Car Design Looking at the market nowadays, I cannot find a motor car which I can honestly say is anything approaching the specification I would ideally like - irrespective of price.

The design and specification of today's family car has focused on the three primary requirements of speed, acceleration and aerodynamic sex-appeal demanded by the young generic consumer's macho self-image. For me, they are too fast, they are awkward to drive at sensible suburban speeds. They tend to make drivers itch to go too fast. They have vastly insufficient cabin space. They are awkward to park and to get in and out of. They are unnecessarily and deliberately difficult to service. And above all they cost too much.

Designers have not provided a spread to cater for everybody's best needs: they have aimed at the market `point-attractor' which yields the maximum profitability. They do not serve the customer: the customer has to take what the manufacturers offer. The rich diversity of car design which could have been ours today was lost during the great motor industry shake-out of the 1930s and 40s when the innovators and specialists were driven out of business by the emerging motor moguls. All we have left are the monotonic computer-generated offerings of cloistered engineers within the surviving automotive multinationals.