• If, like me, you have been driven to the
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point of ridding yourself of all your gas appliances by the exorbitantly-expensive British Gas flotation advertising campaign (which seems to have been designed on the basis that most Gas shareholders have IQs in single figures), you can imagine my horror at receiving a press release headed "Ogle to make Eurosid dummy". I have a lot of respect for Tom Karen and his team of designers at Letchworth, and the thought of them becoming involved in some panEuropean extension of the Sid nonsense left me speechless.
My deep concern over the wisdom of what Ogle might be getting into turned into deep anxiety over the project's medical ethics when I read on to find "the product is truly international, using French pelvic and neck components, a Dutch abdominal part and a British thorax assembly."
Harmonisation in EEC vehicle weights and dirnen sions I strongly welcome; an EEC passport [can live with — but a Dutch abdominal part and a British thorax? Good grief. Even the most European of minds must boggle.
What a relief it was to discover that Eurosid has nothing to do with the idiotic British Gas ads, nor with some Common market Frankenstein scheme, but represents the culmination of several years collaboration between leading European automotive research laboratories.
Eurosid is the European Side Impact Dummy, which will be used in crash tests of cars. Ogle has been developing crash test dummies since 1970 and now it has been nominated with a Dutch and a French research institute to construct a batch of Eurosid devices worth £400,000. While Sid to me means money wasted, Eurosid means money well spent.