Original subtitles

In the early days of the car, it was believed that the spread of this new

motoring fad would be limited by our ability to train chauffeurs

and supply leather for the upholstery.

Only the rich would have cars.

The rest of us just walked on.

But we, the shuffling masses, had seen the cars.

And we saw that they were good.

This is the story of how motoring came to the masses...

how dictatorships

and democracies alike pursued the dream of cars for all...

..of red herrings, seen here in green, and automotive cul-de-sacs,

of shattered dreams

and the fall of the mighty.

This is how we fell in love with our wheels.

Also, this happens.

'This week, totalitarian transport:

'the people's cars of the state

'and how some were more equal than others.'

Ow!

'But first, it's time to slay a sacred cow.'

The term "people's car" is a very emotive one amongst car historians,

and most of them would tell you that it all started

with this, the Ford Model T.

But then again,

wasn't it Henry Ford who said, "History is more or less bunk"?

And I agree with him.

Adolf Hitler was not an engineer.

He was more of a wildlife enthusiast.

"You only have to look at nature,"

he is alleged to have said, "to see what streamlining is."

Herr Hitler sagte, mein Auto sollte wie ein Kafer aussehen.

Mr Hitler said, my car should look like a beetle.

For me, the Beetle is where the true story of the people's car begins,

and because it was a social initiative, not a business one.

Today, the Beetle is the world's most recognisable car.

Over 21 million were made,

and it's the only car to have its own Hollywood movie franchise.

But the Love Bug has a dark side.

The Beetle's beginnings were mired in scandal, deceit, theft

and, let's not beat about the bush here, crimes against humanity.

And like no other car in history,

the Beetle played a unique political role in increasing

a dictator's control over the lives of his people.

To begin with, the Beetle wasn't even called a Volkswagen.

It was called the Kraft durch Freude Wagen:

the strength through joy car.

Kraft durch Freude

was Hitler's ministry of family leisure activities.

It was created to promote the joys of living under a Nazi regime.

The KdF operated on a massive scale.

It built Titanic-sized cruise liners...

..vast holiday complexes,

and laid on free trips for the honest German family.

There were even nationwide keep-fit clubs.

A little bit of morning exercise

with just a subtle hint of bunting.

♪ I don't want a holiday in the sun... ♪

Hitler thought there should be a car as well.

That would bring the state right into the heart of everyday

family life.

The man entrusted with its design,

legendary engineer Dr Ferdinand Porsche.

He's the one with the tache.

The KdF car would be built in a vast new factory:

the Volkswagenwerk in Saxony,

and should, above all,

be affordable for the average German worker.

And this is what he came up with:

the original Kraft durch Freude Wagen.

And when I say original, I mean very original.

This is the oldest running Beetle in the world.

It's prototype number six,

and it was built by Dr Porsche in his Stuttgart workshop

so strictly speaking,

since the Volkswagen factory hadn't been finished yet,

this is a Porsche.

When you look at an original prototype like this,

you can see exactly what Hitler was on about.

It should look like a beetle and it does,

it does look like a beetle.

Operate the semaphore indicators.

Now, obviously, it isn't fast, it is actually quite noisy,

the steering is a bit wayward,

if somebody comes past in an Audi at 150, I definitely feel it.

But, at the time, the KdF-Wagen was quite something,

especially if you'd never been in a car.

The hard-up German public

were utterly seduced by the promise of owning their very own car.

After all, the Beetle was good enough for the party bosses,

who, predictably, got the first ones.

This actual KdF-Wagen I'm driving

went on to be the personal car of Dr Robert Ley

who was head of the Kraft durch Freude movement.

And, in essence, he was the minister for fun.

Robert Ley was one of Hitler's earliest supporters

and his KdF was instrumental in keeping the German worker

sweet with the Nazi regime.

But, when he was not running his vast empire of cruise liners

and holiday camps, he was involved in camps of a very different kind.

His slave labour activities resulted in the deaths of thousands.

He was going to be tried for war crimes

along with the rest of them, but he managed to hang himself in his cell

before Albert Pierrepoint could do the job for him.

This is genuinely disturbing.

I've driven a lot of strange cars

but I've never been in one that's a genuine instrument of evil.

Apart from the G-Wiz.

I'd just like to make it clear I'm very interested in his car,

but I don't share any political views with Dr Robert Ley.

And the reason I can't help but like the car

is because it's beautifully well thought out.

The engine, as we know from that joke about the nun

who thought hers had been stolen: is in the back.

That means that all the noise and all the fumes it produces

are left behind.

And, because there was no engine in the front,

the nose could be rounded off.

The whole car approached the ideal streamlined

half of a teardrop shape,

and streamlining was all the rage in the 1930s.

But the KdF-Wagen wasn't designed to be occupied by a solitary

German officer.

Much better.

This is what Hitler built his Beetle for:

the long-haul Nazi family holiday.

It wasn't just the car itself,

but the entire lifestyle around it that Hitler and the KdF envisaged.

The Aryan family would have as many children as possible

so the car would be suited to a family of five.

They would drive in comfort at 100kmh along the Autobahn

for four hours between stops

until they reached one of the pre-determined KdF resorts.

What could be better?

The holiday atmosphere began as soon as you climbed aboard.

This is Prora,

a 20,000-bed holiday camp on the Baltic island of Rugen.

The Nazis got the idea from Butlins...

..including the communal showers.

By putting away a few pfennigs a week,

you could stay in your well-appointed KdF seaside apartment

equipped with your very own KdF radio.

And by putting away a little more,

you too could arrive there in Darth Vader's helmet.

Stylish, affordable, totalitarian.

The car cost 990 Reichsmarks.

The typical working German family earned around 32 marks a week.

So, the rule was:

Funf Mark die woche musst du sparen, willst Du im eigenen Wagen fahren.

"Five marks a week must you put aside,

"if in your own car you wish to ride."

So, savers bought these five marks stamps

and stuck them in this Sparkarte, a savings card.

When the card was full, you could have your car.

But if you defaulted on just one of these weekly payments,

the whole thing was forfeit.

But, really, five marks a week was easy.

Even children could contribute to the family car

with one of these KdF-Wagen savings tins.

Look at this thing.

It is rather beautiful, isn't it?

The savings plan and the lavish marketing driving it

proved irresistible.

By 1938, when the giant Volkswagen factory finally came on line,

millions of Germans were dutifully filling the KdF coffers

and the Nazis had a hit on their hands.

The whole scheme was rather brilliant.

A car, a radio, a holiday.

What innocent German citizen,

remembering all the hyper-inflation of the 1920s,

wouldn't have bought into it?

I'd have bought into it.

There was only one tiny problem.

The whole Beetle savings scheme was a giant con trick.

Hitler was secretly saving up for something else entirely.

The war changed everything.

The Prora holiday camp never opened.

If there'd been a KdF customer complaints line,

it would have had a longer queue than Virgin Broadband's.

No-one received a Beetle:

none of the families who'd funded that massive Volkswagenwerk factory

with all their scrimping and saving.

If the Germans had actually eaten kippers,

you could say they'd been stitched up like one.

The great factory became an engine room of the war effort.

The Beetle's versatile, innovative chassis

was adapted to create two German war vehicles:

the rugged all-terrain Kubelwagen

and the amphibious Schwimmwagen.

But it didn't stop at vehicles.

Russian and Jewish slave labour

were also forced to make Hitler's secret weapon: the V-1 flying bomb.

So, unwittingly,

those honest hard-working German Volk of the mid 1930s,

with their brightly coloured cash tins and their saving stamps,

helped to demolish a row of houses

about a mile from where I now live in London.

But, let's be positive, at least it wasn't the chip shop.

The Allies soon identified the factory

as the home to Hitler's flying bomb and blew the place to bits.

And when the advancing Allied ground forces took the factory

in April 1945,

the Nazi dream of the people's car seemed well and truly buried.

So, when Major Ivan Hirst of the British Army

arrived at the ruins of Volkswagenwerk in 1945,

charged with putting a car into production for the occupying forces,

the place was a bit of a mess.

But amongst the rubble, or so the story goes,

he found the battered remains of an odd beetle-shaped car.

He and his German colleagues repaired it

and sent it off to the Army for evaluation.

The message that came back was an order for 20,000.

The qualities that Hitler had demanded of his people's car:

ruggedness, simplicity, ease of maintenance:

were just what the Army wanted.

But just when the British had done the difficult bit

and got the Beetle back on track,

they and their American Allies made the costliest blunder

in the history of car making.

The Beetle, the designs and the factory itself

were offered to Western car companies as a free war reparation.

But no-one wanted to know.

The chairman of Ford said it wasn't worth a damn.

Britain's Lord Rootes also turned it down.

20 years later, the Rootes Group, his great automotive concern,

would produce its own small rear-engined car

in the form of the Hillman Imp,

but that was liquid cooled and plagued by overheating.

In the end, only around half a million were made,

around 3% of the total Beetle output.

Meanwhile, all of this,

the hub of Europe's greatest and most profitable car-making business,

all of this, it's all here because of the Beetle.

Epic British fail.

Eventually, unable to offer the factory as a free gift

if you bought 20 litres of petrol,

the Allies gave it back to the government of Saxony.

Soon, the Beetle was appearing where it was always meant to:

on the driveways of German families.

Abroad, too, although now, like many of its contemporaries,

it had a new name:

The Volkswagen,

the people's car.

But here's the real irony:

it's rumoured that when Major Hirst arrived at Volkswagenwerk,

he found the remains of only a few Kraft durch Freude Wagen.

And if that's true, I'm forced to conclude that had the Allied

bombing campaign had been just a little bit more thorough,

the second half of the 20th century

would have been spared the shameless re-emergence

of Hitler's flatulent people's car.

And more to the point, we might have been spared one of the most

annoying counter-cultural movements in history.

But sadly not.

♪ Listen to what the flower people say... ♪

And that's why I've never really liked the Beetle.

It's not the car, it's the baggage.

It is, tragically,

impossible to separate the gormless face of the VW Beetle

from a lot of soppy hippy nonsense.

Quite how the Beetle came to be the symbol of the flower people

is a mystery,

but it was in blissed-out California that this

fascist fugitive created a brand-new, loved-up identity.

♪ Flower people, walk on by... ♪

Did none of these people ever stop

to think where this car had come from?

Nope. The ex-Nazi party runabout was cool.

And that's all that mattered.

But the Beetle couldn't hide its KdF past entirely.

The hippies may have been responsible for many

questionable things like flower power, Woodstock,

The Incredible String Band, sit-ins, wigwams, the acceptance of yoghurt

and all the rest of it, but they were also the innocent victims

of a dubious 1930s German practice

that followed the Beetle around like a bad smell.

Nudism was something our old mates from Kraft durch Freude

were very keen on indeed, although we don't know exactly why.

But it's clear that the Beetle helped this provocative

pastime spread to West Coast America.

This is '50s America,

a simpler time, when the height of family entertainment was

the car door mechanism of a Chevrolet.

But at around the time the Beetle scuttled onto Yankee shores...

the country became a free-love infested,

swinging hotbed of carefree psychedelic exhibitionism.

And, no, I don't know why she's chasing a heron.

But everywhere one of these vicious outbreaks of nudity occurred,

you were sure to spot a lurking Volkswagen.

It even looks a bit like a buttock.

Part of my problem with the Beetle

apart from all the Nazi baggage, obviously,

is that, rather like the hippies themselves,

it's a bit falsely humble.

It's perceived as being cute

so it comes across as a sort of smug, ironic apology

on the part of its owner.

But, actually, it isn't cute and it definitely isn't ironic.

This shape, the engine, the chassis:

they were the manifestations

of some very radical engineering thinking of the 1930s.

But it's that adaptable chassis

that's allowed me to find in all this a small sunlit upland.

Or, rather, sand dune.

I used to say you weren't a proper car enthusiast

if you hadn't owned a Mini,

but now I think that's actually a beach buggy.

This is brilliant, cos it turns any slightly dreary English seaside

into a bit of California.

And round we go. Yes, please.

Oh, sorry! I think that might have been Edinburgh.

The original beach buggy was built in 1963

by a bloke called Bruce Meyers

and it was actually a shortened Beetle chassis,

engine, suspension and then just a bolt-on fibreglass body.

This Beetle-based buggy is the GP2:

the British version of Meyer's Californian marvel.

It weighs a mere 600kg.

That means its 1600cc twin port Beetle engine can kick

a lot of sand in a wimp's face.

Famous beach buggy advocates include Elvis Presley,

proving it's OK to drive one

even if you're a slightly bloated, middle-aged family entertainer.

It's absolutely fabulous.

There isn't an easier car in the world to slide around.

It's weird, isn't it, to think that what we're talking about here

is Hitler's vision of a car for his people

that would run on a dead straight motorway from Berlin to Moscow

and it's ended up amusing surf Nazis in California.

♪ California uber alles... ♪

Thank you, Adolf Hitler!

So, a happy ending worthy of Herbie himself.

But not quite.

Remember the betrayed German workers,

the ones who saved up for all those little green stamps

so they could have a KdF-Wagen?

Well, in the 1960s, after a great deal of legal wrangling,

Volkswagen eventually agreed to pay them compensation.

Or at least, they did if they were West Germans.

If you'd ended up in East Germany, you were scheisse out of luck.

In 1945, 16 million defeated Germans

staggered from their flattened homes to find themselves

once again under a dictatorship,

and the communists weren't about to compensate anyone

for the great Nazi rip-off.

But no matter.

You simply had to save up for another ten years or so

and you could have one of these.

Now, you don't need me to tell you that this is a Trabant.

A Trabi. And, hang on, some of you are saying,

aren't Trabants supposed to be light blue?

Yes, a lot of them were,

but it was also available in white and in this baby diarrhoea brown.

And because this is a deluxe model,

it came in two tone baby diarrhoea brown.

Now, in recent years, the Trabant has enjoyed

something of a renaissance as a fashion accessory.

It's been driven "ironically", it's been used as a comedy taxi,

it's been used as a state limousine

by a Bulgarian foreign minister,

and it's formed the basis of a number of contemporary artworks.

But, please, let's not get emotional about it,

because I'm here to tell you

that no amount of cheapskate commie customising

could disguise the basic fact that the Trabant was a travesty.

Let's be balanced about this.

There were several good things about the Trabant.

For a start, it was very light, at 615kg,

and that's always a good thing in a car.

Makes it lively.

Trabants were also exceptionally long-lived,

with an average life expectancy of 28 years.

That's better than a Volvo.

The secret of the Trabant's immortality

was a material that the communists were very, very proud of indeed.

If the old Tomorrow's World had been an East German production,

then, somebody like Kieran Prendiville would have said,

it looks like glass fibre, it feels like glass fibre,

but it's made from Duroplast.

Duroplast.

It was a crude mix of waste cotton scraps and phenol resin

that was shaped in moulds to give a rust-proof car

that, in theory, could last for ever.

And that was the problem.

Duroplast was also toxic if burned and didn't biodegrade.

So, when your Germanic Wundercar finally gave up the ghost,

you were stuck with its non-disposable corpse.

Some managed to saw their Trabis up and find new uses for them,

but the majority would simply end up as overgrown eyesores

blotting the landscape like the automotive undead.

Meanwhile, if you were one of the three million East Germans

who had been fooled by the Trabi's advertising campaigns,

with its hi-tech, scientific looking men in white jump suits,

everyday life with the car was a load of old pants.

It produced just 26 horsepower and took 21 seconds to reach 60mph,

which, incidentally, was its official top speed.

Whatever that meant.

It also smells funny.

Terrible, in fact.

It smells like an old hospital or something.

The culprit is the ancient 600cc two-stroke engine

that runs on premixed petrol and oil.

That is roughly what you'd put in a cheap '70s moped.

If you've ever owned a '70s two-stroke moped, you will know

that they produce more smoke than a whole history of papal successions.

The tailpipe emissions of this car

were around 30 times as bad as those from a '90s Mercedes saloon.

If ever an industrial paradigm was needed to illustrate

the folly of central planning,

then surely the Trabant is it.

A terrible car made out of old pants

and foisted upon people who had no real choice.

For the second time in two decades,

the hapless German working family had been fobbed off

with a duff people's car.

The addition of brown boot carpet in 1976

was about as interesting as it got.

But it wasn't all bad.

If you were a well-connected East German

with a devil-may-care side-parting,

you could afford one of these.

This is a Wartburg and you're right,

it doesn't look at all shabby.

But that wasn't going to last.

This shape was launched in 1956,

but within a decade, it had been restyled to look like this.

Now known as the model 353.

The same basic car underneath,

but with new and improved, ie, uglier, Eastern Bloc bodywork.

In its defence, the Wartburg was fitted with a one-litre engine

with three cylinders, developing something like 48 horsepower.

Top speed: 80mph.

And it was made from a proper car-making material: steel.

How about that?

I know it doesn't sound particularly impressive,

but you have to remember, East Germany was a country where

a really fabulous Christmas present was a beige cardigan...

..or a deformed cuddly toy.

It's pretty terrible, really.

The engine is still a two-stroke stinker,

which is why this car was known as Farty Hans.

Imagine that: the nicest car you could hope to own is called Farty Hans.

It's like the new Jaguar being known as Guffy Nigel.

But the Communist Party bosses didn't give a toot about that.

With no competition to worry about,

they simply kept churning out the same model

for over 25 soul-destroying years.

There was no stopping these Eastern Bloc boys...

..except, ironically, with a wall.

Life behind the wall was supposed to be a Utopian

and classless worker's paradise.

But a class division did exist

and was perfectly exposed by our two commie cars.

The cheapo Trabant, the car of the oppressed

versus the faster, sleeker Wartburg,

the favoured car of the oppressors: the Volks Police.

The Volks Police Wartburgs had been slightly breathed upon.

They produced about seven horsepower more.

The Trabi, meanwhile, had the advantage of small size.

Keeping a low profile was key

if you wanted to avoid attention from

the secret division of the Volks Police, better known as the Stasi.

The Stasi liked to collect files on its citizens.

They reckon there were so many files that if you stacked them

all on a shelf, it would be 180km long.

The Stasi oversaw the most invasive campaign of psychological intimidation

ever conducted by a state on its own citizens.

They would break into people's houses simply to leave signs

that they had been there,

move the furniture around, interfere with personal effects.

They used dogs to track people

who they thought would be trying to escape

and to make sure the dogs had your scent,

they'd go into your laundry basket and steal your pants.

They'd then keep these at HQ in a pickle jar and if you got away,

give the pants to the dog and then they knew your smell.

Even driving a car made from other people's pants wouldn't help much,

as the Stasi were absolutely everywhere.

By the late '80s, there was one Stasi officer for every 63 citizens,

and that's not even counting all the informants.

Some people reckoned it was as high as one in five.

But the East German Government

and the Stasi or the paid informers,

they'd all reckoned without one thing:

East Germany's humble people's car

would be the means of symbolic escape.

November 1989, the East Germans have finally had enough.

It began with confusion...

Mass protests erupt in Berlin

and thousands, accompanied by convoys of smoke-belching Trabis,

flock to the wall demanding to pass to the West.

Open up, they chanted, open up.

The border guards, demoralized

and overcome by the old hospital fumes of 100 Trabis,

let them through, convinced that their first taste of Western culture

would see them streaming right back.

♪ I've been looking for freedom... ♪

But it was no good.

Even the Hoff couldn't put them off.

♪ I've been looking for freedom

♪ Still the search goes on... ♪

The Cold War was over.

Sanity had reasserted itself.

The cardboard comrades' car had led the charge,

and Farty Hans had farted his last.

A people's car indeed.

So, the Trabi: for the first 30 years of its life,

it simply plodded around East Germany in a fug of its own making,

helping to cement the people's misery.

But, really, it was just waiting to make its one significant journey,

this brief but glorious lunge for freedom across the bridge here,

after which its usefulness was completely exhausted.

So, as a symbol of liberty,

which is what a car should be, it remains very poignant.

But as a car per se, it is quite literally rubbish.

So far, the people's car has been a litany of repression and disaster.

But to show that it was possible to create a small,

affordable four-seater,

we need only come to sunny, capitalist Italy

and try this.

This is a Fiat Cinquecento,

or Fiat 500 in a less romantic Germanic language.

It was called the 500 because it had a 500cc engine.

Although, strictly speaking, the early cars had a 479cc engine,

but Fiat Quattrocentosettantanove

was going to be a bit of a flamboyant name,

even for the Italians.

And at the time,

the little Fiat 500 was the height of zippy carefree Italian cool.

The adverts of the time proudly showing how you too

could drive like a maniac, traumatise by-standing cattle,

and store unwanted gas bills,

but, crucially, still have enough room in the back for your favourite

luxury picnic hamper or an adulterous weekend getaway

playing doctors and nurses.

In recent years, we've lost sight of what "small car" really means.

The Fiat 500 is absolutely chuffing piccolo.

It's just 275mm, or less than your school ruler,

longer than a Smart car, but this has four seats.

It weighs just 470kg: around two-thirds of the original Mini.

It really is very, very simple.

The engine is an air-cooled two-cylinder job,

mounted here in the back, same as the Beetle's was,

and for similar reasons.

The earliest cars developed a widow-making 13 horsepower.

But don't worry, because this one is a bit later and has 17.

Maintenance was intended to be very simple.

In the more rural areas of Italy,

corner shops would stock essential Cinquecento spares:

spark plugs, belts, and what have you.

Rather in the way that these days

you can buy a sat nav from Sainsbury's.

And we think of it as being incredibly cute,

but Dante Giacosa did not design it to be this shape

so that we would go oochy-coochy-coo,

he did it this way to use as little sheet metal as possible,

because in 1950s Italy, steel was expensive.

And that brings us to this fabric sunroof,

which was not an extravagance, and it wasn't an option:

you had to have it.

And it was there because fabric is lighter and cheaper than steel.

Avanti.

The 500 was launched in 1957

with the aim of the being the Italian people's car.

A four-wheeled version of a Vespa scooter.

And while the KdF-Wagen and the Trabi were cheap,

they were, it has to be said,

about as cheerful as your average Sean Penn film.

The 500...was fun.

In the way that the Trabant

reminded you of you and your ideology's failings,

the Fiat Cinquecento seemed to confirm that a simple life

could be one of unalloyed joy.

But it's in the narrow, cobbled streets of the city

that this proto-Smart car really comes in to its own.

And you can see why. I mean, this is an ancient city,

this is part of the Italian renaissance.

Some of the roads are tiny.

But look, here we go, room for two.

The Fiat 500 is a potent symbol of Italian utilitarian chic,

the Latin driving temperament,

and creative solutions to everyday parking problems.

Stuck for a space? No matter.

Thanks to the 500, you can squeeze expertly into any gap

without a care in the world.

Between 1957 and 1975, Fiat built around 3.6 million Cinquecenti.

Not bad.

But it isn't Italy's most successful people's car, not by a long way.

That's coming up now.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

Fiat's next bash at a people's car was launched, literally, in 1966.

Fiat spared no expense on the 124's arrival.

It even had those white jump-suited guys from the Trabi ad who

were clearly looking for work.

Despite that, no-one could have predicted that this

unassuming little car would go on to be

the vehicle of choice for one of the greatest tyrannies on Earth.

Cars like this were around when I was a boy,

and when I was a boy, Italian cars were famous for two things:

firstly, for dissolving like a soluble aspirin

as soon as it rained,

secondly, for being great fun to drive.

Now, the difficulty we had in finding this mint example suggests,

rather tragically, that the first of those is perfectly true.

Now let's see about the other one.

Now, this looks a bit like a car I designed when I was six,

and I'm sure lots of six-year-olds still design like this:

three basic boxes with some wheels added.

Indeed, one of Fiat's official histories describes this as

"a rather conventional car".

But hang on a minute: beneath this

depiction-of-a-car-on-a-signpost exterior,

the 124 is a bit more sofisticato than you might think.

For a start, it came with a range of typically Italian fizzy

four-pot engines.

This 1968 car has a 1.2-litre developing 60 horsepower.

Now that's not a lot, I know,

but what it does have

it gives willingly, enthusiastically.

Underneath, there were coil springs,

anti-roll bars and disc brakes.

Now that gave you very good bar room bragging rights in the 1960s,

especially in a family car.

What basic Italian cars always gave: still give, in fact:

is the sensation of performance without the expense

and inconvenience of actually achieving it.

So you get an exciting engine, you get a nice gear change,

nicely weighted pedals, nicely weighted steering...

..a car you can sort of fling around a bit.

The 124 may be as bouncy and fun as Tigger's honeymoon night,

but there is one area in which it's sadly lacking: air-con.

It's got nice big glass, it makes a nice noise, it's happy, it's hot.

I'm sweaty. I'm literally the hottest person in the world.

Bah!

But what's all this got to do with the greatest tyranny on Earth?

To explain, I'm having to take the 124 back home.

I'm now driving up the ramps of Fiat's historic Lingotto car factory

deep in the heart of Turin.

It opened in 1923: an Art Deco masterpiece for manufacturing.

Sadly, now a shopping centre like so many other of these things,

but one little bit of it, one very significant bit, survives

pretty much as it was: the rooftop test track.

What a view!

Much better than our Dunsfold test track.

On to the banking and whoo-hoo!

Ho-ho!

From up here, Fiat executives could survey their empire,

which was, let's be frank, Italy,

because Fiat was such an enormous force in Italian commerce

and politics and culture.

And that empire was about to grow enormously.

Well, let me rephrase that, actually.

The Fiat 124's empire

was about to grow enormously.

Over here, we have another one, apparently identical

apart from the colour.

But, actually, there are something like 900 subtle changes under

the skin, and one very significant change on it, which is this...

..the badge.

It does not say "Fiat".

It shows the outline of a historic, fast-sailing boat

from the River Volga, and the Russian name for one of those is...

Lada.

In the 1960s, the Cold War was at its most precarious,

but what bothered the Soviet Union most of all was this:

in the USA, there was one car for every 2.7 people,

in the Soviet Union, one for every 238.

In 1965, Americans produced 9.3 million passenger vehicles,

Russians produced under 250,000.

Something had to be done.

Now, it might seem odd that the Soviet Union looked to

outside help in order to bring cars to its people.

The Soviets were already experts at producing tractors, trucks

and especially tanks in truly astonishing numbers,

but they didn't know much about making

a typical small passenger car.

So if you were lucky enough to have one,

you were unlucky enough for it to be something like a Zaporozhet.

So, approaches were made by the Soviets to the West, even,

ironically, to our old friends at VW.

Nothing came of that,

which was a lucky escape for Ivan.

There were flirtations with Britain as well and with France,

but, finally, in 1966, the Soviet minister of automobile

production signed a deal with the managing director of Fiat,

that charged Fiat with building a brand-new factory,

capable of producing 2,000 passenger cars a day,

and the car would be a Sovietised version of the Fiat 124.

And this is the result: the AvtoVAZ factory at Tolyatti,

known to everybody else in the world as the home of Lada,

and it still is.

But why pick Fiat?

Well, the Italian car company already had a relationship with

the USSR, having supplied trucks to them in kit form 40 years earlier.

Also, the Fiat 124, it has been suggested, was the ideal

car for a Communist regime, as it was predominantly functional and

exhibited little in the way of pesky bourgeois decadence.

But was there something more shady at the heart of the deal?

Let's not forget, there was a Cold War on.

Outside of the actual Communist nations,

the biggest Communists of the 1960s were the Italians.

The notorious Red Brigade was born in the metal pressing shops of Fiat.

It quickly spread to other parts of the Italian car industry:

the Pirelli tyre factory,

the Magneti Marelli auto-electrics work.

And by the '70s, over in Italy, Communist Red Brigade members

with jobs at Fiat were not only getting funds and support

from the KGB, they were also murdering their own executives.

30 Fiat workers were jailed for terrorist offences.

There was arson in the factories, strikes, mass walkouts.

And the Agnelli family, the effective owners of Fiat,

became the most guarded family in the world.

Allegedly, Gianni Agnelli carried a cyanide pill

in case he was kidnapped.

Now as somebody once said, "When Fiat trembles, Italy trembles."

So, was the deal done to keep the Soviets sweet

in case Communism eventually triumphed,

or even simply to placate Fiat's Communist workers even if it didn't?

It's just a thought.

Anyway, in April 1970, the first car

rolled off the glorious new production line,

just in time for the centenary of Lenin's birth.

Nice.

And this is what those first cars looked like.

Yes, exactly like a Fiat 124,

but thanks to the famously sterling condition of Russian roads,

under the skin, the Lada was given a Marxist make-over to deal with

these sort of mildly adverse conditions.

It had an all new engine, a blistering 1cc bigger than before.

The steel bodywork was thickened all over.

Over time, a big radiator was added, the floor was strengthened,

square headlights went on, new bumpers, different wheels:

this no-nonsense Communist approach

extended to their Finnish advertising campaign.

Now here we are in 2013 and I'm driving something of a rarity.

It's an original stock, low mileage, under 3,000 Lada Riva.

But that shouldn't be a rarity, should it?

I mean, few things in life are less rare than a Lada Riva.

It is in very good condition, by which

I mean it's in quite poor condition, because that's how they were made.

This is a 1999 car,

but, even so, you can tell it's an ancient design,

made with very tired tooling in a very old factory,

mainly because of the massive gaps everywhere,

such as these ones on the radiator, round the lights,

down the edge of the bonnet.

It has plain pressed steel wheels in 1999!

Look at this gap here on the door: a cat could escape through that.

And let's remember that this car is a very low mileage example,

it's never been touched or repaired or anything like that,

so you can only assume that this orange peel effect on the paint

and this nasty run down here:

well, that's how it came

out of the factory.

I don't think Honda were having any emergency board meetings,

let's put it that way.

That said, a lot of developing countries around the world

were very keen on it and so Russia began

licensing and exporting Ladas to a whole slew of Third World countries,

including India, Egypt, and Thatcher's Britain.

Strangely enough, in Britain, this car, the Riva, enjoyed a brief

renaissance as the car of the oppressed and immobile people,

because in the Thatcher era, the industrial North

and parts of the Midlands were wracked by redundancies

and people were very hard up.

This was the cheapest car you could buy.

This was the easiest way

to stay mobile.

And briefly, this was the tenth bestselling car in Britain.

Some people risk buying a used car

when they could quite easily afford a brand-new Lada.

The UK Lada ads were a cornucopia of extravagance

compared with what had come before.

You either had the luxury of Cannon and Ball...

I thought you said "risque", Tommy, I thought you said "risque."

..or this action-packed spectacular,

which presented the Lada as some kind of gravity-defying super car,

perfect for a typical Sunday afternoon's African safari...

Each Lada is built to survive...

..while you listen to your mix tape of the Airwolf theme song.

..the roughest of roads.

So, in order to test that claim, I've come here:

the old ZiL automobile factory...

..275 hectares of industrial complex right in the centre of Moscow...

..now all but abandoned.

Interestingly, they used to make

those old pre-Lada Fiat kit trucks here.

It's now home to the odd rabid stray dog

and the most distressed surfaces this side of Jeremy Clarkson's face.

Sorry about the weaving around:

there are some quite big holes in this bit of road.

Ow!

Good God!

Hole!

I can see some very concerned faces in my rear-view mirror.

'Sorry, James.

'I'll be with you in a moment.'

'We'd barely started and the ancient Communist potholes have

'given our decadent Western crew car a flat tyre.

'This is a top of the line, modern day Range Rover.

'I think that's one-nil to the '70s levitating safari wagon.'

So, while the beefed up Soviet Lada could handle anything that could be

thrown at it, the same couldn't be said for the Soviet regime.

By the 1980s, everything was falling apart.

The great social experiment had yielded a result which was,

"No, it doesn't really work. Sorry."

So, a lot of people did what any reasonable person would do

under the circumstances...

..they got drunk.

Even the President decided to put the "pub" back into Soviet Republic.

Back at the Togliatti factory, things weren't any better.

They actually changed the speed of the production line

throughout the day.

It could go a bit faster in the afternoon...

..because everyone's hangover had worn off a bit.

There was widespread theft: components were being

catapulted over the perimeter fence of the factory by groups of workers

building cars and supplying spares on the black market.

Pirelli Tyres brought in for the export models:

they were stolen from the factory

because obviously the Russians would want them.

Their tyres were terrible.

And they were taken out of the factory on an elaborate

rubber boat that left via the sewers

and then sailed off down the River Volga,

rather like the fast pirate boat

the car was named after in the first place:

an irony the Russians would have surely appreciated,

were they not completely Sputnik-ed.

Lada was falling apart. Your Lada Riva was falling apart.

If you were lucky enough to have a Lada Riva, it was being

gradually reduced by rust, by the potholes...

..like that, and by your neighbours nicking vital parts

during the night.

Spares were very, very scarce and very, very expensive.

Fortunately, enterprising Soviets would set up

guerrilla roadside repair stations with ingenious DIY solutions.

Leaky radiator, comrade? The answer is...

..Russian mustard powder.

You pour a bit of that in, forms a very, very effective seal.

Another common problem was that the bottom of the fuel tank

would be holed on the rough roads. Well, the answer to that was

a bar of Soviet soap.

You rub that against the hole, it forms a small plug,

which becomes rock hard: very effective.

What else have we got?

Oh, yes, here's a very good story we heard.

There was a man, an old man we've been talking to,

driving in a very remote area

and the return spring on his clutch pedal failed.

Not to worry, though, because he had at his disposal

what the Soviets refer to simply as "rubber product number two":

here's a copy of the packaging.

You can probably guess what it is

from the picture of the smoking factory at the top.

It's a condom.

"Rubber product number one" was a gas mask.

And to pay for this DIY MOT,

all you needed were some luxury Western goods to trade.

Have a fish, mate.

It was the comradeship of the road.

And so, like a cockroach after a nuclear blast, the Lada just

kept going as society crumbled around it.

As the Soviets kept on churning them out, Lada gained

a reputation, not as a maker of people's cars, or even

a robust survivor, but as a long obsolete fossil:

a global punch line.

There are more specific Lada jokes, I think,

than there are about any other car.

What do you call a Lada at the top of a hill?

A miracle.

A Lada with the window open is a bottle bank.

A man buys a Lada and takes it back to the dealership.

"This car is useless," he says. "It'll only get to 75 up that hill."

"Well, that's not bad," says the dealer.

"It's useless," says the man, "I live at number 93."

A man goes to a scrap yard.

"Have you got a hub cap for a Lada?" he asks.

"Yes," says the scrap merchant, "that sounds like a fair swap."

Ho-ho-ho.

Laugh, possibly,

but like the Beetle before it, the Lada was a survivor.

I have here an extract from an article that

appeared in Financial Times in 1967

talking all about the Fiat/Soviet deal.

And it says, "Soviet planners have made it clear they do not intend

"to emulate Detroit's practice of planned obsolescence,

"and so the Soviet versions of the Fiat 124 may well

"continue in production until the late 1970s."

Well, I bet he wishes he'd been better informed,

because the last one rolled out of this factory in 2012.

This, then, will be the legacy of the Lada:

not that it was one of the oldest cars still being produced,

nor that it was one of the few survivors

of the collapsed Communist regime.

No, the Lada will for ever be remembered as the worldwide

punch line of Christmas-cracker-level comedy crap.

It does distress me that a story that begins with the gorgeous,

almost feminine, Fiat 124, is going

to end with the world's most derided car:

a car with a face

that only a Russian's shot-putter's mother could love.

It's going to go out with a pathetic whimper.

The poor old Lada: yet another victim of state tyranny.

There's always an issue with a dictator's car. The Beetle:

it was brilliant,

but the people who paid for it never actually took delivery.

The Trabi and the Wartburg: they were awful,

but the people were forced to have them.

The Lada:

it started off quite well, but totalitarianism slowly ruined it.

It does seem that if you actually want to mess up your motoring,

you need a dictator.

But let's not forget the Lada's long journey began in a joyful

flourish of Italian style.

It fell from the sun-drenched sky.

We thought it should bow out the same way.

It's what the designer, Oscar Montabone, would have wanted.

The Lada: hated by purists, mocked by the people, and disowned by Fiat.

But there's a twist:

I wonder if the people signing that original deal

realised it would go on for so long

and I wonder if Fiat's executives ever imagined this.

Now, no-one knows for sure quite how many 124-derived cars have

been built, but if we combine Fiat's original output with

the Togliatti cars and all the ones built in India, Spain, Bulgaria,

Turkey, Egypt and Korea, it comes to something like 20 million,

which means that the largely forgotten Fiat 124 is,

in fact, the second bestselling car in history.

By the second half of the 20th century

the word "consumption" already had positive connotations.

It denoted economic growth, choice, happiness even.

But it was also still also the name of a wasting disease,

one in which the sufferer grows smaller and weaker

and eventually fades away.

In the '50s, '60s and even the early '70s,

both definitions could be applied to the Cars of the People.

This week, how the people's car lost a wheel and lost its way,

comedic French cars that go like a bomb...

..and how noodles saved the world.

Nothing can stop noodles!

America, the 1950s. Happy Days.

The nation is rich,

there's excess manufacturing capacity after the war,

fuel is cheap, materials are plentiful,

space is seemingly limitless.

What does this mean for the car? Well, something like this:

a wheeled automotive palace

celebrating the jet age with bosses and fins.

American cars of the 1950s oozed wealth and glamour,

and this rubbed off on the driver.

Who's the best pilot you ever saw?

At the top of the pile: Cadillac.

This 18-foot, 2.2-ton

Eldorado Biarritz seems a bit unnecessary.

But, despite its 5.6 litre engine,

and enough heavy metal to headline Donington,

this overblown jukebox on wheels had its fair share of supersized rivals.

American excess?

That'll do nicely.

Now, I'm only guessing because I wasn't there, obviously,

but I reckon that life in 1950s California,

where this car came from,

was probably better than life in 1950s Birmingham.

But it's just a hunch.

♪ I feel unhappy... ♪

Birmingham then, as now, was utterly depressing.

But it wasn't alone in its abject misery.

Unlike America, everybody in post-war Europe was broke.

With rationing still in force,

people did what they could to get by.

A colander, for example, needs a little embellishment

but a dash of colour works wonders:

even if it does leak in rainy weather.

For smart vegetarians, a salad bowl, with servers, too, you'll notice.

It wasn't just hats.

Elegant, a funnel hat.

It really wasn't. The motorist longed for

the bejewelled decadence that the Americans had.

But what they got was a bunch of midgets with funny accents.

Welcome to the exciting and occasionally baffling world

of the European microcar.

The idea was really very simple.

They were cars but they were smaller and simpler,

so they use less materials, they were easier to make,

they have simple engines, usually single cylinder, often two stroke,

they were cheaper to buy, they were usually easier to run.

The microcar promised to revolutionize motoring

for the masses. They didn't just aim to solve post-war hardship

but also congestion in the crowded European cities and towns.

And because they were pretty basic to make,

all sorts of people had a go.

This is a FMR Tg500.

Better known as the Messerschmitt Tiger.

Now, let me say straightaway it's a complete myth that Messerschmitt

built these using leftover canopies from World War II aircraft.

But you can see where they got the idea from.

It looks like a 110 Zerstorer fighter bomber

with the wings and the tail chopped off.

Doesn't have a steering wheel, as such. It has a yoke,

again a bit like, let me think... Yes, an aeroplane.

The Messerschmitt came with a 500cc two-stroke twin cylinder engine,

four gears, and a spare seat for your rear gunner.

It was also small and very cheap.

It's very ingenious, though, because it is, of course, German.

German aeroplane designers

weren't allowed to make aeroplanes after the war,

so they applied their considerable talents to this sort of thing.

In fact, if you get the sun in the right position you can bank

some lesser European microcars and shoot them down

before they even know you're there.

Yes, the Tiger is a rich source

of cheap and predictable Battle of Britain gags.

But, compared to some other first-time designers,

at least Messerschmitt knew if they were coming or going.

This, for example, is the Zundapp Janus,

named after the Roman god who could look in both directions

at the same time.

I presume they called it that because it's almost completely

symmetrical front to rear, apart from the lights.

And the big surprise for you is:

I'm not driving.

I am.

♪ East is west, left is right

♪ Up is down and black is white... ♪

Zundapp was a motorcycle maker

and, not surprisingly, the Janus is powered by a 250cc bike engine.

It's mounted exactly in the middle. Where else could it go?

Do you know, this never caught on. I wonder why not?

Maybe because it's confusing.

Maybe that's why I left the indicator on all day.

Advantages of a symmetrical car?

Well, the doors and the glass are the same at both ends.

And the seats are the same as well. That makes it cheaper to build.

Disadvantages: it sort of interferes

with your passenger's minds a bit.

♪ All the small things... ♪

While the experimental Zundapp

might have caused its occupants temporary insanity,

other models like BMW's iconic Isetta became the byword

for reliable, low cost family motoring.

But, despite their wildly differing designs, all the early microcars

offered the cash-strapped European worker

something that a normal car couldn't:

you could drive these four wheel marvels on a motorcycle licence.

Well, you could...

unless you were British.

Here's one from a very prolific British maker: Bond.

Bond and this British Messerschmitt and this British Isetta

have one important difference. They only have three wheels.

Because a piece of legislation said you could drive one of these if it

was below a certain weight and you only had a motorcycle licence,

so long as it only had three wheels.

This is very, very complicated and nobody on this programme

really understands it properly but we are fairly confident

that this bit of government interference...

spoiled everything.

The three wheel legislation aimed to draw a line between proper

middle class motorists, and working class oiks and bikers

who wouldn't or couldn't obtain a full driving licence.

But all it actually achieved was to wreck the British microcar's chances

right from the start.

Many affordable three wheeled models were available over the years,

but sales were poor for two main reasons:

they made you look like a berk, and this tended to happen...

Reliants uniformly gormless range

symbolized all that was wrong with the British three wheeler.

It was mocked to the point of ennui,

and in 2005 was voted the Worst British Car in History.

Across the Channel in la belle France, however,

things were a lot more laissez faire.

You could have four wheels if you wanted: no-one really cared.

And it didn't matter what sort of licence you had.

Boff! You didn't need a licence at all.

There was but one small catch

and it came in the shape of a chewed block of Duplo.

This is a KV1.

It's a so-called voiture sans permis,

a car without permit.

It's awful.

Honestly.

I'm not camping it up or anything. This is truly diabolical.

This represents the most ruthless attempt yet

to pare back both the car and the ownership burden.

This isn't a particularly rough road, honestly.

Voitures sans permis, or VSPs,

were a truly egalitarian attempt at a people's cars.

Small, simple and very "merde,"

they would mobilise the very fringes of French society.

There were some rules governing the car.

It had to be below a certain weight.

It was only allowed to have two seats and, for some reason, no boot.

That was pretty much it.

For your part you, just bought it and drove away.

Even if you couldn't drive.

Pre-1988, French urchins as young as 14

were allowed to drive these things.

Again, no test, nothing.

You just got one, nicked one: there are no keys or anything:

and you had a car.

I use the term "car" quite generously, obviously.

You'd think that the manufacturers of this abomination on wheels

wouldn't have been able to give it away.

But you'd be wrong.

When this car went on sale in 1978, it cost around £700.

Now, I was around in 1978

and I seem to remember that £700 was a huge amount of money.

But it's not just the build quality, price, performance,

or the sheer insanity of the thing that lets the KV1 down.

It is, quite honestly, pantaloon- fillingly-terrifying to drive.

Oh, BLEEP, I've pulled out! Oh, Christ!

What a merciful man. Merci, monsieur.

Oh, my God!

Oh, God I'm joining like a proper...

There's a gigantic lorry behind me. It's massive.

I'm going left, I'm going left.

I don't know, call me a wimp if you like

but I didn't really like having that behind me.

In order to show just how lethal these microcars are,

we must put one in the hands of a typical VSP driver.

Blondine, who is perfectly sane and absolutely normal in every way,

but she's only 15 and therefore has never driven a car,

no car, not even a VSP. However, had she been 15 in the early '70s

she could just climb in and drive away.

We'll be marking Blondine down for each imaginary French pedestrian

she kills in this old Axiam. Trois, deux, un. Partez!

Brake, brake, brake!

'There goes the first one as Blondine reverses into an imaginary

'blameless baguette seller, orphaning a French family of 16.'

Terrifying.

'Remember, in the '70s this could be you in the

'passenger seat next to somebody who doesn't know where the brake is.'

Touch the brake...

'That's a whole troupe of imaginary mime artists silenced for ever.'

Keep going, keep going, keep going.

'Small dog.'

Good recovery.

'Blondine's safari continues by ploughing through

'a sizeable pavement cafe.'

Stop. Stop, stop.

Reverse, reverse.

'It's a massive overshoot as the Axiam enters the local bibliotheque

'through the window.'

You have to go...parallel.

'And one more point for murdering the idea of parallel parking.'

Tres bon.

'The final score is ten confirmed kills

'in just under a third of a mile.'

And if you think that's over the top, consider this:

it wasn't just underage French people,

but drivers banned for being dangerous or drunk

who could all legally get behind the wheel of a VSP.

At the height of the unlicensed VSP disaster,

there were around 50 deaths on French roads every single day.

VSPs are horrible. I don't want anything else to do with them.

I'm sure you're bored of watching them as well.

I'll tell you what, why don't we go back to that road

at the beginning of this French sequence and I'll come over the hill

in something a bit more interesting.

And better.

Yeah, all right, it's a cliche,

but, like all cliches, it's a cliche because it's good.

This is just tremendous, this thing.

While the VSP took everything bad about motoring and made it worse,

the Citroen 2CV can claim to be

one of France's greatest ever achievements.

What could be more French than this?

I mean, it's utterly ridiculous, and yet it's charming,

and strangely adorable.

Right, first of all, let's clear up something you're all a bit

too embarrassed to ask. Why is it called the 2CV?

Well, it actually means "deux cheveaux vapeur,"

which is "two steam horses."

It's the nominal output of the original 375cc engine,

measured in the way that you would measure the output

of a steam engine. Anyway, don't worry,

this is a later 425CC car

and this develops a heady nine horse power.

For most of us in Britain, the 2CV is bound up with tie and dye

in that '70s and early '80s period. You know, when people where

starting to experiment with brown foodstuffs and barn conversions.

That sort of thing. In actual fact, the 2CV is a pre-war design.

It comes from that era when any nation worth its salt

was head-butting the complex idea of a car for the masses.

In 1938, Citroen unveiled the 2CV's earliest prototype.

Codenamed the TPV, or the tres petite voiture,

the car came with Citroen's revolutionary soft suspension

that put the fun into road rage.

So far so good.

But in 1940, just as production began, Hitler swept into France.

The Citroen factory appeared to carry on as normal, but in secret

all traces of the little car were hidden from the invader.

And post-war, enough 2CVs were recovered from their hidey holes

to launch the car at the 1948 Paris Motor Show.

And, so, the 2CV began its long and enduring love affair

with the French people. And to this day,

like Japanese soldiers still fighting World War II,

prototypes are still being found,

hiding from the enemy in barns all over France.

So, the 2CV is a contemporary of the Beetle

and they share a similar philosophy.

They're both full size four-seater cars. They're both very simply made

so they're easy to maintain. You could take that apart with

a handful of tools.

The engine is air-cooled but now it only has two cylinders,

and it's mounted at the front, and it drives the front wheels.

Apparently, it can be driven at full revs

all day long without exploding.

Where they differ, though, is in the vision of their creators.

The German car was for high speed efficiency

on revolutionary autobahn.

The French car was designed to be driven across a ploughed field

by peasants carrying a basket of eggs, and without breaking any.

Eggs or peasants.

If ever a car suited its people, it was the 2CV.

It cost less than half the price of a VW Beetle,

yet was infinitely more practical.

Actually, the 2CV is a handy denoter of Frenchness.

If you're making a film, a TV series, illustrating a comic strip,

you simply plop a 2CV in and that says,

"This person, this scene, is very French."

It's utterly unequivocal,

like a Breton shirt or a sting of onions hanging from a bicycle.

Or a beret.

You'd think that thanks to its brave war record,

and its strong national identity,

the 2CV would easily be France's most celebrated people's car.

However, the French know that this is all complete nonsense.

Their real automotive hero, the one that Delacroix would have painted

standing atop a pile of vanquished bodies,

waving the tricolor, is in here.

And that, if you didn't know, is a Renault 4.

The Renault 4 is the most successful French car of all time.

It may be the most successful French thing of all time

after the croque-monsieur.

Which is really just a cheese and ham toastie,

and they stole that from us. At Agincourt.

While the 2CV acted as a sort of missionary, spreading the gospel

of French chicness and eccentricity around the globe,

the Renault 4 soldiered on with the more onerous task

of being France's true people's car.

Under four million 2CVs were built

but over nine and a half million Renault 4s, and not just in France.

It was built in other parts of the world. It sold in 125 countries.

Its mission was quite simply to make the motoring world French.

Those impressive figures may be partly down to an innovation

that puts the Renault 4 firmly above the 2CV.

It's a masterstroke that changed car designs for ever.

Renault's ideas for a voiture des peuples, or people's car,

were formulated in the late 1940s

and originally they thought it would be an enlarged,

more powerful version of their 4CV saloon:

no relationship to the Citroen whatsoever.

But that would have made it rear engine,

so they scrapped that and put the engine in the front:

which makes this the first ever front-wheel drive Renault.

And then they realised, because there was no engine in the back,

they could make the rear seats fold down.

And then...

..they invented le hatchback.

Now we can have produits dans la voiture very easily.

That and so much more besides.

But it wasn't all boring baguettes in the boot.

Unlike the homely 2CV, the Renault 4 was marketed

as a macho four-wheeled version of Ross Kemp,

ready for slightly camp adventure

in exotic locations all across the world.

And this gung ho attitude was backed up under the bonnet.

The engine 747cc

and four cylinders, and liquid cooled.

That's bigger than any 2CV engine ever was.

And you can tell.

That's second of the three gears.

Look at that, I'm doing 40.

It may be basic, it might have a baffling gear change, it's slow,

but the Renault 4 allows us to roll about in more lovely cliches.

It's got Gallic charm in spades.

Drive one for long enough

and you'll occasionally lapse into Frenchness.

Bonjour, mademoiselle.

Crikey, what a ripping girl.

So that would appear to be a cut and dried victory

for the Renault 4 over its rival.

But Citroen wasn't about to give up without a fight.

The Renault 4 and the 2CV were

mechanically simple, very robust cars.

So they were infinitely adaptable. Yes, they were the standard cars

but then there were pick-up versions, covered pick-up versions,

small camper vans, bakers' vans.

They were used by the fire service,

they were used by the police.

They even made, in the case of the Renault 4,

a sort of beach version. Infinite variety.

But this sort of thing can go too far.

And it did.

In a vain quest to sort it out once and for all,

Renault and Citroen both produced military versions.

And while the Renault 4 Sinpar served with the

French military in Africa,

the 2CV pick-up found itself with the British Royal Marines

in the Far East as a helicopter-bourne

light assault vehicle.

What on Earth were the French thinking of?

Cardboard cars with comedy gear changes

as assault vehicles?

Sacre bleu!

But let's give them the benefit of the doubt,

with a wholly gratuitous and typically scientific Top Gear test.

Now, these two examples, the 2CV and the Renault 4,

have been converted to military use

in much the same way the originals would have been.

They have been painted dark green.

But which was best on the field of battle?

Let's find out.

We've set our quarry up in this French quarry.

Our two sturdy light grade passenger vehicles will advance

very slowly along the ground to simulate the terror of the soldiers

who were forced to drive them.

Meanwhile, up in our bunker, we have the sort of weaponry these

cars would have faced during their post-colonial adventures.

This is a good old British rifle, the Lee-Enfield,

and this is what it fires, the .303 British cartridge.

These were used in pretty much everything, really:

Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield rifles, Bren guns,

Browning machine guns in Spitfires and Hurricanes,

and the gun turrets of Lancaster bombers, and so on, and so on.

Thousands of millions of these have been made and fired at everything

from paper targets and beer bottles, to big game and foreigners.

We're not sure, though, that any have ever been fired at French cars,

so let's give it a go.

All clear!

2CV.

Window.

Window.

Empty.

So far, it's a typically French military performance.

Neither car seems to be putting up much of a fight

against the .303 round.

But both cars are still drivable, so let's take this up a notch.

Can I do some more shooting?

♪ This town ain't big enough for the both of us. ♪

I don't think that was quite scientific enough,

so let's move on to a more contemporary weapon: the AK-47.

This is the very cheap Chinese-made one.

Now, I'm not allowed to use this,

because it's a Section 5 firearm. It's fully automatic.

So it will be fired today by my glamorous assistant, Joss.

Sir. Thank you.

♪ Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat

♪ You are a khaki-coloured bombardier

♪ It's Hiroshima that you're nearing

♪ This town ain't big enough for both of us... ♪

In normal life, Joss does crosswords and likes small animals.

Our two French vehicles are certainly starting

to look more Swiss.

But I can't in good scientific conscience say that either of them

is out for the count just yet.

Time to bring in the big gun.

Now, I would normally baulk at an act of unbridled vandalism

to cars, such as you are about to witness,

but let's be honest:

in this instance, they were literally asking for it.

Ready, sir.

As another great military strategist said,

"Now I have a machine gun.

"Ho-ho-ho."

OK, here we go.

Quite a lot of stuff hit me in the face then.

And, so, the great Renault 4 2CV rivalry shoot out

reaches its conclusion.

Our imaginary infantrymen, those unhappy few,

those band of buggered who drove the 2CV or Renault 4

into the heart of occupied territory

have been comprehensively...

Oh, sod it. Let's have a tie-break.

We may be finally be seeing

the Renault 4's defence capabilities.

Or we may be rotten shots.

One of them missed the camera by about a quarter of an inch.

'Actually, no, it didn't.'

BLEEP.

'But just when we thought we'd got this all wrong

'and the Renault did come with force fields...'

He may not make it back to base.

The vehicle has been defeated.

And, as the smoke cleared, we were left with an impossible decision.

We could only come to one reasonable conclusion.

Both cars were utterly, ludicrously inept as military service vehicles.

But then the 2CV caught fire so we gave it to the Renault.

So, what have we learned?

You can go to market in them, you can go out for a picnic in them,

you can go the shops in them,

and you can go on a romantic date in them,

but don't, for God's sake, go to war in the Citroen 2CV or the Renault 4

because they're rubbish.

I hope that was useful.

OK, they're not military vehicles

but let's not hold that against them.

These are truly iconic cars

that are deeply engrained in our motoring consciousness

and I can demonstrate that to you, because if you go outside:

I don't know what sort of mid-sized mainstream car you may have:

but if you just took one bit off it you wouldn't be able to identify it

from that, and yet if I hold up this rear wing

from one of our blown up cars

and you ignore the bullet holes and the fact it already says 2CV on it,

you would still identify that as the rear wing of a car that once

took a lovesick young poet to the Rive Gauche,

or a pastis-soaked protester to a fishing port in Calais.

That's how iconic they are.

And now for something British,

and so pathetic,

it's not even worthy of target practice.

Faced with the growing evidence that microcars were not much good

at dealing with congestion,

the British looked for inspiration

to a place which had no congestion at all...

..outer space.

This is a Peel Trident.

The original was made on the Isle of Man for just a year,

1965 to 1966.

But this one is a faithful modern replica.

Back in the mid '60s everyone was space mad,

which is why it looks like something from the Jetsons.

This one, as you can hear, has an electric motor.

The original had a 50cc petrol engine,

a top speed of 38mph and, as usual, not enough wheels.

Doesn't really solve anything.

OK, it might look futuristic,

but if you thought this space cadet capsule

could ever be the way forward for mass transport,

you'd need your head examined.

You see, the reality is,

if you want to change the world and save it,

you actually need something quite large.

It's not obviously a car, it's a van,

and maybe even more than that,

because at one point Ford took to calling it a "delivery system".

A delivery system?

Well, yes, but I'd go further than that.

The Ford Transit was launched in the same year

as the Lost in Space Peel Trident.

But that's where the similarity ends.

Over six million Transits have been produced to date.

And as no-one buys one for fun, that tells us something.

The Transit may actually be the most useful vehicle on our roads.

There have been eight marks of Transit van

but only three basic platforms.

There are, however, innumerable variations

on the Transit theme.

There's the Luton, the drop side, the 3/4-door van,

4-door Crew Cab, the motorhome, the Connect van,

the 2-door chassis cab, the One Way Tipper... I could go on!

There's the Three Way Tipper,

the 14-seat minibus, the 17-seat minibus,

the 4x4, the XXL, the armoured van,

the riot van, the long bonnet ice cream van...

Children have been conceived in Transit vans,

other people have been murdered in them, I don't doubt.

Stolen goods have been transported,

new televisions have been delivered to excited owners.

You cannot think of a sphere of human activity

that can't actually be improved by a Transit van.

You could say this noble, heroic, big lump of metal

has done more for the common man than any car.

But, again, I'd go even further:

in its own way, the Transit has helped save the world.

Approaching now from the left of your television screens

is the brand-new 2014, Mark VIII Transit van.

Gorgeous.

The Transit van has been the best- selling light commercial vehicle

in Europe for over 40 years.

Just sign there, please.

Cheers.

Saving the world?

Well, in a way, I think it has, yes,

because it's neatly nailed the very problem

that all those makers of daft microcars were worried about:

it has reduced congestion.

Cheers, thanks.

Look at me, not driving to the supermarket.

So, that would appear to be that.

The really small car, the microcar,

is a terrible idea that came to nothing

except a lame three-wheeled joke in a sitcom about market traders.

Or is it?

We've rather overlooked a country for whom making things smaller

anybody thought possible

is something of a cultural cornerstone.

Japan.

Could they make something of the microcar idea?

The short answer: and not very wide or very tall either:

is hai.

Yes, Japan,

home to the Karaoke Kids,

used panty vending machines, Russian roulette for minors,

aerobicised exercise English lessons...

..and this, the Suzuki Wagon R.

And it has everything you could want in a car:

air-con, electric windows and mirrors, ABS, 4-speed automatic,

Sat Nav... I'll stop at the cup holder

before I turn into the brochure.

The point is it's engineered like any other modern car.

Just not quite as bigly.

This is a so-called Kei car, short for Kei Jidosha,

which translates rather disappointingly as "light car."

Kei Jidosha is a set of regulations

governing things like weight, dimensions and engine capacity.

There's just 660cc under the bonnet of that baby.

If you buy a Kei car, you pay less purchase tax

than you would on a regular size car.

There's also a weight tax in Japan. That's lower for a Kei car.

Road tax, yes, that's lower, too.

And in Japanese cities there are places where you can park a Kei car

where you're not allowed to park a normal one.

So, what's the catch?

Well, there isn't one, really.

As long as you accept your car looks a bit ridiculous.

There are millions of Kei cars in Japan, especially in the cities.

Over half of all Japanese households own one

and it's not just regular cars.

There are miniature Kei removal trucks, delivery vans...

..and bin lorries.

Meanwhile, down at the Tokyo Fire Department,

Pugh san, Pugh San, Barney McGrew san,

have started using Kei car fire engines

as part of their rapid response fleet.

It might look cute, but these are perfectly suited

to emergencies in the narrow Tokyo Streets.

Like a kitten stuck up a Bonsai tree.

It's easy to see the logic behind all this.

Japan is not a very big country.

It's also a very populous one.

More to the point, 75% of it is useless mountains,

Fuji, and what have you,

and that leaves very little room for rice,

Sumo wrestlers,

Hello Kitty, people, and cars.

So, a few inches saved here and there,

well, it all helps.

This lack of space is almost certainly at the root

of Japan's expertise in miniaturization.

They can just make anything a bit smaller.

Radios and personal hi-fi, obviously,

but also trees, escalators,

hotel rooms,

even food staples.

I mean, a grain of rice is smaller than a chip.

However, saving space was not, originally, the point of Kei cars.

It was all about, as usual, mobilising the masses.

This is all going to sound a bit familiar.

Post-war Japan was even worse than Europe.

There was devastation, poverty, no raw materials.

But the people's need for transport

was just as great as their European counterparts.

So, in 1949, Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry

came up with a sort of people's car plan.

Not one of those Ein Volk Ein Auto plans,

like the Germans had with the Beetle.

More a simple set of rules.

They called for a car with an engine of not more than 150cc,

not more than a metre wide, and costing no more than 150,000 Yen.

The idea was this would encourage development of new domestic models.

Japanese industry looked at this

and said, "Soddu offu! It's not possible."

So they lobbied government for some more reasonable rules

on engine sizes, dimensions, price, and all the rest of it.

They made some prototypes

and in about ten years they started making things like this.

This is the work of the Uchiyama Manufacturing Corporation.

They made cork for bottle stoppers

and all the other things cork is made for.

And they thought, "We'll have a go at this car lark," and set up an automotive division.

And this is what they came up with. It's called the 360,

because it has a 360cc rear-mounted V-Twin air-cooled engine.

All very people's car.

I wonder what became of the Uchiyama Manufacturing Corporation's

automotive division.

So while we in Europe we were still mucking about with three-wheel

back-to-frontmobiles, Japan let the people who actually make cars

get hold of the rules and solve the problems.

And I have to say

it is very small, it is fairly basic,

but it is a proper car.

As somebody once said of Richard Hammond:

"He's like a person, only smaller."

That's true of this, as well.

If you're a regular Top Gear viewer, you might be a bit disappointed

that this programme is full of stupid, small cars,

but, I have to say, I'm enjoying myself immensely.

This area where I'm driving, on the outskirts of Tokyo,

is proper old Japan.

The streetscape, the street plan,

is as it has been for hundreds of years,

ie, not really designed for cars.

So you can see already

the benefits of having a small car mentality are paying dividends.

I have, for example, lost our camera car,

which is a Land Rover Discovery.

The reason I can't see our camera car

is because it's managed to get itself stuck

on the narrow rural lanes

and leave some of its paint on a 1,000-year-old village fence.

Are you stuck, camera car?

I don't want to appear smug or anything

but I could get two of these through there.

One-nil to the Uchiyama Manufacturing Corporation.

What is it that made the Japanese so good at this small car lark?

Simple necessity, perhaps?

Maybe it's because Japan

was prevented from re-arming after the war,

so all its big brains went into things like cars,

motorcycles, not fighter aircraft,

missile systems programmes, and Star Wars.

Maybe it's because the Kei car rules

were reasonable, they were the result of ongoing

intelligent dialogue between government and industry,

rather than some arbitrary nonsense about three wheels or four wheels,

or bike licences, or no licence at all, and all that nonsense.

And it must be said that the benign restrictions of the Kei car class

have been a constant spur to the ingenuity of their designers.

They've come up with small metal folding roofs,

tiny little turbochargers, and all that sort of stuff,

and these cars have been a sort of showcase for technology

that has quite frankly staggered the West.

The Amara has automatic windscreen wipers.

If I pour water onto this sensor here,

they wipe automatically. Unbelievable.

These early Kei cars

are like the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Japanese car industry.

Early evidence of a national enterprise

that would go on to sweep the globe

and almost destroy the old motor industries of Britain and America.

But, for all the eventual global dominance of Suzuki, Diahatsu,

Toyota, Mazda and the like,

the Kei cars themselves still have a rather glaring shortcoming.

Since I'm not doing anything,

I haven't been for the last 20 minutes,

it's a good time to consider

the fundamental flaw of the Kei car philosophy.

Of all microcars, in fact.

Yes, they're very good for small parking spaces,

they're very good for negotiating those tiny side streets in Tokyo

and Kyoto, even Siena in Italy, or a small Cotswold village in England,

but they don't actually deal with this problem.

They don't deal with congestion

because they can't make another lane for themselves.

Now, we all get very excited about buying a very short car,

a smart car, a G-Wiz, but actually length isn't the issue.

The road is infinitely long but it's finitely wide.

To get through that, you need something very narrow.

Narrower than Jeremy Clarkson's mind.

It's been in production since 1958.

It's been made in over 20 countries around the world.

It is a product of the Rising Sun on which the sun never sets.

It's the Honda Super Cub.

And this little bike has done more

to get the people mobile than any car in history.

Pretty much the least motorcycle you can get away with.

The frame is made of pressed steel welded together,

the leg guards are just a piece of plastic,

the engine's just 50cc and it has only three gears,

but they're very cleverly spaced.

Two and three are for cruising along,

one is for climbing up hills, very steep hills, as it happens.

So, you bought a 50cc motorcycle, but Honda gave you a mountain.

Thing is, of course, it's brilliant because

it was the work of Sochiro Honda,

one of the greatest automotive minds that ever lived.

Honda, unimpressed with the dirty, unreliable bikes of the time,

wanted to make something that catered to the Japanese market.

So the Cub had an enclosed chain,

big wheels for Japans unmade roads,

very deep mudguards and that small but efficient motor.

But Honda's real masterstroke was in marketing the Cub

as a clean, safe and female friendly,

completely overturning the reputation

that motorcycles had in America.

By contrast, the Honda Super Cub was like a tea towel with puppies on it.

You meet the nicest people on a Honda.

The Cub subsequently became an unprecedented hit in the States,

in Japan, and in developing countries all over the world.

The VW beetle: 21-point-something million made.

The Fiat 124 and its derivatives, we think around 20 million.

The Ford Model T: 13-point-something million.

But this is chicken feed.

The Honda Super Cub to date...

85 million and counting.

It's by far the most successful vehicle of any kind in history.

But, for all its adaptability,

it was designed with a very specific task in mind.

Back in the 1950s, when the Super Cub was being developed,

the staple lunch of the Japanese working population

was takeaway delivery noodles.

Still is for a lot of people, of course.

And the noodles used to be delivered by bicycle.

The rider would go one-handed,

one hand on the handlebars, one hand to carry

the delicious lunch item.

For this reason, old man Honda decreed that it must be possible

to ride the Cub one-handed, because that way every single

noodle shop in Japan would buy one for deliveries.

And that is why the Super Cub still has a proper motorcycle gear change

that you operate with your foot but

has no clutch on the left hand handlebar

because the clutch is an automatic centrifugal device.

Now, Honda made a big deal of this at the Cub's launch.

The publicity picture showed it standing outside a noodle shop.

It was in fact this very noodle shop.

And that's given me an idea for a race.

To demonstrate that this little bike,

not the microcar, is the true people's champion,

we're going to have a bike versus Kei car noodle delivery race.

Starting from this historic shop, I'll bike some steaming soba noodles

ten miles across town to the Global Honda headquarters

in central Tokyo.

There, I shall offer them in homage

to the current Honda Super Cub executive, Mr Takeyama.

And my four-wheeled competition?

Mr Toshio Suzuki, Formula One driver and Le Mans 24 Hour winner.

There's only one rule:

the noodles must still be at least 50 degrees C on delivery.

Mr Suzuki wouldn't be seen dead in a Suzuki

so instead I have arranged for him to drive this:

it's the Diahatsu Copen.

Now, it looks like a shoe

but it is a perfectly miniaturized Kei sportscar.

It has a 650cc turbo-charged engine,

which will do 118mph, and has a removable roof.

Now all that remains is to decide who

goes in to buy the noodles first.

And we will decide that with a game of Janken.

Jan...ken.

Honourable victory.

Finally, I'm on the move.

It might not be the quickest start,

but I can't really blame that all on the bike.

Suzuki may be way out in front, but now that I'm on the Super Cub,

I can exploit its nimble thinness

on the congested Tokyo roads.

Select a gear.

Victory is a good as in the noodle pot.

I should explain I have a temperature gauge on the handlebars

and a thermocouple in the noodles to tell me how hot they still are.

They're 72 degrees.

They can't fall below the ideal Japanese temperature

because that would be dishonourable.

Oh, sodding traffic lights!

Japan's full of them.

I have to say, I thought this was going to be a doddle.

In a straight-up urban race

I was sure the Cub would win, no problem.

Oh, God, traffic lights.

Come on!

But suburban Japan seems to contain more red lights

than downtown Amsterdam.

Every single set of traffic lights is red.

Mr Suzuki, on the other hand,

is scything through the lights like a samurai.

As my noodles get ever cooler

and Mr Honda starts considering a pizza instead,

Mr Suzuki and the Kei car are powering on.

He's already stormed through the level crossing at Jiyugaoka,

nearly half a mile ahead of me.

But I am starting to catch up.

Hooray! Been through a green light!

I didn't think that was possible.

Right, I think I'm through the worst of it.

Time to give it 50cc worth of...

Trains!

Another train.

I'm now hopelessly behind.

Mr Suzuki and the Kei car are already over halfway to Honda

and approaching downtown.

But, like the Super Cub itself, I just carry on.

The Cub is not fast, not by modern small bike standards,

but it keeps going.

And as I at last hit a long straight of open road

I can finally deploy the ancient motorcycle secret

of putting your head down a little bit.

Up ahead, Mr Suzuki has become so over-confident

he's started to listen to his audio tapes

of aerobicised English lessons.

Little does he know I'm hard on his tail.

Come on, baby.

Have I got the balls?

Yee-ha!

We're now just two miles away from Honda HQ

and getting deep into downtown Tokyo.

I need one of those Japanese mask things.

But just ahead is Shubiya junction,

the busiest crossing in the whole of Japan.

I may be here a while.

This is the famous crossroads.

Yes, it was in Lost in Translation.

As roughly 3 billion people cross in front of me,

I notice someone driving a distinctive red car.

Oh, cock! How did he get there?

I've just seen the Copen go the other way

across the famous Shibuya crossing,

and my noodles are down to 55.

Mr Suzuki knows the territory.

And he is a racing driver, let's be honest.

Trying to stick to the route I'd memorised was getting me nowhere.

It was time to think of the Super Cub delivery boy,

use my noodle and head off the map.

Not down there.

Turn right here, take a short cut.

Soon I began to suspect the two Mexicans

fighting over a broken television is the sign for pedestrian zone.

But it's got me exactly where I want to be.

Now I've got him!

And thanks to a kamikaze lady with an umbrella,

I take the lead.

With just a mile to go to Honda,

Kei car and Cub are neck and neck,

but now I know that main roads are for losers.

50cc versus 650c and a turbo charger,

I need to find a really short cut.

This'll do.

This is why the Super Cub is the people's choice.

Yes, I might have had a bit of a shaky start,

but let's not forget, the Cub that I'm riding is 50 years old,

but it can still dart through the streets

like a metal fighting fish.

Nothing can stop noodles.

Noodles 53: that's still hot enough for any executive. Whoa!

Less than half a mile to go.

Victory is at hand.

Every time you ride a Honda Super Cub

it's with the ghost of Sochiro himself on the pillion seat.

Laughing at the success of his creation.

♪ It's all right, it's all right... ♪

That's the Honda HQ, right there.

♪ I'm gonna wake you up early

♪ Cos I'm gonna take a ride with you

♪ We're goin' down to the Honda shop I'll tell you what we're gonna do. ♪

Noodles at 51 degrees.

No sign of Suzuki.

Er...Takeyama San?

Konichiwa.

For Takeyama San.

Hi! Takeyama San? Yes. Your noodles.

51 degrees. Thank you. Delivered from the Super Cub.

A pleasure.

Thank you.

Pleasure. Honda Super Cub.

51 degrees.

As the Hondells said, it's not a big motorcycle,

just a groovy little motorbike.

But it has condemned Mr Suzuki, with his lukewarm lunch,

to shame and dishonour.

Close, but no Kei car.

So, the microcar, whether in Japan or Europe,

never really dealt with the challenges posed by congestion.

It was just quite easy to park.

As for the Super Cub,

well, I liked it so much I rode it all the way back to England.

This difficult period in the history of the people's car,

the '50s and 60s,

seems to have yielded an unlikely pair of champions,

because neither of them is a car.

And, let's not forget,

this is exactly how the modern world works, with vans and small bikes.

Back in the early noughties, the buzz-word of the day was

"Go for it!"

But now we realise that that's all complete nonsense.

Why not just have whatever "it" is delivered?

But let's not write the '50s and '60s off just yet.

They did, of course,

produce one of the greatest people's cars of all time.

Some of you will have guessed what it is.

Some of you will be screaming at the television. "Come on!

"Where is it?"

Well, don't worry, because it's here.

The Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.

See you next time.

A lifetime ago, car ownership was a great privilege.

We can all remember our grandparents saying, "Only the doctor had one."

But, by the time I was born, having your own wheels was

beginning to look like an inalienable right,

and public transport was a hangover

from an earlier, less enlightened time.

So now definitions must be revised

if we are to separate mere motor vehicles

from the true cars of the people.

Hey-hey!

'This week: aspiration. The cars we always dreamed about.'

Boing, boing, boing.

'And how that occasionally meant a nightmare.'

If this is your small and tasteful gated community then I'm very sorry.

'And. finally, we arrive at the perfect people's car.

'Don't worry, it'll be finished by the time we get there.

'Also, two sales reps take their trousers off.'

Last week we discovered that Japan's greatest people's car

was a motorcycle.

Sorry about that.

At least Britain's greatest people's car was actually a car.

It just wasn't this one.

Look, I love Minis.

I've had three Minis, in fact, and I know the Mini was important,

but it's all been said 5,387,862 times.

Which is how many they made.

I could bang on for ages about how, in 1959,

the Austin Mini's inspirational design, blah, blah,

a new golden era of, etc, etc.

But I bet you've heard it all before.

So let's keep it mini.

I'll do you the executive summary.

Radical transverse front-engine, front-wheel-drive, packaging,

Issigonis, Michael Caine, Italian Job, classless, Twiggy,

string-pull door handles, sliding windows,

Peter Sellers, Elke Sommer naked, The Italian Job

water in the distributor cap, bypass hose, Marc Bolan,

also available as a van.

In any case, this week it's social mobility that interests me.

That's why I'd like to suggest that Britain's greatest

people's car is not the Mini but...

..the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.

And the story of its transformation from in-your-face aristocrat

to aspirational people's hero

is a lot more complex than a quickie in a Mini.

When the Silver Shadow was launched in 1965,

it was a radical departure for Rolls-Royce.

Now, it may not look it now, with its overbearing presence

and that radiator grille nicked from the Acropolis,

but this was actually a pretty modern car by anybody's standards.

For a Rolls-Royce, it was VERY modern.

Rolls-Royce, like Kim Kardashian's booty,

stretches back a long, long way.

A temple to tradition, luxury and class,

Rolls-Royce was the chariot of presidents, kings and tycoons.

Owning one sent a message to the rest of society

and that message was, "Naff off!"

But the times, the people, and car design, were a-changing.

Up until now, R-R had built cars the old-fashioned way,

on a separate chassis.

But the Silver Shadow was unitary:

the body shell formed the structural substance of the car so there

were no huge girders running underneath and this meant that,

even though this was smaller and lower than the car it replaced,

it actually offered superior legroom.

Pretty much everything about the Silver Shadow

was new and radically hi tech.

There were high-pressure hydraulics to operate the new-fangled

disc brakes and the self-levelling suspension.

The seats, gear change, windows, air conditioning

and even the fuel filler flap were operated electrically.

Monocles fell out everywhere.

More importantly, Rolls-Royce had identified a new type of customer.

It wasn't the aristocrat of old, who just sat in the back

while his chauffeur stayed at the front and did all the work.

No, this was a new breed of self-made owner-driver.

Entrepreneurs, industrialists, and then famous artists, photographers,

pop stars, television personalities.

I can't think of anyone else I should mention.

It was boom time.

The Shadow said you were part of the boom like nothing else.

But a status symbol for self-made millionaires

hardly qualifies this as a people's car.

That came about from Rolls-Royce making a cataclysmic error.

To try to keep up with the demand from all those new money buyers

springing up all over the place, they over produced.

More Silver Shadows were made than any other Rolls.

That meant the second-hand market became saturated

and prices plummeted.

Eventually, over-supply meant that second-hand Silver Shadows

fell into the hands of the sort of people who perhaps weren't

prepared to give them the love that a complex hand-built car needs.

Because, contrary to popular belief,

a neglected Rolls-Royce will go wrong and it will go rusty.

So, while the prices of the cars came down,

if anything, the size of the bills went the other way.

Soon, shabby Shadows could be seen hanging out

in some very questionable company.

By the mid 1980s, a used Silver Shadow becomes

something of a badge of office for disreputable professions.

Scrap metal dealing, the specialist video industry, that kind of thing.

But move forward a couple more decades

and something interesting has happened.

The sick Shads have been put down or cannibalised for spares and

the sparkly survivors are driven by people who just appreciate

this thing for what it is: a lovely car.

People like this misty-eyed fool.

Now it's an equal opportunities car because everyone,

everyone, regardless of age or gender or race or religious belief

or political persuasion or class or income or profession

or dress sense or sexual inclination or hairstyle,

can drive one of these.

You simply cannot look bad in a Shad.

It's still faintly, almost comedically British

and yet somehow it's multicultural.

No other car does that.

When it came out in the 1960s,

the Shadow cost twice the price of the average UK home: about £6,500.

Today, a good one is yours for a 20th of the average UK house price.

So, from '60s millionaires to dodgy dealers to now pretty much

everyone, the Shadow has, in its way, represented the masses.

But there's one more reason I feel that this truly is a people's car.

Well, here's one thought.

That plethora of second-hand Shadows meant that it soon became

very popular, obviously, with the wedding car business.

And I can't prove this, but I reckon that more British couples

have taken their first car journey of married life

in the back of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow than in any other car.

And that makes it deeply significant in the lives of millions.

Meanwhile, back in the '60s, another car maker: a big one this time:

was about to unleash something that would get straight to the point.

It's a Mark 1 Ford Mustang and,

admittedly, it isn't a dirt cheap utilitarian runabout,

but it was a people's car nevertheless,

because it gave the people hope.

Launched in 1964 to almost orgasmic excitement across the pond,

the Mustang was actually based on the mechanical underpinnings

of a fairly humdrum saloon: the Ford Falcon.

But that was a good thing.

Because it was just a saloon car underneath,

the Mustang didn't cost much more than one.

And that was fantastic news if you thought you were condemned to

a life of family car dreariness.

And to be honest, if you'd grown up driving a European hot hatch:

in fact, even if you grew up driving a Rolls-Royce:

you'd find this fairly appalling.

It's cumbersome, it's crude, it's bouncy,

it doesn't really handle very well.

But then, you see, it's a Mustang:

it's untamed. It has a nice, feral quality.

Boing, boing.

Over here, we thought this was a great idea. Like nylon.

Ford of Europe saw the Mustang and they saw that it was good.

So they took the bare bones of their best-selling saloon and,

by 1969, had come up with: you've probably guessed it by now:

the Capri.

Ha-ha!

The Capri worked, and for exactly the same reason the Mustang had.

Here was the type of car that was normally the preserve of toffs,

playboys, rotters: a two-door coupe with a long and lascivious bonnet.

And now you could have one

for not much more than the price of a Cortina.

Look.

Look again.

Go ahead. Dream some more.

The new Ford Capri is very generous with its room and comfort.

To someone my age, the very expression "three-litre Capri"

is enough to make your heart go at least 50% faster.

At your Ford dealers now.

You are contemptuous of the needs

of family and luggage and all that sort of thing. You have a Capri.

Most of the car is in front of you

and that's the way it was with great cars back then.

I've often wondered which one was actually best:

America's or Europe's blue collar hero.

Well, much as I do like the Capri,

famous real-life owners of the Mustang include Jim Morrison,

Neil Armstrong, Bruce Willis and Tom Cruise.

Famous Capri owners include...

..Cliff Richard.

Plus, being American, the Mustang can handle more doughnuts.

Well, that would seem to hand it to the Mustang.

But hang on a minute. I've just thought of something.

Jackie Stewart had a Capri.

So did James Hunt, in fact. That gives it a bit more credibility.

And there's something else as well. As far as we can make out,

there's never been a car chase between a Capri and a Mustang.

Now, I'm sure there must be some polystyrene barriers and

plastic fruit stalls

and inexplicable piles of cardboard boxes

somewhere on this industrial estate.

The Capri...

was great.

And Ford plays an important role in breaking down the old order.

Here was a louche car for every man:

a car that said something about you.

But not actually because of the contemptuously small boot,

not because of the rakish two-door styling or the vinyl roof,

or the two doors, or the exciting array of instruments.

Not even because of this beautiful, long bonnet.

It was actually because of this.

The badge.

Now, this is a 3000 E.

It might easily have been a 1.3L, or XL, or the XLR.

Or it could have been a two-litre GL.

Or a GXL, or even ultimately the Ghia.

This was still Britain.

You were still expected to know your place.

And Ford could tell you what that was with unprecedented precision.

My very first car was one of these:

a Vauxhall Cavalier Mark 1. Ha-ha!

Except, actually, mine wasn't quite like this

because I think this is a 1.9 GL.

Oh, yeah, proper upholstery.

Wow. The speedo on this one goes up to 140.

Mine was actually the very basic 1.6 L model.

It didn't even have a clock. But then, the previous owner had been

an industrial representative in t'North of England.

Now, your car is supposed to say something about you

and the 1.6 L said something very definite about him.

Every single blanked-off switch and missing feature was there,

or rather wasn't there, to remind him of his failure.

And that was exactly the point.

The company car: it was a peculiarly British thing.

Well, of course it was.

We had a class system in society, we needed one on the roads as well.

What do I like about the Astra CDi?

Well, it's an "i", and "i" means "important" these days.

There's no CD badge on the back and that's disappointing.

It's difficult for someone following to know you're driving a CD Astra.

Vauxhall, Ford, British Leyland, Talbot:

they seemed to be offering a world of magnificent choice.

You could have different engines, different trim levels,

two headlights or four headlights. But, in reality,

they were making the rungs of an automotive social ladder.

It was a system more arcane than the table manners in Downton Abbey.

So, I've enlisted two experts,

former sales fleet managers Ian and James,

who join me on a day that suitably represents

the glamour of life as a '70s business traveller.

When I was a lad, in the '70s,

one boy's father had a two-litre L

and another boy's dad had the two-litre GL,

and we knew instinctively that GL Dad was just more successful

with women and GL Boy would have better football boots.

It all started off very innocently with Ls

and then it all got quite complicated.

It was a bit of a psychological war, really.

Part of it is driven by ego.

Nobody sees what your pay cheque is

but they sure as hell see the GL or the L or the Ghia.

And, as you drove up the motorway and people passed you,

you'd instinctively look at the boot to see what his was.

And if he was doing better or worse than you.

'There's something very playground about all this.

'There's obviously all the usual comparisons

'you'd look for in a car.'

96 horsepower, not bad.

108mph, 0-60 in 13 seconds...

'But then there's the mystical L, XL, GLS,

'the leftover scrabble letters of aspiration that signify

'a whole baffling world of proto-bling.'

Boot light. Fog light. Electric windows.

'A real-life Top Trumps.'

It's got a clock.

This would be the car that typically was driven by the junior salesman.

Wood trim dashboard fascia. I don't believe it.

It does!

Vinyl roof.

I don't think I've seen one of these since

Peter Gabriel was still in Genesis.

Oh, man.

This is just glorious, this thing.

Oh.

'I might be worryingly overcome by velour seat envy.

'But when it comes to the ranking of electric windows above a vinyl

'roof, it's clear that this was the sort of debate that would

'have started bloody brawls in Happy Eaters up and down the M1.'

13.6 seconds to 60 and only 91mph.

Do you realise your car is so slow?

It may be slow but it is a Crusader so it has the stripes

and the velour interior.

Oooh!

I am going to put it in front of the Mark 2 Cavalier 1.6 L

simply on the basis of the wood, the wheel trims,

the coach lining and the crushed velour. Fair?

Well, yes, but in terms of sales appeal,

the Cavalier would have had it.

Really?

'Decrypting Ian and James's cipher of just what SLX or WTF means

'might as well be a scene from The Da Vinci Code.'

The Cavalier was more appealing? Oh, I would've said so.

Even though it was a more basic model? Yes, I would've said so.

So this badge hierarchy, actually, they got it wrong?

I think there is an element of it's the badge, it's also the time.

'I have fallen down the rabbit hole.

'Ian will now only answer me in a series of riddling clues.

'And it's doing to the inside of my head

'what the wind is doing for my hair.'

Well, chaps, that's been absolutely fascinating

and I am absolutely none the wiser but thank you very much anyway.

It's been a pleasure.

The thing is, this whole badging business, it was full of more

social pitfalls than a multi-denominational dinner party,

but what I do remember from my time as a teenager was that

the big company car war was between Ford and Vauxhall.

That's what matters.

So...

..let's have a race.

Cavalier or Sierra?

Which one was actually best?

Well, it's time to find out once and for all.

Here we have the two ultimate final editions of these cars.

The Cavalier Calibre and the Sierra XR4x4i.

And our reps, Clive and Trevor, are going to race down the runway

and back again to the start.

But there are several business challenges on the way.

First one back wins a box of wine...

from Austria.

Three, two, one, close that sale!

♪ One, two, three, four

♪ Roadrunner, roadrunner... ♪

It's an early-off-the-blocks for the Ford Sierra.

♪ Gonna drive past the Stop 'n' Shop

♪ With the radio on... ♪

Trevor and the Ford Sierra remain slightly ahead,

but Clive in the Vauxhall Cavalier

is just a Ginsters pasty-length behind

as our reps hit the first obstacle.

After putting on their jackets to make themselves suitably

presentable, they must press a pair of trousers

inside these roadside-standard B&B trouser presses.

And Trevor has reached his trouser press first

on this wonderfully bracing day

here on the North Weald Airfield racecourse.

Clive in the Vauxhall Cavalier

displaying some sloppy trouser technique, there,

but it's drawn them back level.

As the reps hit the gas,

it's Clive's Vauxhall Cavalier that's off the mark quicker,

but the Ford Sierra soon pummels the gap once again,

giving Trevor the advantage

as they approach the course's second obstacle.

Here, after putting on their jackets once again,

both men must photocopy

a vital annual sales and analytic statistics marketing report.

Trevor's appropriately jacketed, first in at the photocopier.

But he's forgotten the printer toner:

a rookie sales mistake unbefitting of his high-end company car.

Meanwhile, Clive's stolen the lead

and is well on the way to installing his printer toner.

Trevor appears to be using the shove-it-in-anywhere-he can

technique favoured by many away-from-home salesmen

in the 1980s.

♪ And I say roadrunner once

♪ Roadrunner twice

♪ I'm in love with rock'n'roll... ♪

Clive continues to look befuddled: I did not see this presenting

quite such a challenge to our two competitors today.

Oh, Trevor's just lost February to March of the marketing report:

they'll not be happy with that at head office.

And Clive's just got a face-full of printer toner!

But it's Clive in the Cavalier who has successfully negotiated

the photocopying, leaving Trevor languishing behind.

This could swing the race for Vauxhall.

Trevor's photocopies are a horribly smudged and blurred mess,

but he's back in the game.

It's the Vauxhall's race to lose as Clive is comfortably ahead

and already at the final obstacle.

After putting on his jacket once more he must retrieve his

pristinely pressed trousers, shave and then head for the finish.

Clive is first back to the Vauxhall Cavalier with the trousers,

but Trevor isn't far behind.

Trevor fast closing the gap now.

♪ Goin' a thousand miles an hour

♪ Gonna drive to the Stop 'n' Shop... ♪

And it's Trevor: Trevor, who is first away,

retaking the lead quite literally by the seat of his pants.

As Clive pursues

while frantically trying to remove his five o'clock shadow.

It may be too late, as both cars approach the line.

♪ That's right

♪ Bye-bye. ♪

Well, there you go.

20 years of bitterness, resentment, stress-induced illness:

20 years of social angst.

Winners drive Fords.

And it's very difficult for me to say that

as a former Vauxhall owner.

This is James May at North Weald Airfield,

cold, wet, very BLEEP off.

But while our dads lay awake dreaming of velour seats

and wood-trimmed dashboard fascias, we, the teenagers of the era,

were indulging loftier fantasies.

Pin-ups.

Sam Fox, obviously, but also this kind of thing.

This was a time when the development of a pubescent boy

could be accelerated with a picture of a car.

Now, these are a couple of all-time favourites:

I put them up there when I was about 14,

and they're still there.

The Lamborghini Countach,

the Porsche 911 Turbo.

Phwoar!

♪ You got the touch... ♪

These unattainable beauties kept me going single-handedly through

the dark nights of those difficult years.

Launched in 1974 as the LP400,

the Countach remains a nodal high point in radical automotive styling.

And perhaps the most uncompromised expression

of what came to be known in the vernacular as wedge design.

The name "Countach"

is derived from an involuntary Italian ejaculation

meaning something like, "Cor, what a smasher, Luigi."

A reaction not even slightly diminished by the passage

of time and the metamorphosis of the original into this, the...

Oh, hang on a minute.

I've forgotten something.

'80s reality check number one:

having to tentatively reverse

and manoeuvre between bollards in a Lamborghini Countach

results in me looking neither gnarly nor bodacious.

Ah, well. It'll be worth it once I fit the piece de air resistance.

I don't suppose you've got the wing for the back?

That one? Yes. Yeah, yeah.

You know it slows you down... I'm not worried about that.

No? No. It looks cool.

I'm borrowing this Countach from my mate Harry,

who actually decided to live the bedroom dream

of owning an '80s pin-up car.

The thing is, when we grew up, we never saw these cars. No.

You had to buy the poster: you couldn't go on YouTube.

You couldn't see, you know... "Oh, look, I've seen a Countach."

I saw one in London, I was 18, 19:

on the other side of the street was a blue Countach.

I had to take a picture, and this picture was in my photo album:

and then, very embarrassing, I then cut out a picture of me

and stuck me next to the Countach

so I could say, "Yes, I'm next to the Countach."

I want to make it absolutely clear

that these days Harry is a perfectly normal man, he's married,

he has a happy home life, he hasn't suffered from having posters

or indeed owning a Lamborghini.

This is a sensitive question at our age,

but has the wing made you more attractive to the ladies

than when you drive your Countach without the wing?

I think it just attracts more blokes than girls, actually.

Really? Yeah.

Desperately disappointing. Yeah.

The wing was absolutely pointless.

It doesn't work as a spoiler, it doesn't provide down force.

If anything, it accentuates the lift at the front.

But who cares?

It's bitchin'.

Rod Stewart had one of these.

And he had leopard print trousers and a massive train set,

so it's cool.

'80s reality check two:

pin-up cars look fantastic framed on sunset beaches.

They look slightly less good

being dragged through waterlogged ditches around Oxfordshire.

So, let's get this thing on the road, sharpish.

I don't care if you hate supercars,

or you hate the idea of being flashy, or excessive consumption:

look at this car on your screen

and tell me it isn't a thing of utter wonder and beauty.

Because it is.

Let's drop it down a cog and give it some beans.

Yes!

Well, that's quite terrifying.

Let's take this back to subsonic, before I Bobby Brown my trousers.

I suspect all this spray is actually giving my Lamborghini

a bit of a soft-focus look.

It's another great '80s effect, really. It's poster art.

Probably looks a little bit like a gentle porn film.

I'm off for some tryst somewhere.

Everything about the Countach was quite a bit more exciting

than the equivalent bit in your dad's car.

The engine in this one is a 5.2 litre V12,

developing 455 horsepower: that is actually quite a lot.

2 litre Granada had something like a hundred horsepower.

Meh.

There have been other amazing cars since,

but I'm not sure anything has ever seemed quite so modern

and quite so stunning as the Countach.

It still looks modern now.

The engine was behind you, and it had two radiators,

fed with air by scoops apparently from a fighter aircraft.

The rear tyres were the fattest ever fitted to a car.

The doors opened upwards like something out of Back To The Future.

The seats sported Miami Beach six packs,

and it had that wing: which was supposedly to stop it taking off.

It was unbelievably exotic,

and we were weak at the knees at the thought of it.

Now, at last, I'm in one.

And it is...

terrible.

It's an old car, now.

It's also a supercar,

so it's not very good round town.

But then, supercars aren't, are they?

It does about 15 miles to the gallon, which is terrible,

but I suppose Rod Stewart wasn't really interested

in the price of petrol.

The cold, hard, grown-up reality of it is,

unless you do happen to live on the sun-kissed shores of California,

then owning one of these things is utterly, hopelessly impractical.

Sorry, Harry.

The visibility is very poor.

The seats are uncomfortable.

The windows only open a couple of inches, look,

and the interior was designed by a man who loaded some instruments

and switches into a blunderbuss and then fired it at the fascia.

The engine is not, as it would be on a modern Lamborghini, fuel-injected.

It's fed by six twin-choke carburettors,

and that effectively means it has a carburettor per cylinder.

And setting that lot up to run smoothly

is a bit like trying to synchronise 12 mopeds.

Still, it could be worse.

They've closed the road.

I don't believe that.

Oh, God.

As I've already discovered,

manoeuvring in this Countach is a bit tight.

♪ You're sort of stuck where you are... ♪

I can't really see...

♪ But in your dreams you can buy expensive cars... ♪

The people who live here are going to be chuffed to bits, aren't they?

♪ Or live on Mars

♪ And have it your way... ♪

If this is your small and tasteful gated community,

then I'm very sorry.

The opportunities for smacking this on something are absolutely massive.

So difficult to see the extremes.

It's pretty difficult when you're driving along in a straight line,

never mind doing this sort of thing.

♪ In your dreams show no mercy. ♪

Yes, I know, it's for barrelling along a big, wide road,

not exploring the back streets of medieval England.

But even then you could still be going home to a maintenance bill

bigger than MC Hammer's trousers.

The suspension on this car is rose-jointed, like a racing car's.

What that means is, there aren't any nice, soft, forgiving rubber bits

in it, it's all just metal on metal.

They could wear out in as little as 800 miles,

so if you drove from London to Edinburgh and back,

you could be due for a very expensive undercarriage rebuild.

So, it was a great poster.

But actually driving a Countach is like discovering that...

Sam Fox is a drag artist.

♪ Gotta get back in time... ♪

But that was the point about supercars of the '80s:

we plebs were never meant to drive them,

we were just supposed to admire them.

When we grew up, there was an automotive drudge waiting for us:

badged L, or maybe E.

Wasn't there?

While we were kneeling in awe before those graven images

of Italian and German supermodels,

something very interesting was happening.

Performance was being democratised,

and this is where I first saw the true light.

The Ford Escort XR3.

Now, it is still an Escort: a very humdrum car:

but this one is different.

It has tricked-up suspension, a bit more power:

and those wheels.

Yeah!

Ignition...

..first gear, Spandau Ballet...

♪ Gold

♪ Always believe in your soul... ♪

Just about the time I started driving,

a bloke I knew bought one of these.

And from that moment on, he was virtually unapproachable.

He had an Escort XR3!

He must have had loadsa money.

Unlike the ethereal supercars, the XR3 was real.

A performance car that you could see, touch and, crucially, possess.

One of the things that made this car appealing was that it

sat in Ford showrooms alongside all those cars

that were secretly oppressing us: the Cortina L and the GL and the GXL

and the 2000E, all that hierarchical stuff, and then amongst it, this.

An Escort with XR3 on the back.

XR3: it sounds like...

Well, it sounds like a space ship, doesn't it?

The XR3 wasn't alone on Planet Hatchback.

The early '80s saw an invasion of small,

souped-up cars propelled by no-nonsense advertising.

The Thatcher years would end up being remembered

not as the era of the supercar,

but the time of cheesy synthpop and hot hatches.

Look, I'm not going to claim that a warmed-up Escort

was the foil to the supercar.

The Countach got to 60 in half the time, and was 70mph faster.

If this was a pub debate, that would be the end of that.

But there's another way of looking at this.

A hot hatch is just a car.

Driving one is no different from driving the regular version.

Hot hatches are light.

Hot hatches are modestly sized, so they're wieldy.

Meanwhile, '70s and '80s supercars were full of tricks and vices.

Not for the unwary.

And one, above all, had a had a lethal reputation.

It's a 1975 Porsche 911 Turbo.

Just like the one on my poster.

Let's take it for a spin.

Turbo!

What a word!

It wasn't a new idea in engineering, to be honest.

Aero engines had had turbochargers for decades,

but it was the great hope of performance motoring.

In basic terms, a turbocharger made any given engine...

well, bigger.

"Turbo" means simply that an exhaust-driven impeller

charges the engine's cylinders with more fuel

and air mixture than they would get under atmospheric pressure.

So, you got the power.

Remember, the vast majority of what a car engine burns is, in fact, air.

So, if you can put more air in, and a little bit more fuel in:

wahey!

The turbo-charged 911 could reach 60 in 5,2 seconds:

a second and a half quicker than the non-turbo version.

Was there a catch?

Oh, yes.

Barroom philosophers will always tell you that the

Porsche 911 could bite back.

Part of the problem was the layout: the engine was right at the back,

so the whole car behaved like a giant pendulum in the corners.

But in the Turbo you had the added problem that the power

came on a bit suddenly.

But that wasn't all: the Turbo suffered from a massive time lag.

This meant you were never quite sure

when all that power would make itself known at the rear wheels.

And that spelt disaster for many a chinless yuppie

who'd invested your whole pension in one.

There goes another stockbroker.

The thing is, even by modern standards,

this is still a very, very quick car:

but it's terrifying.

And that is exactly my point.

I've always said that I've never driven a car

that actually played any tricks on me:

I always knew I was being an idiot before the car told me I was,

but actually I'm going to revise that.

I think an old 911 Turbo DOES play tricks on you.

It really will catch you out.

For a nation growing ever more wealthy and upwardly mobile,

the 911 Turbo was peerless,

sophisticated and very, very desirable.

It promised us the world.

Well, either that or a terrifying short cut out of it.

To paraphrase The Rolling Stones, you can't always get what you want,

and if you try too hard, you might find...

yourself in a ditch.

Anyway, this has got me thinking: here is a Peugeot 205 GTI 1.9.

It is a definitive 1980s hot hatchback.

It can be a bit wayward at the limit,

but it's front wheel drive, so ultimately it's benign.

Over here is our Porsche 911 Turbo:

unusually, and probably rather briefly,

pointing in the right direction.

Now, in the hands of a professional,

the Porsche would be quicker around a race track: of course it would.

But what about in the hands of mere mortals?

The sort of frustrated fantasists who prostrated

themselves before the posters of that glorious era.

It's time to find out.

Here are our two sales reps from earlier on.

They've washed the toner off their faces

and smartened themselves up a bit.

Clive used to have a poster of the 911 Turbo on his bedroom wall.

Trevor used to have a poster of Bananarama,

so they are eminently well-qualified.

Now, how shall we sort this out?

In three, two, one, yah!

♪ Your soul don't burn You dark the sun

♪ Rain down fire on everyone

♪ Scabs, police, government thieves

♪ Venal, psychic amputees

♪ Parasitic, you're syphilitic

♪ Parasitic, you're syphilitic

♪ Swastika eyes

♪ You got swastika eyes

♪ Swastika eyes

♪ Swastika eyes. ♪

So there you go. Just a little bit of extra power to the people

can topple the nobs from their high-performance pedestal.

Once again, the cars of the people gave us hope.

This is James May reporting from Rockingham Motor Speedway,

cold, wet, and very BLEEP off.

The hot hatch is still with us, the company car almost forgotten.

But there is a legacy.

Gone are those ranges that were graduated as precisely as an engineer's ruler:

L, GL with a clock, GLS with a clock and a rev counter,

but if anything, the opportunities

for interfering with an individual car's specification have increased.

These are the ultimate expressions of it:

trendy cars that can be almost infinitely reconfigured to suit

the individual owner's taste.

The Mini comes in baffling variety and with very aspirational names

such as the Mini Bayswater or the Mini Hogarth Roundabout.

I made that one up, but you can get a Mini Clubman Bond Street.

The new Beetle Cabriolet,

the latest edition of the very car that Adolf Hitler had.

You can spend up to £35,000 on one of these,

including £10,000 worth of options:

amongst them, the Beetle clothes hanger, £21.50.

The Fiat 500: now, apparently,

there are half a million permutations of all the options

you can have on this car. I'll not go through them all,

but they include a whiteboard on the glove box

and "balls" stickers for £190.

And we don't know what those are.

So, in a way, this is more power to the motoring people than ever.

All the extras that defined the company car of old

are now in an options tombola.

As the old saying goes, give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.

Give a man a Fiat with 500,000 choices

and he won't work out the brochure in one lifetime.

The problem for me is that they are so unashamedly retro,

and retro design makes me uneasy.

It smacks of a lack of confidence, I think, by the makers

and to some extent by the buyers as well.

I mean, old cars, real old cars,

they're great, they're a warning from history, but new cars,

surely new cars should be new.

And while we're on warnings from history, here's another:

old being passed off as new.

The Bond Bug.

By 1970, things in Britain were looking a bit grim.

The empire had gone. We had to accept

that we weren't going to be a part of the space race.

We were beginning to retreat into a world of sci-fi and fantasy,

but it was OK because we could offer you a car

shaped like a piece of cheese that looked from the future.

It seems mad to think that this monstrosity:

it looks like Marge Simpson's tried to iron her own head:

was ever a car to aspire to own, but to a kid in the '70s, it was.

The Bond Bug was an attempt by Reliant

to make the three-wheeler appealing to a younger market

and actually, it did work

because when I was a kid, a bloke up the road had one of these

and we just thought he was the coolest dude in creation.

We would have fallen around laughing at anybody who had a Reliant

but a Bond Bug: Bond Bug was brilliant.

Reliant genuinely believed that the bug would...

well, drive a wedge into the sporty two-seater market.

Yes, really.

What do we like in a small car?

We like small tyres so there isn't too much grip,

we like a perky engine, and very sharp steering.

It has all of those.

It doesn't have fifth gear, though, and I keep going for it.

We also like a car to be bright orange with some black decals on it.

I think initially these cars were only available

to Tomorrow's World presenters, people like that,

but pretty soon they filtered down into the community at large.

And that's where the problems began.

It soon became clear that the bug

was nowhere near as modern as it made out.

One of the things that characterised the 1970s,

particularly in Britain, I think, is that we had technical ambitions

and aesthetic vision far ahead of our actual engineering ability,

so this thing, it looks like it comes from the year 2020,

but actually, it's pretty old-fashioned.

It's got a basic engine at the back, it's got four speeds.

It's only got three wheels, let's be honest.

It's not really a very interesting car,

not from a technical point of view.

There are only really three parts to the bodywork of a Bond Bug.

There's the basic tub itself, the hinged canopy part

and the little opening flap at the back: that's it.

Everything else is screwed or bolted in place.

Sometimes not that thoroughly.

There was no disguising it:

Reliant's Bond Bug was just dreary old Uncle Robin

in a funny party hat.

So, the bug was reversed into the lock-up of automotive oblivion.

Trying to pass off the past as the future fooled no-one.

If only they'd done it the other way around.

20 years later, the Japanese did.

They took the essence of the old and stuffed it with the new

to create the Mazda MX5.

What Mazda did with the MX5 was to take an old philosophy

and then drag it, willingly, as it turns out, into the modern world.

The MX5 was an instant hit.

A fun and affordable roadster

designed purely and unashamedly for the people's pleasure.

What a brilliant idea. Why did no-one think of it before?

This is a Mark 1 MX5, launched in 1989, and actually,

it is a piece of retro design.

It's very obviously a bit of a rip-off of the original Lotus Elan.

It even has the pop-up headlights, but the remarkable thing is,

on the Mazda, they pop up...

and pop back down...

together, whereas on the Lotus you often ended up driving around

sort of winking at people in a slightly inappropriate manner.

Most importantly, Mazda got that famous basic formula

absolutely right: the engine,

the driven wheels, the skinny little tyres, and all the rest of it.

For decades, the British and the Italians were

the champions of the small roadster.

MG, Fiat, Austin Healey,

Triumph, Alfa Romeo and Lotus.

These roadsters defined the spirit of motoring, but by the late '70s,

and not for the first time, European standards started to slip.

We were beginning to fall out of love with the roadster.

The designs were archaic.

The build quality was indifferent.

They had dodgy electrics

and hoods that leaked like government ministries.

The hot hatch was the new thing:

perky, more powerful versions of four-seat, three-door family cars.

The European roadster suddenly became an antique.

It was something to be driven only on a Sunday,

and even then only if you knew a bloke with a van.

And yet the Mazda, the same basic idea, was all the rage.

I know, because I've done it,

that if you stepped into an old '70s MG after this

it would feel like a damp postcard from an English seaside holiday.

Terrible.

I have to conclude that it was the cars that were at fault,

not the philosophy. The philosophy is brilliant.

The cars had just become annoying.

Thank God we've got the Japanese.

It's so simple: if you keep everything small,

everything light, you don't need hundreds of horsepower.

A little four-cylinder job will do.

And because this car is short, then, because of boring reasons to do with

physics and something called polar inertia, it will turn smartly.

It all makes perfect sense.

Why did we ever forget about it? Hmm?

And the roof comes off, and that trumps everything.

Now all I need is some sun.

I had one of these. So did my dad.

It's a sort of ageless car.

Anybody can drive it: a misty-eyed nostalgist who remembers

the lovely days of the '60s when it never rained, obviously,

and modern youngsters who simply want a simple, low-maintenance car

to have fun in.

It is a people's car. It's for all the people.

Most importantly, the MX5 worked.

It worked perfectly and it didn't leak.

Over three generations of this car, almost a million have been sold.

Small beer by people's car standards, I know,

but it remains the world's best-selling small roadster.

We talked about cars that gave the people hope.

And the MX5 helped realise the hopes of generations of roadster drivers,

the hope that you would reach your destination.

So the Mazda was good, because it worked,

but it was successful because of the way it looked,

because of the lifestyle it hinted at.

And if we go back to the Lamborghini we saw earlier,

that didn't really work that well, but look what it said about you

with its scoops and its wing and all this stuff here,

it was just fantastic.

We've been talking about people's cars of hope,

how choice gave us more freedom and made us happier,

but isn't choice really just another form of tyranny?

They are just... I know this is the sort of thing boring people say,

but they are just cars.

They're for getting from one place to another, from A to B.

So wouldn't life be easier

if we just had a car in the way that we have a National Insurance number?

But what would it be?

Not this hideous boogie bus, that's for sure,

and what is the perfect people's car anyway?

Is it just the cheapest car possible so more people could own it?

Is it a political instrument, a national statement?

Does it say something about the self

or does it work for the benefit of the whole? It's a tricky one.

The answer can be found somewhere that embraces the heights of modern

innovation while acknowledging the weight and experience of history.

In fact, we could have saved ourselves a lot of time and bother

because it's where we started in the first place.

So what is the people's car of the 21st century?

Well, I think there is one.

It's a practical, reasonably priced, five seater. It's good to drive

but it's not too big.

You can have a basic, frugal model or you can have a sporty version.

It's classless, it's tasteful, it's inconspicuous, it's well-made

and it's just sensible enough.

If you re-write the rules of the people's car for the modern age,

it fits perfectly.

And even though we live now in a world of overwhelming automotive choice,

I believe it is the only car the world actually needs.

It is, in case you hadn't guessed, the Golf.

Not a totes radical choice, I know.

But ask yourself, "Why not just have a Golf?"

Why hadn't I got one, in fact?

It's the second best selling car range in history at around

30 million and stretches all the way back from the current

seventh generation car to the original of 1974.

The Golf was designed to be the much belated replacement to VW's Beatle

and as difficult second albums go, it was a bit of a stormer.

Simple, attractive with Italian design,

good handling and an affordable price.

And it was a hatchback.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

As things turn out, it still is.

Each new generation's stuck with the same simple recipe,

establishing the Golf as a wheeled staple.

Golf's are like potatoes, you wouldn't want to do without them.

Even though they're not really that exciting.

Hey! Allow to me interrupt this lovely filmic montage

while I talk about the GTI version of the Golf.

This is a Mark 2 GTI, from the 1980s.

I know it's not the mould-breaking original, but it's

the one all my yuppie mates had

when I was in my 20s and I couldn't afford a car.

So it's the one I resent.

To some people the Golf GTI is responsible for redrawing the

battle lines of the class war, especially in Britain.

And therefore it is an instrument of evil.

Maybe.

Mind you, if you've already produced the Beetle, you can

probably get away with it.

Remember what I was saying earlier?

How the hot hatch destroyed the old school two-seater roadster?

The Golf GTI was the main culprit.

It's tremendous, though.

Why didn't I have one of these in the 1980s?

And a job with a salary of pounds attractive.

As well as making me well jelly, the GTI shows what a durable idea

the Golf is.

As it manages to be a great car in its own right that's still

contained under the Golf umbrella.

Hang on a minute. Hang on. Stop.

I think I might have got a bit carried away with this idea.

You see, there have been 30 million Golfs built over the whole seven generation life of the thing.

There have been something like 40 million Toyota Corollas,

if you count every car that has the name Corolla on it.

But there are over a billion cars on the planet today.

So what's 30 or 40 million here or there?

The VW Beetle, the best selling single car in history?

There were only ever 21.5 million. So it barely registers.

In any case, there are over seven billion people on the planet

so in crude statistical terms, there's only one car for every seven people.

There aren't even enough seats to go around.

And, of course, one and a quarter billion of those people live in absolute

poverty, so have probably never even been in a car.

It's all nonsense, in fact. The motor industry has completely failed.

There is no car of the people.

But there's another way of looking at this.

The car as we know it only exists

because of a universal desire to possess it.

It began life as the preserve of the toffs, it was a proposition

so complicated that you needed to

employ a man just to drive it and look after it for you.

But now a century later, it's a consumer durable.

A disposable one at that.

Yes, there are still cars that cost a million pounds or more, but

they come to us riding on a groundswell of engineering achievement

that is fuelled by the demand for mobilisation for the masses.

So, in actual fact everything from the £1,500 Tata Nano all the way up

to the £1.5 million Bugatti Veyron Super Sport,

they are all cars of the people.

♪ They know my name cos I told it to them

♪ But they don't know where

♪ They don't know when

♪ It's coming

♪ When is it coming?

♪ Keep the car running

♪ Keep the car running

♪ Keep the car running. ♪