Fast cars of the future

Laurence Pomeroy had an extremely good article in “The Motor” of October 23rd, which all our readers should study. It compared streamlined with box-like cars and showed, as clearly as we have ever seen it shown, the advantages of high average speed to the ordinary car user. Pomeroy mentioned that he used to rise early on a summer’s morn while working in Derby, have breakfast on the Beaulieu River and be back in time to put in a full afternoon’s work, thanks to possession of a car with ability to average 50 m.p.h. He emphasises that a car able to average 50 m.p.h. with safety gives added living space equal to an area greater than that of the whole of Cambridgeshire, to those who wish to live within an hour’s journey of their place of toil, as opposed to a car only able to average 30 m.p.h. Pomeroy believes that streamlining is the key to such motoring, with economy, in the future, and suggests that the distinction between touring car and sports-car may, in future, become extinct, being replaced by demarcation in terms of the box-like, slow-speed, short-distance car, and the high-speed, long-distance, invariably streamlined car. It is a pity that this country has been slow to produce practical streamlined road cars, so that Pomeroy has had to base his reasoning and figures on the streamline “Balilla” Fiat saloon, which so impressed him when he had it out on test, and which we last recollect seeing in action at Backwell hill climb, just before the war, and to illustrate his article with pictures of foreign cars. We hope this state of affairs will change before we have to go, all out for export markets, and we look forward to a separate article from Pomeroy’s pen on the subject of those 50 m.p.h. average advantages not apparent to ordinary motorists.