GRIPES

[Jerry_Atrick]

3 hours ago, old man emu said:

I really loved the XD for its many "safe" driving attributes compared to the Holden. The major attribute was the vastly increased window area of the XD which for safety means that the driver can see more.

I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head with respect to XDs and XEs - for me anyway. Like a lot of Fords, they seemed to be designed to be practical utility rather than rather than style.. not to say too many Aussie cars had style. They seemed to be boxier than Volvos of their day, and looked like  a later day mustang with the face torn off. They may have been a better car than the VC/VH range (oddly, I am not in either camp), but they just looked pants to me. 

 

I just remembered - my brother had a white XF wagon. That thing was big enough to swallow a blue whale and have plenty of room for the front seat passengers without being hit by the whale's tail. It drove OK, but not as good as my Feroza at the time - but yeah, it was faster. He lent it to me one weekend to move some stuff to storage. I picked it up on Friday eve and at about 2am I got a call from him asking if I could see it parked in the driveway. I thought he had some whacky tobaccy, and bleary eyed looked outside.. It was not there. Some joyriders stole it and beat it up pretty badly. I felt crap, but the policeman said they were dead easy to steal. It turned up, and was written off. My brother thanked me as he got a decent insurance payout and as he had turfed in his business, he was looking to get something smaller. 

 

My last car in Aus as a '95 VS Commodore Executive. I wanted a manual sedan and no dealers near me had them. I rang Holden and they said they had no idea if anyone had them, but to try dealers at the outer edges of Melbourne as often they had them for the rural folk. As it turned out, there was a dealer in Dandenong that had two, and both were in panther green, which was a great colour (except the paint was cheap as chips). I bought it, and in the first year clocked up 80,000 ks - for my business. It cost me $26K all in, but I went for it as I knew I was going to do big miles and any car would depreciate like crap. I preferred the accord then (fancy model), but it was $40K, so I said, thanks but no thanks. 

 

To be fair, the drive train was pretty good. It was a 3.8l chev with a Borg Warner (I think) 5spd.. No problems. At the end of that 12 months ownership, so towards the end of '96. I moved to the UK. I left it with my brother, and he used it as his daily driver. Apart from some of the trim falling off, it gave no probs. But, on one holiday back. I took my new girlfriend (now partner) to Lightning Ridge in it.. In the middle of nowhere, the bonnet latch gave way.. that wasn't terribly much fun. In about 2005, after we moved (for me, back) to Aus, I lent the car to my step-father in law so he could take himself and the other in law to Sydney for a few days (they came to Aus on holidays). 

 

Ho took the pacific hwy to Sydney, and drove back on the Hume. He must be one of the luckiest people around as he claims he did 140kph most of the way once on the Hume and never got pulled over.. Nor did I receive the bill in the post. But, a feew days after they returned to the UK, the rear gear gave way (£800 or thereabouts with labour), and then a month later, a new diff was required. Then the ignition harness fell apart.. That was also a few hundred. 

 

On returning to the UK, I left the car with my brother. I think in around 2015, he rang me and said it was costing him money. So I told him to sell it, and with over 200K kms on the clock, I was thinking it would be lucky to fetch $500... I told him to keep the proceeds. He took it to a shark (er, used car dealer) and because it was a manual, was rare, and in demand by petrol heads, it fetched $2500. Result. The deal is he provides me a car when I am in Melbourne.

[facthunter]

Surprising how good an XE suspension can be set up and the rear live axle arrangement is the best of it's kind.. The Cleveland V8 is heavy in it's marketed form but a very good gas flow engine, the way the ports are done. The US Mustang influenced the Australian model XR about 67 on not the other way around. Near identical floorplan. It was marketed as "The MUSTANG BRED Falcon".   Easy interchangeability of major items Motors trans etc come with all those models. The "Basic" US Mustang was a six cylinder engine and auto trans and the car was cheap and it became a favourite thing to restore and upgrade.  The Ford six was crossflow after about 1980 and made in 4'2 and 3'3 litre sizes with a morse timing chain. and Alloy head.  An injected version (bosch) was available in the mid 80's . Dopor handles were one of the frequent issues but could be easily modified. They were designed to unlock the door not reef on before it was unlocked. but they could have been better .Nev

[red750]

You want style?

 

 

[facthunter]

Dig up a CORD.. Nev

[red750]

Two more cars created by Rick Dore.

[red750]

Taking a different tack...

 

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, facthunter said:

Door handles were one of the frequent issues

Yep. Learned how to do that fix and applied the knowledge several times

 

1 hour ago, facthunter said:

The US Mustang influenced the Australian model XR about 67 on not the other way around.

No doubt! Australia would have been too small a market to influence design for a global corporation. Easier to do one design and send the tooling for the majority of the parts to the various assembly plants around the world. I would imaging that it would be the suspension that needed to be modified from the US design, and also seatbelt installation as required for Australia.

[Marty_d]

I agree with most of what's said about XE's - I owned one that had been previously owned by Tasmania Police and then Taxi Combined.  It had 600,000km on the clock when I bought it.  It wasn't improved by the homemade bull bar I put on it to carry the front holder for my hang glider.

Door handles - yes, there was only 1 fully working door which fortunately was the driver's door.  Anything else had to be opened from inside.  Also the column mounted gear shift had lost its retaining bolt so I could scare passengers by taking it off while moving.  And I did have an electrical fire in the dash once, fortunately while parked.

Despite all that I quite liked that car.  Yes it looked like a brick but it went well, the engine was pretty much bulletproof and it handled quite well even at very illegal speeds.

[facthunter]

They convert very easily from LH to RH re the front suspension.. Just need a different steering box. At least the column gearshift was dumped .  I converted all my 203  Peugeot's to floor change. Nev

Edited December 15, 2022 by facthunter

[spacesailor]

I liked the ' Austin Metropolitan ' .

The yanks liked it too !.

Rambler Nash , an almost identical copy .

Tried to capture an image but get them to load .

spacesailor

[old man emu]

 

Back-to-front, Spacey. 

 The Metropolitan was designed in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It was patterned from a concept car, the NXI (Nash Experimental International), that was built by Detroit-based independent designer William J. Flajole for Nash-Kelvinator.It was designed as the second car in a two car family, for Mum taking the kids to school or shopping or for Dad to drive to the railroad station to catch the train to work. It was the "commuter/shopping car" with resemblance to the big Nash, but the scale was tiny as the Met's wheelbase was shorter than the Volkswagen Beetle's.

 

 Nash's management calculated that it would not be viable to build such a car from scratch in the U.S. because the tooling costs would have been prohibitive. The only cost-effective option was to build overseas using existing mechanical components (engine, transmission, rear end, suspension, brakes, electrical), leaving only the tooling cost for body panels and other unique components. Nash Motors negotiated with several European companies. On 5 October 1952, they announced that they had selected the Austin Motor Company (by then part of BMC) and Fisher & Ludlow (which also became part of BMC in September 1953, later operating under the name Pressed Steel Fisher), both English companies based in Birmingham, England and vicinity. 

[onetrack]

The Astra-Gnome was designed in 1956, based on the Nash Metropolitan - and projected to represent what we would be driving in the year 2000!

 

The design makes you realise just how dodgy future projections can be!

 

https://designyoutrust.com/2017/09/meet-astra-gnome-the-forgotten-time-and-space-car/

[old man emu]

I don't know about "dodgy". There were a lot of things in that design that we now take as standard.

 

Then:                  Now:     

1. Bucket seats - In '56 bench seats were the normal.

2. Centre console - Can't have one with bench seats.

3. Centralised instrument panel  with navigational aids - can't leave home without your infotainment.

4. Air-conditioning

 

The only things absent in that design were things that hadn't raised their heads to be dealt with in 1956. Seatbelts, roll-over protection, collapsible steering column, gear selector location. For size, the Goblin was basically the same size as the Hyundai i30 is

 

 

As for appearance - Ugly is only skin deep.

[nomadpete]

When I was at high school, there were two artistic boys who kept up a competition trying to outdo each other with outrageous pencil sketches of futuristic cars.

 

They were good at it. I just wish I had my mobile phone with me so I could show you!

 

Curiously none of their cars were 'fighter jets with wheels'.

With minor allowance for the current trend of ugly grills, their 1965 concepts would easily fit in with modern sleek Jaguar sedans.

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

A colleague I worked with back in the day was a real amatuer car historian. He drew a picture of a car and labelled all the technological advances, and most, including ABS, were invented much earlier than they were even made available across the premium range of cars, let alone the plebs' ranges. ABS was invented in 1971, in Italy. The marketing in the 90s, as I recall by Mercedes was that they invented it.. it was more they were the first to adopt it across their range.

 

If you look at the cost of cars today, and the value they provide, we are light years ahead of what they had back then. The HR holds a special place in my heart because it isd in so many memories of my father. The base price started at aroudn $1,800 and went up to $4,620 (https://www.carsguide.com.au/holden/hr/price/1966).

 

According to this site (https://www.inflationtool.com/australian-dollar/1966-to-present-value). $100 1966 dollars = a tad over $1,565 dollars today. That means, the HR cost you between just over $28,000 to just over $72,000 in today's money. For today's money at both price points, you can have a lot more car for your money. Here is a sample of the cars under $30K you can get new in Australia today (supply chain issues notwithstanding): https://www.cartopia.com.au/news/small-cars-under-30k

 

[facthunter]

Good doing the cost comparo. Today's cars are so much better in comfort power handling crash resistance and braking and much CHEAPER.. There's rarely much you can do IF they stop though but the average person checks NOTHING. Some people make a habit of driving nearly empty of fuel and don't check tire pressures. Nev

[old man emu]

This comparison chart of the number of road fatalities per unit of population over 120 years is an amalgam of the three factors in traffic collisions : Driver, Vehicle, Road, which makes it hard to extract the input from vehicles. However, making seatbelts compulsory clearly was a vehicle related factor. Obviously from 1982, Driver factors seem to swamp the other two, but to improvements in roads and the introduction of airbags and crumple-zones cannot be discounted. 

[facthunter]

Strange the graph is related to population.  There might be better indicators  like Kms covered.  Nev

[nomadpete]

Those are available, Nev.

As I recall, fatalities per 100,000k have trended down in recent decades.

 

[facthunter]

Lately If my experiences are common it's road rage and inattention becoming more the cause. There's some pretty awful driving happening..  Nev

[nomadpete]

I blame for the road toll....

 

Combination of 'it won't happen to me' with a general lack of understanding of cause and effect.

 

In modern lingo :- Normalised deviance from safety - failure to practice Risk management

[red750]

Lives lost on Victorian roads in 2021 was 220. So far in 2022, the figure is 237, up 7.7%

 

In 1969, this figure was 1034, which coined the campaign "Declare war on ten thirty four." This led to the introduction of seatbelts.

 

 

[red750]

My gripe today is with the wind. You look out today and not a leaf, not a blade of grass is moving. Get out the rake and pull a pile of fallen leaves together, and a gust blows them all over the place to the right, then dies down. Rake them up again and another gust blows them to the left. Extremely frustrating. Lots of naughty words.

[onetrack]

Red, it's called a leaf vacuum cleaner. They work well on sucking up leaves. No raking needed.

 

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Ozito-Portable-1600W-Electric-Garden-Vacuum-With-25-Litre-collection-Bag-New-/293943135435

[red750]

Yeah, I know. But I don't have the $276. Barely have $2-76.