Merely looking at the gap between the floor and the splitter or the hedge and the mirror gives me the jitters…
Eek, graunch, oops, sorry. There will be a set of exclamations, crunches and apologies such as these if I’m driving a car that grinds its nose on a driveway ramp or speed bump or grounds out over an undulating road.
I apologise because I feel like I’ve let the car down. Yet, as time goes by, I’m less and less convinced that it’s my fault.
So why the apology? Is it a natural part of being English? Like saying sorry to someone who happens to be wanting to walk through a door at the same time as me? Oops, my bad. Or like feeling similarly in restaurants when not everything will fit on a table?
Oh dear, what a muddle, let me move my drink and that little vase with the artificial flower in it-sorry-so there’s room for the saag aloo.
How many times have I apologised like this over the years? Dozens, certainly. Hundreds, maybe. And I think I’ve had enough of it.
Not one of those times was I responsible for how low a car was or how small a restaurant table was. So why on earth was I apologising? Car makers know what the roads are like, just as restaurateurs know exactly how much their average customer is likely to order.
So, genuinely reluctant though I am to criticise a hospitality industry that needs all the help it can get, how about making the tables a tiny bit bigger?
And, more pertinently to my day job, why make road cars that can’t be driven onto driveways, into car parks or over shoddy roads without significant risk of underbody gravel rash or, worse, cracked splitters or diffusers? Give it a rest; ease off the downforce a bit and give them more ground clearance, for heaven’s sake.
Manufacturers may argue that they fit hydraulic nose lifters to avoid this sort of damage. And it’s true that any time I get into a car that has a button that raises the front end clear of harshly angled driveways, I am, for a brief moment, grateful.
Yet then I’m also fearful. For one, exactly how low is this car? For two, how long will that nose lift take to actually raise? And at what speed will it happen? Some are painfully slow or will refuse until the car is moving at a crawl.
Finally, though, I’m irked that, through fitting a lifting nose, the manufacturer has somehow passed the onus of not scratching the underside of this car on to me, rather than itself and the highway constructor bearing the responsibility themselves, where it actually lies.
Approaching an abrupt ramp or speed bump, there might be traffic impatiently queuing up behind me, or I might have misjudged the severity of the angle, and it’s not like I’m outside the car, able to check whether I have clearance.
So I’m very much taking a punt. Yet if I get it wrong, I feel doubly responsible, because I didn’t raise the car’s nose enough or in time. This is unfair. And I’ve had enough of being sorry for it. This isn’t my fault.
If a manufacturer wants to design a car with a low front splitter and rear diffuser to improve aerodynamics, it should at least make the splitter out of some kind of flexible rubber (as Porsche tends to) so that if it graunches, it doesn’t matter.
But better still would be to make a car fit for the roads where it will be driven. That means no dangling splitter or trailing diffuser or ground clearance so low that the car’s mid-section whumps into the ground alarmingly over a poor back road-because Britain has loads of those.
This is not, I should say, the world’s most serious issue for me. But I can’t believe I’m the only one who thinks like this, and I do believe it’s a significant turn-off for potential buyers.
This is entirely anecdotal evidence, I know, but I have many mates who say they’re not interested in the latest supercars because they’re just too fast, too wide, too low, too silly: not usable enough on the road.
A number of factors are at play there, but designing a car that doesn’t grind its underside would genuinely be a solid starting point for improving the situation.
