Motoring Anecdotes

[Khamen]

To quote the late great Douglas Adams most stories that have passed into folklore are either apocryphal or at least wildly innacurate, but does anyone have any motoring anecdotes they have heard over the years?

I'll start us with the story of the man who had just bought a brand new Rolls Royce, and was so impressed with the car he sent a letter to RR eulogising that inside the cabin it was so quiet he could hear the clock tick at motorway speeds!

A few days later RR responded and suggested that if he sent the car back to them they would fix the clock.

Any others?

K

 

[Deleted member 37751]

Not quite motoring, but a good engineering anecdote nonetheless;

A German engineering company proclaimed that they had made the worlds thinnest drill bit and British Steel requested to have a look at this so called 'thinnest drill bit in the world'.

The German company duly sent this drill bit to British Steel and received it back, intact, a couple of weeks after.

With a hole drilled straight down the shaft...

 

[D-18]

When giving test drives, Carroll Shelby is alleged to have stuck a $20 bill on the inside of the windscreen of a 427 Cobra and challenged the passenger to reach forward and grab it whilst the car was accelerating hard. If they could reach it, they could keep it - but no-one ever claimed that $20.

 

[NW_Merc]

Mercedes used to claim that their cars didnt need rust warranties as their cars didn't rust. How the mighty have fallen

 

[prprandall51]

Not quite motoring, but a good engineering anecdote nonetheless;

A German engineering company proclaimed that they had made the worlds thinnest drill bit and British Steel requested to have a look at this so called 'thinnest drill bit in the world'.

The German company duly sent this drill bit to British Steel and received it back, intact, a couple of weeks after.

With a hole drilled straight down the shaft...

I don't know if that story is true or not, but here is a true, documented version of that same theme.

My father was the Production Manager for a Midlands based company, Accles and Pollock, which made tubes and tube-related products.

Their smallest-diameter tube with a useful purpose at the time (which was the early 1960's) was for the artificial insemination of mosquitoes, so you can imagine how small a tube that would be! But Accles and Pollock were able to make smaller tubes than that.

In 1963, the Superior Tube Company of Pennsylvania (I have had to look up these details, I discovered that this story is on the web) sent a tube to Accles and Pollock claiming it to be the smallest-diameter tube in the World. Accles and Pollock duly got to work and returned it to them with a smaller tube threaded through the centre of theirs.

 

[prprandall51]

Back onto car-related anecdotes, my favourite is the one where Cary grant visited the Aston Martin factory, then under David Brown's ownership; Brown had taken over the ailing car company and was pumping in cash to make it viable.

After a factory tour, Cary Grant indicated that he would like to buy an Aston but, with all of the attendant publicity that Aston would get arising from having a Hollywood film star driving one of their cars, he would only pay what the car cost to build.

David Brown quickly replied "Thank you so much, Mr Grant, that is very generous. All of our ordinary customers pay substantially less than that."

 

[del320]

The general public were agog when "The Shape fo Things to Come" - aka the Triunph TR7 was unveiled at the 1975 Geneva Motor Show.

Giorgetto Giugiaro when, after looking at one side of the TR7, viewed the other and is alleged to have exclaimed ; "My God! They've done it to the other side as well!".

 

[NW_Merc]

During the first season of the popular 80's children's series "Knight Rider" with David Hasslehoff. The hero car was a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am which Pontiac were thinking of putting into production similar to Ford had done with the Gran Torino from Starsky and Hutch. However, in the second and following series, the car was no longer referred to as a Trans Am as some intelligent individual had bought one and attempted to jump a train with it.