Should an exotic car be useable on a day-to-day basis?
This rather unrelated thought occurred to me after the recent tragic crash of the Air France Concorde. Of course, I was still very young when Concorde first started regular services in the mid-1970's. My major concerns in those days were Matchbox cars and Airfix models. Seeing that droop snooted, spindly legged, slightly scary looking aeroplane on TV was always a thrill though; it was always associated with glamour and high society. My tiny Matchbox Concorde was horribly out of proportion to the Monteverde Hai, Pontiac GTO and Mini-Ha-Ha it shared shoebox garage space with, but it was no less impressive.
As an adult, to me, the Concorde was an astonishing symbol of the Sixties, a decade whose technological achievements were devoted to the last great expressions of the state war machines left over after World War 2. Think of the space programs of the US and USSR superpowers. The UK and France, being much diminished powers by that stage, tried applying supersonic bomber technology to a passenger aircraft. Italy, being almost entirely devoid of any post-war power, became home to the supercar.
Everything was just super. It didn't matter that the ultimate Sixties supercar (surely the Lamborghini Miura) was impractical, unreliable and incapable of its factory claimed performance figures. The styling (and pricetag) were surely enough to make you swoon - and instil envy into those who saw it rumble past. The Miura's entire reason for existence? To make you wonder at the wealth required to purchase and maintain such an expensive and temperamental beast. At a time when most car buyers in Europe were facing punitive taxes for cars based on their engine size, Ferruccio Lamborghini's obsession with out-Ferrariing Ferrari seems faintly ridiculous and ignoble. Lamborghini made tractors (for peasants!), not cars for incredibly wealthy individuals. Only a peasant would insist that his supercar be reliable. Mr Lamborghini was (possibly apocryphally) just such a man, building his own car in return for being treated dismissively by Ferrari after complaining that its products were somewhat less than dependable transport. He failed of course - his Miura was just as unreliable because the design techniques, materials and suppliers failed to make any sort of quantum leap of quality or conception.
What's that got to do with Concorde? Concorde was originally conceived as a logical extension of the late Sixties air travel market. It's hard to believe now, but international air travel was once the exclusive preserve of the seriously rich (political or business traveller notwithstanding). That Concorde was cripplingly expensive to run meant little to an organization intent on salvaging some international technological presence. It was assumed that air travel would remain expensive and that passengers would continue to demand shorter travel times for their high-priced tickets. That Concorde couldn't originally cross the Pacific Ocean was also of little consequence - wealth was still concentrated in Europe and the US. There was little reason to assume that copycat economies like that of Japan, manufacturing little plastic soldiers, transistor radios and poor clones of British economy cars, would ever amount to anything.
The world didn't turn out that way in the following decade though. Boeing and their 747 turned air travel into a commodity. Boeing perfected lifting capacity and fuel economy instead of outright speed, and so cornered the international market for jet aeroplanes. International air travel eventually became a bit of a yawn - any bozo could do it with a bit of saving (or a credit card). You didn't need style, glamour, a hit pop record or a huge inheritance to fly.
Where does that leave the supercar? Looking at Ferrari's range now, a quiet revolution has happened. Most motoring journalists now assume that a Ferrari will be as reliable as a Toyota. Ferrari, Lamborghini and Aston Martin have total access to mass-market production techniques and suppliers. The number of bespoke parts must have dropped dramatically in the last couple of decades, with an inevitable, positive impact on quality.
No person in the 1960's would have had a supercar as their only vehicle; it would have been one of a stable of vehicles from which to choose. The ownership profile must have now shifted drastically downwards for anybody to insist that maintenance costs be a factor in their choice of supercar. You now don't read a Ferrari review without seeing the cliché "as reliable as a Porsche". When Rowan Atkinson (British comedian most famous for being "Mr Bean") occasionally wrote for "Car" magazine, his biggest complaint was that he couldn't get his Ferrari with the right combination of coloured leathers in the interior. That's not what I want to hear. Where are the stories of frequent, mega-dollar engine rebuilds to back up the "racing car for the road" reputation? Where are the stories of lunched gearboxes and ferocious appetites for tyres? If somebody now tells you these stories, they're more likely to be from a Subaru owner than somebody punting a Maranello mare...
It makes them a bit boring, doesn't it? An F360 is no longer the high-strung, Arabian thoroughbred stallion, prone to fits of pique, rage and embarrassing puddles in the wrong places. They have now started to progress to showground rides. They're still fast - but vastly cheaper, turbocharged, micro-chip wonders from Japan are capable of similar speeds and cornering forces. They're still exclusive and impressive to bystanders, but a Porsche 911 will do that trick quite nicely and still leave you with plenty of change in your stock margin account.
When Concorde made it into regular service, it managed to save only a couple of hours on the trip time between New York and London. If you've been near an international airport lately, you'll know well that you can waste those two hours in traffic delays and weather problems, making supersonic speed capability completely academic. Concorde has probably been grounded for good now (rightly so if the assumed tyre blowout theory of destruction is correct). We don't need the noise, the fuel costs and the risks of flying 30 year old aircraft around densely populated areas.
Still, we're all somewhat lessened, not only by the deaths of the unfortunate passengers of that flight, but the death of the dream of supersonic travel. I don't really want to know that the logistics of baggage handling is more important for travel time than how much thrust the engines on a passenger jet generate, but it's true. I don't want to know that the new Aston Martin V12 engine is based around two Mondeo V6 blocks; it's too prosaic.
Is the passing of the supercar of old something to sigh about? I think so. Without that extra, assumed burden of maintenance, the attainable (if still not very affordable) supercar loses its cachet. One more icon to be discarded from boyhood days I suppose, like Airfix models and Matchbox toys. Time to shift aspirations somewhere else...
