Sebastian Abbott

Karel Capek's 1925 Letters from England

Oh my goodness, this is pretty amazing: Karel Capek’s 1925 Letters from England start off with his impressions of London - streets, traffic, parks and so on.

It’s so quotable!

In {Czechia}, in Italy, France, the street is a sort of large tavern or public garden, a village green, a meeting-place, a playground and theatre, an extension of home and doorstep; here {in London} it is something which belongs to nobody, and which does not bring you closer to his fellows; here, you do not meet with people, and things, but merely avoid them.

→ 6:36 PM, Nov 26

"S" "U" EVs

We’ve been looking at switching from our 2015 Toyota Avensis estate to an EV for a while now, but still struggle with the sheer bulk of the “cars” we’ve tried up to now.

From the Tesla Model Y to the Nissan Ariya and VW ID.4 these vehicles have been huge, heavy and remarkably small of boot (trunk).The closest we got to a real car was the NIO ET5, but that ended up being a little too small for us, more akin to a Mercedes A-Class wagon than to our Toyota.

Each time I’ve returned a car from a test drive and driven the first few metres in the Avensis, I’ve felt the familiar lightness of our admittedly underpowered petrol car, in which we’ve driven around 75k km in the nearly 8 years we’ve had it. I wonder if we should just keep running it for another few years until proper electric cars evolve.

There’s an issue with that thought, though: we’d still be burning petrol, and emitting hefty chunks of CO2 (amongst other things) whilst we’re at it. If I look to how far we’ve driven in the Avensis so far, we can see how the emissions stack up.

If we assume a fuel economy of around 7 l/100 km (equivalent to around 34 mpg in old money), and a carbon dioxide emissions rate of 2.35 kg/litre fuel (the American EPA charmingly refers to the number of grams CO2 generated per gallon of gasoline !), we will have burned 5250 litres of fuel and emitted 12337 kg of CO2 in that time… Yes, 12.3 tonnes!

Looking at it another way: If we assume 8.9 (9 is good enough) kWh of electrical energy per litre petrol (a value proffered by the Canadian Government, then our Avensis is running at an average consumption of around 63 kWh / 100 km, which is nearly 3 times that of a Tesla Model Y, which, when we tested it, was showing around 21 kWh / 100 km, on a predominantly Autobahn-based route for a weekend.

So, in one sense, it doesn’t matter that the Y is an SUV: in energy terms, it’s running at around 3 times more efficientuy than the Toyota (and gets more efficient still when we’re on shorter, cross-town or commuting trips). It’s even a few cms shorter than the Avensis, though significantly wider of stance.

But - those shoulders, and the shape of the boot! The Tesla is by far the best of the boots that we’ve encountered so far, but it’s still noticeably shorter than that of the Toyota. We could live with it, but these EV SUVs (SUEVs) are terribly inefficient in space where we need it.

Of course the battery pushes the floor upwards, so EVs tend to end up higher than ICEs, but the rear passengers, growing teenagers, do end up needing to slot their feet under the front seats to have a chance of resting their legs on the seat squabs. Rear seat height seems to be smaller despite the overall height of these cars (10s of cms greater than our car).

Ultimately, the question is about which sort of efficiency we want: energy? There, it’s a clear win for the big EVs. Space and road-space efficiency? Well, the SUEVs are taller and wider than our traditional ICE estate car, but are shorter - tall but still energy efficient isn’t that bad a trade-off. These things seem very width-inefficient, though, and that troubles me.

The switch to EV is a convincing one, but still not compelling - and the reluctance has both reasoned and emotional bases, which makes it all the trickier.

→ 9:34 PM, Feb 29

Looking at things to drive in

2CV hub - reminds me of the Tintin books!

The other museum- Oh. Sorry, I'll have to start that again.

Over Easter, you may recall, I visited the German Phonographic museum in St. Georgen. We also visited another building full of mostly old stuff - but it wasn't a museum.

We went to the Autosammlung Steim in Schramberg. This collection has been built up over the years by Dr. Ing Hans-Jochen Steim, with the express intent of being driven. And what a collection it is! Much more compact than equivalents like Sinsheim, it initially comes across as being small and stuffy - but the quality of the cars in there speaks for itself, as do the occasional tell-tale tyre marks along the otherwise pristine floors.

Definitely worth a visit, as the (again, smartphone) photos below will attest.

As an aside, Herr Dr. Ingenieur Steim was chairman of the Kern-Liebers group of companies. These make such "dull" products as springs and stampings. However, one look at the range of products they produce shows how intrepid a traditional engineering firm can be when it looks at and develops its products in the right ways: from automotive injection systems to the textile industry right the way to pacemakers and hearing aids, their products are there. And when you next desperately try to avoid the flailing cable retracting at great speed into your vacuum cleaner, you can admire the strength and consistency of Kern-Lieber springs, too!

1932 Auburn Boat-tail Speedster

1963 Auto-Union SP100 Speedster

1968 McLaren Formula 2

→ 9:20 PM, May 13

Hej då, Saab Cars

Saab cars went into bankruptcy just before Christmas. There is tons about it on the web, so I don't really need to describe the ins and outs of the long and painful slide from being sold by GM to Spyker and "Swedish Automobile," to the rather demeaning attempts at sale to the nobody Chinese firms Pang Da and Youngman.

I'm writing about this now because I had to pop into the local Saab dealership in Ipswich to have an engine management problem looked at. (It turns out that the turbo vacuum hose had a small hole in the side, most likely caused by a marten, the famous "Marderbiss" in German.) I had to wait a while, just over an hour, for my car to be looked at and repaired, so I had time to sit in the upstairs waiting area to read a 1987 history of Saab-Scania, and to sit in the latest and last Saab, the 9-5 Aero turbo 4.

The book was full of hope and pride of Saab Cars, noting its original raison d'être of being an emergency occupation for thousands of Svenska Aeroplan workers who were no longer needed for aircraft manufacture in the post WWII years. It was always a bit of a side-show for SAAB the company.

The 9-5 was rather nice and sitting in it made me feel slightly melancholy about a brand that I have always appreciated from the days of the 900 Turbo. It had all the equipment: HUD, gear-changing flaps behind the steering wheel and a nice big old turbo engine. I rather liked the styling; there were a lot of subtle details in there that set the Saab design language in a modern context. The interior was less successful (rather too black and with some rather perplexing discontinuities in there).

One of the big problems about it all is that none of the tech really belonged to Saab. Suppliers and GM owned all the technology. Saab repackaged it nicely but no longer sufficiently uniquely. There was talk in Feb 2009 of Saab being the "Apple of the auto world", but ultimately there was nothing compelling in knowing that GM platforms were the Intel chippery inside.

As I write this, there is talk of the bones of Saab being bought by Mahindra and Mahindra. I still doubt that they will be able to keep the Saab name, as the aircraft manufacturer would like its name back in reasonably good order. But if a car based on the 9-5 can be resurrected along with the next 9-3 and Saab can keep its engineers, then there would be a chance of it being as successful as the Indian owned Jaguar Land Rover. We shall see...

→ 7:03 PM, Dec 30

A Night flight and a right fright

My business trips are now rare in comparison to how things were a few years ago. I count myself lucky as this dip has coincided nicely with starting a family. So from monthly trips to Asia and almost weekly trips to Germany from the UK, I now occasionally fly to Italy to meet suppliers and drive around Germany meeting customers. And read bedtime stories.

This week I ended up on a more unusual trip, to Dacia in Romania, to discuss some issues that they have been having in production. It was to have been a relatively relaxed journey, flying to Bucharest from Frankfurt airport early in the afternoon to stay in an airport hotel until my colleague from Turkey arrived early the next morning. Alas, though, systems happened.

We have the Egencia travel booking system at work; it is the business version of Expedia. Egencia turned out to be a nightmare for rapid turnaround travel as it has an - in itself eminently sensible - approval system built in. The problem is that these approvals need to be completed within a certain time, presumably in order to protect us all from monstrous price rises as the flight date nears. As soon as I had understood the need, I booked my flights on Friday afternoon. The approval deadline (written in very small letters in the confirmation email) was set for 20:00 that evening, when my manager and his boss were unlikely to be reading emails. The same happened on Monday, as the pair were out of the office. When it came to my flight on Tuesday, I thought that it had been confirmed, as Uwe had submitted his consent; but I discovered when I arrived to collect my eTicket - no ticket. My seat had been cancelled.

So, following a frantic round of internet bookings, phone calls and awaiting confirmation, I ended up on the late flight to Bucharest. On that flight over clouds lit by a full moon we passed a thunderstorm in the distance; the flashes of light within that dark mass of cloud were awe inspiring. We landed uneventfully at a quarter to midnight.

Bucharest airport has a new terminal that is perfectly inoffensive, but the signage is terrible. When I asked the infodesk how to get to my airport hotel, they sent me down a flight of stairs and a ramp into a dark car park occupied by an off duty, wide-boy taxi driver who convinced me to part with 20 Euros (the smallest note I had at the time) for a 2 minute ride to the hotel and, in the meantime, proceeded to tell me how insignificant 20 Euros was to me, especially as the company would pay for it, how the French were so arrogant, the Maroccans working for Dacia even more so...

My room was fine, though blighted by that most east european of curses, the endlessly barking and yapping dog outside. It reminded me of my earlier 'adventures' in Liberec but I was at least tired enough to get to sleep relatively quickly this time around.

The next day I met my colleague Ilker at the airport and we found the taxi that he had pre-arranged. It was an ageing Dacia Logan that took us lumpily (with noticeable wheel wobble) through an ageing, shabby Bucharest suburb onto the motorway. Half way along that obviously European money edifice, the taxi was suddenly surrounded by a cloud of black smoke and then white steam, the engine revved out of control, we stopped on the hard shoulder and got out to survey the damage.

The engine was obviously not going to restart, despite the taxi driver's best efforts, so he started to make some phone calls. He initially offered a replacement taxi, but that, too, would have taken 45 minutes to get to us. Instead, he started to wave the traffic down. Astoundingly, within a few minutes a van transporting another (new) Dacia on its flat bed stopped and agreed to take Ilker and I to Pritesti, a town near to Mioveni which was our ultimate destination (well, my ultimate destination was home, but I couldn't possibly write that in LinkedIn). We were met there by another taxi and finally we arrived at Dacia.

We were offered a small coffee.

The meeting wasn't terribly effective as our customers didn't seem to have the faintest idea of what we were talking about; which meant that they would not change their view that we were at fault for a particular issue. However, when I pointed out that there was no evidence whatsoever that what they were experiencing was linked in any way to our parts, they seemed to go a little bit quieter still.

I got home again, in the end and thanks to the worst "quiche lorraine" on the planet courtesy of a certain large German airline, I even arrived with a little bit of energy to spare.

→ 10:19 PM, May 24