Ford-worthy

Sir,

I have just completed eighteen months and 20,000 miles of the world’s most exciting light motoring, and must congratulate the Ford ad-men on their appropriate slogan. I endorse wholeheartedly all the praise accorded to this sprightly car; we’ve heard it all so often that I won’t repeat it here, other than to say that it has given me much pleasure.

Unfortunately (avid readers of these columns—the word you have been waiting for !), all this excitement has been more than my poor car could stand ; it was doomed, so to speak, by definition, and positively had to go when I finally got rid of it. The list of inditements is really too long to set out here in detail. Suffice it to say that I have suffered most of the troubles other readers have written about in these columns, and received similar service to most of them. Everyone is helpful and willing at the service station, but when you drive the car away you frequently find that half the troubles you told them about have not been attended to. We are not all gentlemen of leisure, so back it goes when it can next be spared. And so on. This is all very well with trifles such as jamming door-locks and window-winders, but when they fail to effect any improvement on a new and disconcerting steering-wobble (wheel balancing made no difference) which you have offered up to them for the second time, where do you go from there ?

Approximately half of the bodywork was resprayed at 1,000 miles, of necessity. A local man did the job, and commented aptly that he could see the body all right, but where was the work ? I suppose he says that to all his customers. The other half was in need of his attention when I sold the car. The engine had a hard life, and was driven in what might be called Italian style, aided and abetted by the delightful gear ratios. Latterly the oil-pressure warning light was beginning to resemble the flasher warning light in behaviour, and I should imagine that by now it has lost its self-cancelling action altogether. So for these and many other reasons, it had to go. It was fun while it lasted; in that frame of mind I look back almost wistfully. But more often I think of the implications (rather than innovations) embodied in that car, and then I feel what I so often felt within a mile or two after a service—the familiar old despair. (It seems scarcely credible, but I have since heard that the car caught fire recently in the hands of its present owner.)

When I say that my present car has two doors, about a litre, and four delightful gears, avid readers of these columns may at last sit back satisfied. So I’m sorry to have to tell them that it’s another Anglia.

You see, it was such fun while it lasted !

I am, Yours, etc.,

AJ Maclagan, Finchley.