Titchmarsh Borgward

There's two words you wouldn't expect to see together.  In fact I'd never heard of one of those words before today.

This is a Titchmarsh:

While this is a Borgward:

The former is a gardener turned TV host who I had heard of while the latter is a German car I had never heard of.

 

Alan Titchmarsh contributed this piece to the Telegraph motoring section this weekend about how he prefers to travel around in old cars.  He says that after passing his test, he "took to the roads in an assortment of cars that were owned either by my father or the plumbing firm that he worked for: everything from a Borgward Isabella to a Ford Capri."

 

That got me researching Borgward.

 

They seem to have existed from the late '20s to the early '60s when they went bust after producing a very large number of vehicles including trikes and trucks - I really don't understand how I could not have heard of them.  Were they not imported to the UK?  I don't know.  However, a quick visit to the UK Borgward Drivers Club website reveals plenty of right-hand drive examples, some on British plates.

 

Maybe we'll all get to hear the name in the future though.  The grandson of the original Herr Borgward has started up a new automotive company, called Borgward AG.  Their website uses lots of management-speak - but these days, they have to.  They use the word "revival" a lot - I hope they succeed - this project deserves to do better than the Maybach revival but even Mercedes money couldn't make that work.  I think it could be a long time before a popular UK TV gardener called Alan can go out and buy one to tootle around Yorkshire in...

 

...a long time before we see the Titchmarch Borgward.

Would you sell your Granny?

Somebody is.

And if I had £5K spare and some space and some time to travel down to East Anglia (as opposed to Ford Anglia - there's one of them for sale too) I would certainly be interested in making a purchase.

After all, she is beautiful:

It's the rarer 3-door coupe style as well.

 

So what alerted me to this sale?

 

This did.

 

It is a story from the BBC about a 1961 Triumph Herald up for sale with just 20 miles on the clock.  It is believed that the "one careful lady owner" never actually drove it. 

Sounds a bit like the story of the Merc I found in Swansea.

 

It goes under the hammer on Saturday together with the car you can just see behind it.

 

The car in the picture behind it interests me because my first car was identical to it.

 

OK, it had a different registration number and was three years younger but it was a Triumph Dolmite 1500HL in Vomit Yellow (aka Sandglow).

 

It must be in excellent condition because it is estimated to go for between £14K and £16K - although they've clearly got the colour wrong in the listing (brown) and the mileage too (69 - maybe they meant 69000)

 

I don't think they are too clever when it comes to the listings.  They have the mileage for the Herald that is making the headlines down as being 3750 (next to a photo of the speedo that shows 20).

 

3750 is still unbelievably low for a 50-year-old car and probably belongs to a second Herald the auctioneers are selling that they have listed as having 20 miles.

 

I would love to have a wander around this auctioneers site - the actual, physical site, not the website, although that is pretty interesting too.

 

For example, they have a 1988 Rover 213 - why on Earth would that be a classic?

 

Well, to answer my own question (and I bet you thought it was rhetorical) it only has 3101 miles on the clock and is expected to fetch £3K.

 

They also have Granny's successor for sale: 

Oh dear.  Maybe not.

Clerical Error

When Jim Bowen presented Bulleye in the 1980s, the star prize was often a car.

It was always a small, modest car though - like a Vauxhall Nova or an Austin Metro.

Now he has become Pope, he has made a decree in line with this philosophy.  According to Autoguide, he has made a plea to the Catholic Church’s priests and nuns, asking them to pick a car that’s more “humble” rather than the latest model that’s available.

Fair enough, although it was only last week that he took delivery of a new Merc:

Fox had that story.  It's a new M-Class and the keys were handed to him personally by Daimler CEO Dr. Dieter Zetsche.  Maybe he doesn't practice what he preaches.

 

This is the latest in a longish line of Popemobiles - my favourite being this Mercedes 300 D from the days before D meant a Diesel.

I think that His Holiness will approve of Father Ted's choice of car, though - a battered old Ford Cortina.

Great, smashing, super!

Enterprise Rent-a-Car

Fox today asks us "What would Spock drive?"

A Vulcan?

Well, judging by this picture, A Buick.

Apparently it's a '64 Buick Riviera.

However, what Fox have found is a brilliantly amusing ad where he drives a Mercedes CLS.

But it's not a Mercedes ad, it's an Audi ad...


Lots of Star Trek references in there but no mention of Star Trek itself.  Possibly because the Mazda 6 is the official advertising partner of "Star Trek: Into Darkness" so they wouldn't want to upset the sponsors.

I can't vouch for the film because I haven't watched it - yet.  But I can certainly vouch for this advert.

Missing it would be very illogical.

Mercedes 2013 SL Classe best HD picture

Mercedes SL Classe 2013 

Bond Villain

My story last month about Roger Moore didn't really have much to do with James Bond but this one does actually involve Steven Berkoff who played General Orlov in Octopussy alongside Roger Moore.

Now, being a Daily Mail story, they do enjoy a misleading headline.

For example: Pay and dismay: Mercedes left marooned after builders excavate station car park around it

No it wasn't, the story here clearly states that the builders left an escape ramp.

Another good example: Mystery solved! Elizabeth Hurley's car found covered in parking tickets after reports it was stolen during shopping trip

No it wasn't - it had three on it. Story here. Nearly another James Bond connection though - she was a star of Austin Powers which is a very entertaining JB spoof.

Anyway, the misleading Berkoff headline is James Bond villain Steven Berkoff, 75, banned from the road for jumping red light when he heard police sirens

He wasn't. He lost his licence for getting 12 penalty points on it. He also rather naughtily tried to declare his Californian driving licence number but that didn't work.

He claimed he moved through the red lights to get out of the way of an emergency vehicle. Seems like a reasonable thing to do, although he did it at 27mph!

It did get me thinking about what I would do if waiting at traffic lights and an emergency vehicle came up behind with its sirens blaring and lights flashing. What is the correct thing to do?

Well, thank you to Jerry from Lincolnshire who taught me something when he added the following comment to the Mail article, "It is absolutely never the right thing to do to pass a red light in these circumstances. It is absolutely not a defence to the crime of passing a red light to say you moved to allow a blue light vehicle to pass. If you do pass a red light and get prosecuted any compentent lawyer will advise you to plead guilty and try to minimse the sentce through mitigation. Emergncy vehicle drivers are trained that if they are behind a vehicle stopped at a red light they MUST wait for the light to go green before they can expect the vehicle in front to move. They are also supposed to turn off any siren until the light change but can keep blue lights on."

What he says is backed up here so I gave his comment a green up-arrow.


Now, basically, Berkoff jumped a red light at nearly 30mph, pretended he didn't have a British driving licence and claimed he was making way for an emergency vehicle. Worse than that, he was driving a Beetle.

General Orlov would not have been impressed.

Mercedes SLR Striling Moss best HD picture

 Mercedes SLR Striling Moss

Horse Power : 650 HP

Engine : 5.5L - V8

Acceleration : 0-100Km in 3.3 second

Max speed : 347.2 Km/h

Some people say that Wales is 25 years behind the rest of Great Britain

How dare they!? As a proud Welshman I find that very offensive.

Anyway, I wandered into the Mercedes dealership in Swansea yesterday and I saw this:Interesting eh? It was built in 1986 in South Africa, two years after they ceased production in Stuttgart. It is when the E-Class was known as the xxxE where the xxx actually signified the engine size rather than some random number to make the car look faster.

The car was shipped under armed guard to Cape Town and then on to the UK where an elderly lady had ordered it. It was then “professionally stored” until last year. There is no news on the old lady but given that we are talking 1986 I don’t fancy her chances.

It comes complete with “thistle green” metallic paint and a Becker electronic Radio Cassette Player – not to mention original Mercedes-Benz rubber mats.

I have to say that the car looked beautiful and was most definitely the most interesting item in the place. Even more so than the 2009 SLKs going for under £19000 and this SLS Soft-Top:And even more so than this house nearby that looks like Hitler.

What's in a Name?

A story this week from Car Magazine about how Mercedes are "simplifying" their car naming structure. You have to read it to believe it - it makes no sense whatsoever. They are trying to make their naming system which uses letters to identify the postion the model has in the range more logical.

They are failing spectacularly.

Maybe they should rethink the whole letters and numbers thing and just use names instead. They will need to be careful though - GM's Nova for instance didn't do too well in Spanish-speaking countries where "No va" means "doesn't go".

Ford's Pinto had similar problems as this is allegedly slang for "small penis" in South America.

Ford had better luck in Britain naming their cars after "gentlemen's magazines" like Escort and Fiesta.

All of the names in my little picture above are real car names - except one!

There's a prize of much kudos for anyone who spots my fake one.

Some names are so good that several car companies choose them independently of each other. For example, my profile picture is of an Austin Metro but anyone sitting at a computer on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean will expect a Metro to be a Geo Metro - so for those people - here's a nice picture of one of them...

A Little Light Reading

This story today from Autoguide.com is about a rather clever new headlamp system being developed by GM in Europe.It is a matrix system and involves separate LED sections that are controlled individually by computer according to surrounding conditions as determined by a connected camera.

The system has the lights on full-beam for a lot of the time but is alledgedly clever enough to detect other vehicles and not dazzle anyone. I'm all in favour of anything that stops me being dazzled when I look in my rear-view mirror on a motorway at night as German cars other than Opels (ie Audis, BMWs, Mercs and Porsches) all tear along the outside lane with enough light shining forwards to host an evening football match - not that I would advocate playing football on a motorway - unless you're John Terry perhaps.

They have produced a video with some nice music that supposedly shows how it works but it didn't make a lot of sense to me:The bit at the start concerns me a bit where the man plays with the settings to give a light-show. I know that the systems would soon get hacked so that young rappers like Dazzle-Razzle and Bo-Diddly would have their pimped up Chrysler Voyagers annoying everyone in a 3 mile radius. Or should that be 8-mile? - spot the rap reference there proving that I am up with the kids.

The video then goes on to show the lights in action with a few German captions. Apparently "fern" means "distant", "abblen" is to fade out and "matrix" means "matrix".

I still didn't get most of it but it is possibly good news for this chap though:

Ferrari Dayto-forget

I heard this story out of Japan on Radio 2 this morning but it wasn't on the BBC Website (probably will be by the time you read this) but Bloomberg had it. Nobody badly hurt though. It was caused by a sixty-year-old who lost control on a wet motorway. He's now under threat of prison.

Maybe it'll make this bimbo from this story in July feel a bit better though. No, it's not Patsy Kensit, it's some anonymous French woman who drove a Bentley into four other prestigious cars in Monaco. And because she was trapped inside the car and it was a convertible, she was soon surrounded by tourists with cameras and camera-phones. There are hundreds of photos all over the Web.

Like this one...

Monkey Business

Staff at Longleat Safari Park have given their monkeys a car according to The BBC today.They could have chosen a better one though.

A C-Class saloon of that vintage only has one (admittedly large) windscreen wiper.

That is nowhere near enough to satisfy that number of monkeys.

Actually, looking at that picture a bit more closely, that isn't a saloon - it's an estate. That means twice the window-wiper fun!

To be fair, Longleat did also supply a roof-rack with a suitcase so that would help a little.

I visited Longleat a few years back but, much to my childrens' annoyance, I took the detour which avoided the risk of monkeys attacking or defecating upon my beloved car.

This story mustn't be confused with the Daily Mail's attempt in 2009 to reinforce the anti-Scouse stereotype as mentioned in my post Mexican Stand-off when they ran this story about the monkeys in Knowsley Safari Park in Liverpool.

Mercedes C-Class Coupé

Autocar today published spy-shots (link here) of the new C-Class Coupé due for sale early next year.All the main car sites love publishing spy shots - I just don't get it myself - to me they are like the Magic Eye Pictures from the '90s - I never successfully visualised one of those no matter how much I squinted at them.

I actually can get the gist of the shape of the new C-Class Coupé though. And I have to say it is a massive improvement on its predecessors:
This original shape, I thought, looked just awful. It was reminiscent of the original BMW 3-Series Coupé that looked like someone had taken the saloon, backed it into a wall at high speed and stuck some ugly tail-lights on the resultant mess.

The Mark 2 Version was marginally less ugly:- albeit still truncated but the motoring media really hated it because all that Mercedes actually did to produce it was to take the original Coupé and stick on bodywork and lights to make it look like the next generation of C-Class when it most definitely wasn't.

The new one has the semi-boot effect that a proper coupé should have and is also acting as a replacement for the CLK which has always been an eye-pleasing car so I'll approve.