

(b) being independent;

(c) educating your readers in what they should expect in 1962, the sixteenth year of the VolksWagen;

(d) debunking complacent and untruthful advertisers.

3. Please institute : (a) tabulated comparisons of comparable cars;

(b) quoting foreign car prices thus: (i) ex-factory at current exchange rates; (ii) after Import Duty; (iii) after Purchase Tax.

This should make clear, to those who are unaware of it, the struggle which faces the motor industry in the UK

(c) a Road Test of a 1962 Volkswagen 1600. Your comments on the 1500 lead me to believe that you have for so long been rubber suspended and water cooled that you have lost touch with the Beetle’s more than steady developments; (d) printing Readers Car Survey figures opposite relevant advertisements, if you dare!

4. Please intensify your efforts to make our manufacturers realise that they are living in a fool’s paradise of: (a) outdated designs which sell (more than once) only to people who drive at low cruising speeds on billiard table surfaces;

(b) the reputation (at home) of marques long since swallowed, the names of which are prostituted by being plastered on the current tin cans;

(c) the variously tinted spectacles a Robert Glenton and his kind (is it too much to ask it he ever writes with his tongue in his check ?).

Like many of your correspondents, I am quite unable to believe that we do sell many cars in Europe except for our unique small sports cars. It is certainly cause for comment in Germany when one sees a British saloon, registered with the German Authorities and presumably, therefore, German owned. By comparison, however, it would seem that Fiat, Renault, Peugeot and Citroen have quite a foothold in the German market.

Those of us lucky enough to be unhampered by discriminate taxation cannot afford to buy British, and, until our manufacturers accept the advice of Prince Philip, most will continue to swallow our pride and accept individual “motoring Munichs.”

My car is no status symbol and it is no desire to be “one up on the Schmidts,” that makes me remain —–

“Unverschamt Volkswaginer.” Germany.

(Name and address supplied.—Ed)