We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Last Sunday I did a posting about the new Rolls-Royce Phantom, and now that comments there have had as much say as they’re going to, I’d like to add just one more. I appealed in my posting for eyewitness accounts of new Roller, but commenters were only able to speculate about the new car’s appearance and about the impression it makes on people nearby from various photo-links we had found, until this arrived, from Joseph Beckner of Atlanta, Georgia:
I saw the new Rolls-Royce Phantom at the Amelia Island Councours D’Elegance in Florida in March.
Impressions:
1) It is an IMPOSING automobile. It has a massive quality to it that transcends any other car in recent memory. The grill is indeed huge and, in my mind, overbearing. it comes up to my chest and is very wide. The car is very long and wide, and seems to have been carved from a block of granite. It simply dwarfs anything on the road. The first descriptive thought that came to me was “it’s a locomotive”.
2) There is nothing stately about the car. It has what I can only describe as a “Panzer” feel to it. You’ll never mistake it for any other car in your rearview mirror. And I guarantee you’ll move over.
3) The auto oozes quality in every detail. The paint is flawless, the interior fit and finish is beyond fault, and the materials are first rate. That said, it isn’t a “warm” car. Unlike the Rolls of yore, it feels cold and unforgiving. Rather than “This is your reward, sir, for a life well-lived”, it seems to say “See, I have more cubic money than you. Out of the way, swine!”.
4) The wheels are enormous, and according to reports, the biggest tires on any passenger car. They are 31″ in diameter, and while they visually tend to make the car appear smaller in pictures, in the flesh that trick doesn’t work. With its giant grill, high beltline, and small glass-to-body ratio, it just overwhelms the viewer.
5) The coach doors in the rear (‘suicide doors’ to Americans), are a nice touch. Well integrated in the design. Whether they actually work in real life remains to be seen.
6) Everything about the car suggests that it is what the Germans believe the British think of as a “Rolls-Royce”. It’s almost cartoonish. It’s an idea that’s been filtered through BMW’s preconceived notions of the British. “You know, Hans, with their overinflated sense of “Empire” and such, the British really think they still rule the world. This is the car that reflects that attitude.”
One of the other commenters, blogger Charles Hueter linked to and quoted from this story, which happens to include at its top left corner, this photograph, which I think best illustrates Beckner’s reaction to this remarkable, but it would also seem, decidedly offputting vehicle.
Early last month I did a piece over at Transport Blog about the new Rolls Royce. This car, the “Phantom”, is interesting for several reasons.
First, it costs a lot, around £250,000. That’s a lot more than a Rolls Royce has ever cost before. Who will buy such a thing?
Second, will the fact that Rolls Royce is now German-owned affect sales in the USA? I don’t know, but maybe commenters from the USA can enlighten us. Presumably the German connection will ensure that the car has fewer bits falling off it than is the case with cars made by large but still British-owned car makers. But do Americans perceive the Rolls Royce now to be a German car? Or do they still view it as British, with Germans merely helping out with the running of what remains a Great British Institution? If Americans do think it’s now German, will that matter?
Third, it may work terribly well, but is the Phantom a nice enough design to be worth all that money? I have yet to see one of these beasts myself. When I did my Transport Blog piece, I was merely noting the new Roller’s existence, a transport event in itself. Since then, I have heard Jeremy Clarkson’s somewhat critical views about what the Phantom looks like, and what driving about in one might say about you, and I suspect Clarkson is right. What he said was that the thing is just not beautiful enough. In fact, he said, it’s rather ugly. If you drive about in one, you’ll come across as, not to put too fine a point on it, a bastard. I don’t recall Clarkson’s exact words, but that is the gist that I recall.
When it comes to car aesthetics, photographs are notoriously not sufficient to answer such worries.
Some photos make the Phantom look rather small, but this could just be because the wheels are so very big. And if the Rolls is actually very big, then it could turn out to be the front that will upset me. If you follow the Rolls Royce link above, and scroll down the one of a certain Tony Gott introducing the car, you’ll see what bothers me most about this car, which is the latest version of the radiator grill. What used to look stately and classical now looks like it may be aggressive and overbearing. Rollers used to mean noblesse oblige. Well, they did until the sixties, when pop stars and drug dealers started buying them. This latest one looks more like the kind of Germanic noblesse that doesn’t give a scheisse. On the other hand this may all be effect of the photograph exaggerating the size of the radiator, and actually the Phantom is very nice.
I’ve been walking about in London now for two months since this beast was launched and have yet to spot one. Could it be that it isn’t selling very well, and that others have similar reservations to mine?
Has anyone else laid eyes on it? If so, what did you think of it?
Patrick of Transport Blog links to this story, drawn to his attention by this promising rival/collaborator to/with Transport Blog.
So that, when trawling through the Samizdata archives in 2085 you may learn what this story was about, it is an advert by a car making enterprise called “General Motors” featuring a bus with “CREEPS AND WEIRDOS” on its sign machine instead of saying its destination. (I know what you’re thinking: what’s a “bus”?)
“Truth in advertising” says Patrick. Indeed. This advert says something extremely true and important about public transport, which is that not all of the public are very nice or companionable people. So obviously the advert can’t be allowed and General Motors have been made to withdrawn it. But it looks like the blogosphere will immortalise and universalise the message. Congratulations GM. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if they provoked the row deliberately, in order to help them make their point wihtout having to go on paying for it to be said. And in Canada! The horror.
GM is famous in public-transportophile circles for having bribed and corrupted buses and trams into perdition in the USA and replaced them all with the hated (by everyone except the non-creep non-weirdo public) motor car. The more I study this argument, the more I think that GM is the messenger being blamed for the message, the message being that most Americans prefer cars to buses and trams and for good reasons. Whereas buses and trams are quite good for getting new American places to live and work in started, they are not very good for serving all the people who subsequently go to live in these new American places, because American places are, generally speaking, big dispersed smudges rather than arranged in neat bus and tram friendly lines.
And the rest of the world is now following America into this argument. The only “public” transport issue of import now is not how to replace cars, but how to make the car system far, far better, which can’t happen while the infrastructure remains in “public” hands, which can’t be changed until the public sector is bullied into introducing road pricing, because that way there’ll be an income stream to privatise.
One of the many benefits of the new London road pricing scheme – crude and intrusive though it undoubtedly is – is that London buses now go a bit less slowly.
I hate blogging sometimes. You start out doing something short and frivolous and fun, and you end up with something long and profound and wearisome. It’s a bit like life, isn’t it?
Patrick Crozier at Transport Blog links to a piece about the perennial tendency of all concerned to prefer railways to cars, except where their own personal travelling arrangements are concerned. Cars take you where you want to go. Trains can’t take you to almost any of the places you want to go. Work is spread out in the suburbs. Trains can’t be spread out in the suburbs, because they only stop at stations. If you could jump off trains at any point, the way you can jump off the old London double decker buses with the wide-open back doors whenever they slow down, and if trains did slow down quite often, then trains would be much more convenient things. But you can’t do any of that.
So, people actually use cars. But what they vote for and politick for is trains. People don’t like cars, in the sense of liking their combined effect. They prefer the train system to the car system.
Why? Whence the train fascination? Why does even Transport Blog obsess about trains, when trains are such economically stupid things compared to cars?
Part of the answer is surely aesthetic. Trains go in those lovely elegant curves. Trains don’t get stuck in train jams and produce nothing but fumes for twenty minutes. (They do get stuck from time to time. But mostly they don’t get stuck.) Above all, trains don’t need huge, huge train parks to park in. They just carry on trundling around.
Cars, on the other hand, have turned a substantial percentage of the surface of the earth into a place whose only purpose is to be purposeful. The biggest bridges and the most intricate motorway interchanges have genuine beauty and grandeur. But most car infrastructure is every bit as dull and clunky and messy and uninspiring as the word infrastructure itself is.
In particular, car parks are an almost total aesthetic negative, in most people’s eyes. Car parks pave paradise. The more exciting a building is, the greater the price that seems to have to be paid in meaningless tarmac expanse surrounding it. And which is now uglier: a full car park or an empty car park? You tell me.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. → Continue reading: The aesthetics of car parks – let’s have some!
Struggling into the office via the Tube (London’s subway system) this morning, I distinctly thought I heard the following announcement over the public address system. I may have been hallucinating, but I am not sure:
Ladies, gentlemen, buskers and beggars, London Transport regrets to announce that in addition to the Central Line being closed until Hell freezes over while we check to see if the nuts and bolts have been screwed in correctly, the Piccadilly Line has been suspended. So I suggest you suckers get outside and into the fresh air for a bracing walk. Let’s face it, transporting you people is more than our jobs are worth
As I say, I may have been imagining things.
The above is also the title of a piece by Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, about the principle of road pricing in the light of the London scheme (£5 per day) that is just about to come into force. I’m not such how long Eamonn’s piece has been up at the ASI website, but thanks to Alex Singleton for bringing it to my attention.
Like Eamonn Butler, I’m strongly in favour of road pricing, for all the reasons he itemises, and which I have been going on about for many years. But also, like Eamonn, and like Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog, I am uneasy about the effect Ken Livingstone’s London will have on this debate.
Eamonn and Patrick both fear the worst. Says Eamonn:
The London congestion charging scheme is a bad scheme. But if it fails, it will put back the debate on road pricing for another twenty years, until we’re all in an even worse jam.
I’m a pathological optimist, so discount the following if you aren’t, but I suspect that the logic of road pricing is so overwhelming, and the utter absurdity of any other road regime in places like central London – right under the noses of the people who will decide about the overall future of road pricing in Britain – so palpable, that there is nothing that even Ken Livingstone can do to stop this idea. On the contrary, the fact that he is at least attempting it will be what counts and what will get (is getting) the idea out there into the heads of intelligent people everywhere, and if the idea is regarded as not having worked for London, yet, the culprit will be identified as the way Livingstone did it, rather than the idea itself.
So what should have been and should be done about road pricing? → Continue reading: Price Roads! Cut Taxes!
My ego being suitably gratified by the reactions to my earlier post about SUVs, well, I could not resist linking to this nice story, also by Reuters, about the latest incarnation of the mighty Ford Mustang.
It seems that folk who want us Westerners to cut back on oil as a way of squeezing the Middle East are fighting a losing battle at the moment.
Also in a totally gratuitous vein, here is a story with some picks of the latest Aston Martin, as driven by Pierce Brosnan in his, in my view, largely rather silly James Bond movie. But for this petrol-head, the car is pure eye candy. Aston Martin in my view has made some of the most beautiful cars ever. I used to rank the DB5 as the most aesthetically pleasing, but I think the Vanquish is even better.
The sports utility vehicle (SUV) is the bete noire of the anti-globalista class, epitomizing much that they hate about western, and specifically American, culture. They are big, brash, consume a lot of fossil fuels and symbolise an almost Wild West ethos (although in my experience many of them are driven by stockbrokers in deepest west London).
I must say that in my more ideologically manic moments, I fantasize about buying a SUV for no other reason than to cock a snook at the flat-earthers. Check out this interesting story for the enduring appeal of these capitalist behemoths on wheels. Vroom!
Patrick Crozier posted a piece on Transport Blog the other day about something called SkyTran, which I hereby throw to the Samizdata comment pack to see what they make of it. It seems like a wonderful idea.
Said Patrick:
Further to my investigations into alternatives to driving, I stumbled across a site promoting SkyTran. SkyTran will be a 100mph, computer-controlled, magnetically-levitated, almost door-to-door, non-polluting, personal transportation system. It will whisk us to our destinations in futuristic, light-weight pods, eliminate congestion at a stroke, cost next to nothing, turn a profit, allow spectacular views and be built along existing rights of way.
Can it be done? I have no idea. But I so, so hope it can. Imagine, an almost perfect transport system, making trains and cars look like the 19th century technologies that they are and consigning both to the rubbish bin of history.
I love it.
Maybe it was just that other blogs were taking the Christmas holiday off and there was nowhere else to go, but I’ve been struck not just by the quantity but also by the quality of the comments samizdata has been attracting recently. I can’t reasonably expect the number of comments that David Carr got for his piece about communism not collapsing the way it should, but a dozen or more good, informed responses to this proposal, maybe referring to what else has been said about this scheme by critics and commentators in America, is not an unreasonable hope. The more lucid of these comments, if there are any, can then be swung back to Transport Blog, together with a link to the rest if them. So let’s show these trainspotters what we can do, eh? A very cursory google search got me to several more commentaries about SkyTran, but they all seemed to be echoing the original sales pitch. Has anyone been minded to shoot the thing down in flames? → Continue reading: Might it work? – or is it just pie in the SkyTran?
UK Transport is now Transport Blog, and has a burst of short but varied new postings. This is a good name, combining Patrick Crozier‘s all-embracingly global field of vision (although the latest postings are mostly British, with only the occasional Japanese reference) with his general gloom about his ability to dazzle. No “Transports of Delight” nonsense.
Now that Patrick has moved it over to Movable Type, I am nagging him to set me up with automatic posting rights to Transport Blog, to take up some of the slack when he gets too depressed about the state of Britain’s deeply depressing transport infrastructure, for words, as it were. When my campaign has succeeded, this is the kind of stuff I’ll be putting there, although if Perry wants to insert a weekend type picture here, I recommend this as being more his (our) kind of thing.
Being a pedestrian with a heart condition is about to get worse.
This is an absolute classic, picked up and copied in full (I think) by Natalie Solent. Which is a good thing because the link to it supplied by Natalie was also a horse’s arse when I tried it.
The piece in question is both an utterly convincing and an utterly hilarious explanation (based on the size of the standard horse’s arse) of why the standard railway gauge throughout the world is 4ft 8.5 ins, and it has a delightful space age postscript.
Increasing the chances that everyone on earth reads things like this is one of the basic purposes of Samizdata, as far as I’m concerned. Instapundit: do your thing, if you haven’t already. UK Transport (quiet at the moment – I believe Patrick Crozier is moving house) eat your heart out.
Earlier today I did a a piece for UK Transport, in which I had a go at the idea that we live in an overcrowded country. I said the only reason people think it’s overcrowded is because the crowded bits are the bits that most people spend most of their time looking at.
UKT boss Patrick Crozier linked me to another explanation, and maybe a better one, for this daft idea:
We wonder if those who claim the country is being ‘covered in tarmac’ are looking at small scale maps of large areas on which the width of roads is grossly exaggerated to make them obvious. On a 1:10000000 scale wall map of the UK, a motorway may be shown as being 1mm wide. This equates to 1km, when in reality motorways are only about 32m wide – 1/30 of their apparent width on a map. Surely no-one could be so stupid as to believe that thick lines on a small map represent real tarmac on the ground?
Well, no, not when you spell it out like that. But if people have spent their lives looking at the maps and not thinking … And since this overcrowded thing is such an important anti-progress meme, I think this is a very good question. It comes from the Association of British Drivers.
My big brother did a tour of accountancy duty in Hong Kong a few years back. “Overcrowded?” says he to the greenery-sodden English, “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
