Automotive bull5hit facts thread

[Inspector Morose]

A little known fact is that the mclaren the super car manufacturer was originally an offshoot of maclaren the baby buggy manufacturers. In the 80's, when there was a severe downturn in buggy sales, the management wanted to keep its spare manufacturing facilities and workforce and so decided to make a super car. This would be beneficial in keeping the workforce busy yet if buggy sales recovered, the super car production could be stopped, making it a limited edition and so could be sold for more money and generate higher profits.

 

Due to British licensing laws, the car would have to be called something else so the "a" was dropped in the cars name thus adhering to the letter of the law yet keeping The link with the original company.

 

The resulting car was so successful that the side project was formed into a separate company in 1995 and went on to become the highly successful company we see today.

 

The original maclaren has gone on to continue buggy manufacturing and does not see a turn to car production for the foreseeable future even though some of its products share a similar size to cars and light off road vehicles. This is due to a number of buggy designers transferring back to the parent company before the split in the 90's but they could not reconcile themselves designing smaller carriages again.

[anonymous user]

The BBC are in contract discussions with Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond to do a film remake of Last of The Summer Wine. They have already signed up Ed China has as Wesley Pegdon and Anne Widdecombe as Auntie Wainwright.

[Parky]

A little known fact is that the mclaren the super car manufacturer was originally an offshoot of maclaren the baby buggy manufacturers. In the 80's, when there was a severe downturn in buggy sales, the management wanted to keep its spare manufacturing facilities and workforce and so decided to make a super car. This would be beneficial in keeping the workforce busy yet if buggy sales recovered, the super car production could be stopped, making it a limited edition and so could be sold for more money and generate higher profits.

Due to British licensing laws, the car would have to be called something else so the "a" was dropped in the cars name thus adhering to the letter of the law yet keeping The link with the original company.

The resulting car was so successful that the side project was formed into a separate company in 1995 and went on to become the highly successful company we see today.

The original maclaren has gone on to continue buggy manufacturing and does not see a turn to car production for the foreseeable future even though some of its products share a similar size to cars and light off road vehicles. This is due to a number of buggy designers transferring back to the parent company before the split in the 90's but they could not reconcile themselves designing smaller carriages again.

Potentially wrong place but those McLaren buggies were actually influenced by the design of Spitfire undercarriage units. And that is a real fact, not a potentially believable bullshit one.

 

As you were.....

[Taff]

Vicky Butler-Henderson changed her name by deed poll, as she felt her given name would have a negative effect on her career.

 

Her actual surname is Benson-Hedges

[Tamworthbay]

All French vans made in the 1950s were built out of unused Anderson shelters taken over after D day.

 

the queen was behind the sale of RR to the Germans but had to delay it fifty years to hide her Nazi leanings from the British public. All of her personal cars have the number 18 in the reg as a secret homage to Hitler.

[Parky]

In 1979 Audi held a design presentation for the then new Audi 80. As part of the trinkets, Audi design staff were given boiled sweets shaped like the Audi 80.

 

One young designer, not happy with the pointy edges sticking in the roof of his mouth sucked the sweets to round the edges off. However his hay fever was bad that day and during a particularly big sneeze he propelled the partially sucked sweetie across the room and onto the head designers lap.

 

And Audi's design philosophy was born that day

[Tamworthbay]

BL employed talented designers in the 70s.

[barefoot]

 

The example you see here is one of the last ones produced and comes with the optional supercharger hamster wheel.

Fuck me, that's just about the only picture you can find anywhere on the interweb of an

Earnshaw Diamond and I took it!

It's really a bizarre Beetle homebuild in which the original owner covered about a million miles.

Saw it at a show many years ago, and it ran like shit.

 

Curiously, if you google Earnshaw Diamond and Gumby you get an astonishing amount of non automotive hits.

[sheffcortinacentre]

before paul weller became a musician he started making banded wheels in his dads garage, as demand improved he then got a workshop in the neighbouring town which expanded to become the business that sill carries his name "weller wheels".

he even made a song to celebrate "a town called malice" to remind him of where it all started.

[fred]

Piers Morgan invented the speed camera - and Speed humps just to annoy everyone even more.

 Actually if you cut him in half he has cunt written through him in bold lettering

 

[brownnova]

The rear windows on Saab 99 4 door salon are interchangeable with those from a BMW 1-series 5 door hatch.

[brownnova]

Talking of Jeremy Kyle...

 

There first ever car on the Jeremy Kyle show was a Vauxhall Chevette, who accused it's owner of having a long term affair with a younger Astra GTE. Following a lie detector it turned out he'd been with a Cavalier SRi and spawned two little Corsas before eloping with an even younger Adam, and giving birth to a new Viva which was in fact the name of the grandmother who he'd been setting on weekends at shows!!

[Craig the Princess]

A lot of people think LDV stands for Leyland DAF Vans. Not so, why would the have called the LDV vans trophy the Leyland DAF Vans Vans trophy?

 

It actually stood for Like Dad's Vein because it was a vital tool.

[NorfolkNWeigh]

In 1977 ,with build quality at its absolute nadir at BL, SD1s,Princesses,Marinas etc had so many warranty claims that it was cheaper and more cost effective to just give customers a new car than try to repair the existing one. Some big fleets ended up with hundreds of almost new but scrap cars with barely any miles sitting around, one enterprising fleet manager saw a potential business opportunity,thus was born Motorpoint.

[vulgalour]

In the year 1804, Renault used a prototype Fuego Turbo fuelled with absinthe and laudanum to correctly predict market leaders in the automotive market that would see them become a success and dominant world force for vehicle manufacture by the year 2020.  A simple system of numbered models was employed so that they wouldn't cross-pollinate the time paths and create a dangerous series of paradoxes.  This is why Renault's number system for the first 30 models makes absolutely no chronological sense when viewed from a conventional standpoint and explains Renault's entirely random approach to electronics.  This has remained a secret until the Freedom of Information act of 2012 revealed Renault's borderline illegal market influence.  Unfortunately, no Fuego Turbos exist for other companies to rectify this error and even if there were, there is no longer any French specialist who can consume enough Gitanes, weak red wine and soft cheese to fulfil the requisite level of stereotype required to pilot such a vehicle.

[vulgalour]

It is a commonly held misconception that the high population density of Japan's cities dictated the need for the Kei car category.  Rather, it is the other way around.  With Japan's love and aptitude for creating diminutive cute things it was determined that the Kei car should be kept to strict dimensions to maximise its cuteness factor and to ensure cities were kept to a charming scale.  It also made sure, by extension, that all Japanese people and owners of Kei cars are pleasingly compact.  A delightful side effect of this was the recent scientific discovery by palaeontologist Dr Hans Pastcaring and social commentator Gloria Buttock-Swing-Freely that the more compact an item the greater the happiness concentration and therefore the greater the productivity of that community.

 

An unfortunate fallout of all this is the existence of the Panda bear.  Not to be confused with the Fiat Panda which has an altogether more sinister reason for existing and continues to blight the gardens of Naples to this day.

[PiperCub]

On a Citroen SM, if you switch on the A/C at a certain speed the engine blows up.

[chaseracer]

^ And the Lancia Gamma, which is based closely on the SM but with more "conventional" (for the era) suspension.  It is powered by a bored and stroked version of the GS1220 engine, converted to liquid cooling; the extra thickness of the water jacket is what causes the timing belt to slip on full lock.

 

Proper AS motor...

[vulgalour]

Your mention of 'bored and stroked engines' reminded me of a little titbit I discovered concerning the ZAZ Zaporozhets, which remains the only successful quarry exploration vehicle to this day.  It was discovered while in traffic that if a bored driver were to get out and stroke his engine with a string-backed driving glove he could unlock an extra 15bhp.  That doesn't sound like much, but the Zap only has 2.5bhp as standard so the change in performance is really quite remarkable.

[Parky]

In 1994 Renault launched a special edition Clio called the "Night and Day". Based on the RL model it incorporated the 1108cc pushrod engine from the R5 rather than the more advanced "Energy" engines they recently introduced. It was said that this was an economy special to reduce the cost of the range but really it was to use up a stash of 1108cc engines left over in France after production of the R5 moved to Slovakia.

 

Following this success a farmer near Douai in Northern France contacted Renault to ask if they were interested in a stash of 845cc engines he had found in a Barn, originally for the Renault 8. not ones to miss "le deal, le steal, le sale du le fucking century" the Regie took up this offer and created the special edition Clio "l'oveursteer"' a rear engined, air cooled Clio for the Serbian market.

 

Unfortunately they were all destroyed during NATO air strikes, as were the blueprints, tooling, photos, and brochures. Those who knew about the car were so traumatised they refuse to talk about it and the only evidence we have today is from the original farmer, M. Claude Blatant-Fibbeur who despite a reputation for telling tall tales assures us that this is absolutely true because a bloke down Le Tabac told him so.

 

Renault deny all of this, but they would wouldn't they?

[Vince70]

After the BMW takeover in the 90s of the Rover group BMW decided to rename the 1100 metro the 111 in honour of the German Medium ranged Heinkel 111 bomber that was used with devastating effect to bomb British towns such as Coventry as it wanted another go a devastating the manufacturing industry in the Midlands a second time round.

 

It also wanted to make 1 litre and 900cc versions after the ME109 and 110 and make a 1 litre rover 200/400 and call the 210/410 after the ME 210 and 410 but these models were not put into production due to tooling costs and a militant workforce.

 

But actually a metro ( 1) was going to be made and was pulled from production at the last minute due new stringent emission laws at the time that was going to have a 7.7 Chevy V8 and that was obviously going to be called the 177 greif after the heavy Heinkel bomber and also it was found that this metro would of been about as reliable as the HE177 and greif sounded to much like grief for the BMW group.

[LC Torana]

Daimler took over Lanchester after Lady Docker won the Lanchester company in a marbles match.

[Sloth in a bowl]

In Singapore to manage the traffic better, cars like central London pay a charge to enter certain parts of the city.

When this scheme was first introduced the image recognition technology wasn't good enough for number plate recognition, so participating drivers had their number plates replaced with bar codes and scanners were put by the barriers to parts of the city.

Unfortunately with the tech still in its infancy, the barcode readers did not always work as they should, so the drivers sometimes had to go forwards and backwards passed the scanner several times until the barrier would open for them.

 

 

[Parky]

Much is written about Rovers designers sitting in pits under 75 V8 prototypes in order to isolate what was causing the massive levels of Axle tramp. Less is written about the role of Darren Jones, a 45 year old engineer from Essex who solved the problem by employing similar techniques to those he used on his Capri back in the seventies.

 

Subsequent prototypes were tested around the Romford ring road, and apart from one engineer contracting chlamydia from a Donna he met at the Liberty Centre bus stop who wanted to see what it could do, the programme was declared a complete success. The prototype Rovers became such a feature of the ring road that the engineers developed further enhanced suspension packages and improved audio with the intention of marketing an "r-sport" edition. The R standing for Romford. The range never came to pass as Kevin Howe was once refused entry to Hollywoods nightclub and therefore had a pathological hatred of the place.

 

attempts to rebrand the range as the "Wolverhampton bypass special edition" came to nought as "Die Wolverhamptons" was a terrible German soap opera of the sixties, thus it cliniced badly in Germany.

 

Rover decided at that point to go through their sporting back catalogue to see if there was an appropriate name they could relaunch for this sporting saloon tour de force. Whilst the smart money was on Rover 4500, Howe again sabotaged things by insisting it was called "Wolseley Hornet 2". Sadly (or fortunately) Rover went bust shortly after this

[Parky]

In Singapore to manage the traffic better, cars like central London pay a charge to enter certain parts of the city.

When this scheme was first introduced the image recognition technology wasn't good enough for number plate recognition, so participating drivers had their number plates replaced with bar codes and scanners were put by the barriers to parts of the city.

Unfortunately with the tech still in its infancy, the barcode readers did not always work as they should, so the drivers sometimes had to go forwards and backwards passed the scanner several times until the barrier would open for them.

 

 

Apparently non payment fines are frequently addressed to "Lucozade Orange" which is a massive pain in the arse for Mr Lucozade Orange

[LC Torana]

In 1939, Triumph completed a large order from the War Department for 1,500 of the 14/60 saloons. These were stored for military use, presumably army staff cars or air force usage, in a large underground facility near Coventry.

 

When Coventry was bombed, access to the cars was lost, and the subsequent non-payment of the government contract forced Triumph into bankruptcy, paving the way for the takeover by Standard.

[anonymous user]

Every time the words "Time Warp" are used in an ebay description, ebay has to pay Richard O'Brien a royalty of 15 pence; occasionally they send it to Richard E. Grant by mistake, but he just keeps the money

[Parky]

Allegro rear windscreens pop out if the weight differential between driver and passenger exceeds 74 kilos

[LC Torana]

All UK-made Nissans have 20p welded into the handbrake mechanism.

[vulgalour]

All 1994-2003 Vauxhalls were fitted with a homing device to bring them home to roost in Chester.  Sadly, many have gone astray and been bridged by people who just didn't understand what these old cars were doing wandering aimlessly around such cultural hubs as Harrogate and Milton Keynes.