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Can someone explain the logic in almost every new car being bigger , heavier , thirstier than the previous model e.g. Primera , Audi A4 , both cars i have had or got which have constanstly got longer.Time was with Fords if you wanted a bigger car than say a Cortina you bought a Granada , whots going on?
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Bigger the car, the safer it is?
Lets have some more please.
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If cars were shorter we could get more cars in a traffic jam. How many cars have only one occupant?
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driving through newcastle today at rush hour, of the the thirty two cars that i went past, only four of them had more than one person inside.
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You drove past 32 cars in the rush hour? That's some part of Newcastle I've not visited....
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i wasnt the same bit of road, it was the road to the tyne bridge, and the road next to the town moor - corner house roundabout.
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I'd noticed that, particularly with Fords.
The Fiesta has developed into what used to be the Escort.
The Escort has developed into what used to be the Sierra.
The Ka has come in below the Fiesta.
The Montego is coming up towards a Granada.
I find myself having to look at the model badge or number plate to tell if it is a 2000 Fiesta or a 1990 Escort.
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i take it you meant to say 'mondeo', NOT 'montego'
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And garages are getting smaller, which is probably why people are leaving their £20,000 motors out while their garages are full of worthless junk.
HJ
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HJ,
My bike's worth at least £6.50 and what with the lawnmower...
You have a serious point here. Cars have, probably due to market forces, got progressively bigger. In the meantime, house builders seem to continue to build garages to the same 50's 'size standards'.
We have a 70's built house with a single garage. Neither our A4 or Audi 80 saloon will fit in without considerable effort. On length, the 80 has to be nose to the wall to be able to shut the up-and-over door. On width, the nearside mirror has to touch the wall to leave just about enough room to climb out of the drivers door.
My parents can only just fit their Clio in their 80's built garage.
I am sure there is a, perhaps local government, specification on garage sizes? Might this make a good Saturday Telegraph investigation?
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thats why you see these new housing estates, with cars parked on every driveway.
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No, HJ - it's because people have much more useless junk !
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Historically, it has always happened. Compare the Austin 8 to the Austin 7.
More recently, the first Golf is about the size of a recent Polo.
Eventually, a new smaller model, like the real Mini, comes in, with vast acclaim, at the bottom of the range: and the ageing top of the range - no names no pack drill - is dropped as unobtrusively as possible, at least for a few decades until the old name has become vaguely romantic and is revived.
The marketing men look at us punters and calculate our reactions, and in the last analysis WE are responsible!
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I need a big BMW to dilute my BO
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Blame it on Mr Parker-Morris.
At a time when house sizes were reasonably generous, a few builders built small ones.
So the Government, in the form of Mr Parker-Morris introduced minimum standards.
So everyone, including the previous generous ones, built down to the minimum standard.
Come to think of it, driving standards/tests/ road design etc. work on the same principle.
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i prefer 1930's housing, as you had a good size garden front and rear, a driveway, a proper garage, and the rooms are a good size.
i dont like modern housing, because they dont have any of the above.
and i think that victorian housing is just rubbish for todays standards - massive rooms mean more heating = more cost, you dont get a decent back yard so you cant make it into off street parking, you dont get any kind of garden.
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The process by which cars get bigger is very simple. Car manufacturers do a lot of market research, and much of this involves asking owners of their existing models what they would like to see improved. Inevitably, one of the most popular comments is that it would be nice if the car had a bit more space inside. So without thinking of the implications, the manufacturers build the next generation a bit bigger, to keep the customers happy. The end result is that the new VW Polo is a bigger car than the original Golf... Adding more sheet metal is always cheaper than improving the packaging through intelligent design - look at BL, who produced brilliantly packaged small cars (Mini, Austin 1100) and lost money on every one sold, while Ford were raking in the cash with the bulkier, less clever, but much cheaper Escort and Cortina.
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You're missing a very important point about garages. The smaller they biuld them, the more houses they can fit on a given plot of land and hence the more money they can make.
Andy
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Some of the houses I looked at had very narrow garages - just the width of a small door plus the support down the side. Hopeless if you intend to do any work on a car so struck off my list! I had to think up some other reason to justify it to my girlfriend though......
I've got a modern house with about the widest garage there is available for the designs on the estate - fortunately my cars suit it: MK 1 Escort - long but narrow, Caterham Seven - No doors or roof and you climb out vertically! These were of course designed years ago (60s and 50s). (You can now buy a bigger Caterham which can fit drivers of 6'6" and 18+ stone! but it's still not very wide).
I had the common sense to buy a house that fits two cars on the driveway and one in the garage, however many of the newer streets on the estate have the houses closer to the road so only space for one car, the garages in separate blocks so no-one uses them (too far to walk) so park their 2nd cars outside. But as the roads are also smaller they park on the pavement - I've seen people with pushchairs having to walk down the road to get past - and create chicanes by everyone parking right outside their house on opposite sides of the road. The builders are now cramming more houses into less space as the available land runs out.
Piers
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Move to Suffolk. My garage is huge - I can fit a long wheelbase Land Rover in it and still have room to work on it. My previous house - a 2 bedroom terrace in Newmarket - had an even bigger garage at the end of the garden, and space to store four vehicles in front of it. Plus almost unlimited free on-street parking in an area with no car crime. Marvellous.
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i was looking at a house on an estate in north shields called 'gardner park', but the garage was, wait for it --- 13 foot 6 inches long X 5 foot 6 inches, THATS what i call a small garage.
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and another thing, the company selling the house decided to put the measurements of the garage in (MM) mille metres.
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mm = millimetres {lower case m} whats mille ?
M = mega {upper case M }
milli = /1000, Mega = x 1,000,000
1 Mega metre = 1,000 kilometres,
hence your garage is 1,000,000,000 times larger than the average ?
Tom
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mm = millimetres {lower case m} whats mille ?
M = mega {upper case M }
milli = /1000, Mega = x 1,000,000
1 Mega metre = 1,000 kilometres,
hence your garage is 1,000,000,000 times larger than the average ?
Tom
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Tom
I think you've got the pedant key on your keyboard switched on.
;-)
Jonathan
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tom, i thought that i lived a boring life.
when did mille ever sound like mega ????
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Cars getting bigger - maybe people are getting fatter!
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We live in a service economy. Consumer goods are cheaper than ever, but fixing them is more expensive than ever. So we can afford to buy bigger (and more) cars than before. A house with a garage of any size in the 1930s was a big deal; it said you had made it. If you had a car to put in it, that was even better.
Chris
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