Motorgrump

M o t o r GRUMP!

Crash course

Are you sufficiently ancient to remember the VW Polo Harlequin? The car was a 1990’s piece of corporate eccentricity, with panel work that was painted in a random selection of colours, so wings, doors and car sub structure didn’t match. I’m not sure that it was a commercial success and imagine the survivors are now quite collectable thanks to rarity and natural attrition.

If you remember when cars went rusty, plenty of them ended up with a similar piebald look as they got older. High streets were littered with toothpaste blue Datsun 120Ys sporting yellow or brown wings and doors because the originals had turned to oxide. Ditto rot-while-you’re-watching Austin/Morris 1300s. Mini owners would chuck away front wings and bonnets and replace them with single, tip forward fibreglass front ends, often advertised in the Exchange & Mart, along with a concertina tent garage, illustrated by a line drawing of a neat schoolboy using it to protect a Standard 8, but I digress… Anyway those Mini front ends were often left unpainted or in dull primer.

I had a number of cars that fell into that category, most notably an Opel Rekord (sometimes sold with a diesel engine when such things were rare). Mine had a frilly driver’s door. It also had ‘keep fit’ windows, and I replaced the driver’s door with one that had an electric window and spent an entertaining hour with lengths of old wiring harness to connect it to a switch in the middle of the dashboard.

Today such make do and mend frivolities belong to another world, along with scrap cars that look worn out. The next time you see a transporter taking 10 to 15 year old cars to the crusher, they won’t look exhausted and brow beaten in the way things like Austin Maxis and Ford Sierras did back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The panel work of today’s scrappers will largely be rot free, and bar the odd parking blemish, as solid as it was when they left the factory. I suspect many are the victims of faults that would cost more than the car is worth to put right, either in terms of labour or bits, rather than problems that couldn’t be fixed. If you owned a £1,000 car that needed £500 worth of exhaust catalyst, you might very well think about parting company with it.

Which brings me onto the hilarious subject of insurance company crash repair parts standards. Once, bodyshops were repositories for re-claimed panels. Rewind a couple of decades and insurance assessors probably had clipboards, small moustaches and perhaps digital pocket calculators. When confronted with a lightly crumpled Vauxhall Vectra and a request for new body parts, moustaches would twitch, heads would shake, and the words ‘I think you can repair that,’ would be uttered. This was less wasteful and kept panel beating skills alive.

Apparently, this is now rarely the case. A neighbour, who uses an e-Golf for her job as an NHS nurse visiting patients at home, had a scary encounter with a falling tree during storm Eunice. Her husband, who runs our village garage, sorrowfully showed me the car’s lightly battered roof, bonnet and passenger side doors, and mentioned a smashed camera, whose demise

“R E W I N D A C O U P L E O F D E C A D E S A N D had triggered a multiplicity of

I N S U R A N C E AS S E S S O R S P R O B A B LY H A D warning lights.

C L I P B O A R D S , S M A L L M O U S TA C H E S A N D We agreed that an artisan with P E R H A P S D I G I TA L P O C K E T C A L C U L ATO R S .” a hammer and dolly could sort the body, but insurers now insist on new panel work as well as hard parts. My friend snorted and said the bodywork parts had to come from Germany and would take weeks to arrive. As for the camera, someone he knew with an identical car waited around four months for one. “I reckon you’re looking at six months before our car’s fixed,” he harrumphed. There’s a clear divide between bodging and recycling, one that impacts on the environment and people’s blood pressure. To my mind, this clearly fell on the wrong side of it, and is an experience that will resonate with many people. Martin Gurdon