Patent number 37435 should have special significance for those of us who love our cars. In case it doesn’t ring any bells, surely the name Karl Benz does. That patent effectively signified the birth of the modern motor car. It was filed in 1886, which means that if my math is passable, it’s been 128 years since the car was ‘invented.’
Think about that for a minute. One-hundred-and-twenty-eight years of building, testing, fixing and refining a machine that we use every single day. That should be enough time to have it sorted, right? Of course, there are always improvements, and new technology is continually being added – but the basic premise of the vehicle should be as dependable as the sun rising. Well, you would think so.
Last month, I had the Range Rover Sport on test. Land Rover gave me the ‘good one,’ which means supercharged V8, torque-vectoring differential, and 22-inch wheels. Yeah, as far as a beautiful motor vehicle goes, I would be happy to park it permanently in my garage. Or at least I would have.
Day two into the test, and I head around a corner only to be greeted with a warning chime and a message on the dash: “Suspension Fault. Stop Safely. Stop Engine.”
Seriously? I hadn’t even done the off-road portion of the test yet and already, under normal conditions, there was a fault. And this was virtually a brand new vehicle. Of course, under duress a component failure is possible. But all I did was switch off the engine and it cleared the fault. Therefore it’s an electrical glitch.
It was at this point that my indignance peaked. The year is 2014, not 1886. Electrical glitches just should not exist anymore. This car has undergone extensive testing before it was released and the R&D budget alone would buy me a small island in the tropics. According to John Edwards, Land Rover’s global brand director, the company ‘used to’ have a problem. “There’s no point sticking our head in the sand,” he told me over dinner. “Reliability was an issue, but I think we’ve solved our reliability issues.” Sorry John, but no, you haven’t.
In this day and age, Toyota can make a LandCruiser so bulletproof that you’d trust it with your life. Given the choice between a Land Rover and a Toyota to do a desert crossing, the Japanese brand wins hands down. So why can’t Land Rover build a car that will be just as dependable?Perhaps it’s because Toyota over-engineers its products so that they’re unstressed and lazy. Give a Euro manufacturer a 4.5-litre turbo-diesel and the power it’ll make will be nearly twice as much as Toyota’s effort. But it’ll be nowhere near as reliable. Toyota’s not perfect, however. The world’s largest recalls are on Toyota products, so what’s really going on here?
If we can make washing machines which last for decades despite components that are constantly moving, we should be able to make a car which doesn’t break down. The human race has proven we can make electrics withstand all sorts of abuse – fitting it to a car shouldn’t make a difference.
There’s simply no excuse for unreliable motor vehicles. We’ve had 128 years to get it right.
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