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bird's eye view by the Hawk

28th May 1971, Page 47
28th May 1971
Page 47
Page 47, 28th May 1971 — bird's eye view by the Hawk
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

I DIY testing he Denniss paper at the IRTE conference :M last week) certainly set delegates talking.

guess it also set a fair number of them inking about the possibility of persuading eir companies to apply for membership of ie Motor Industry Research Association ) that they can do their own commercial :hide testing.

A fair number of fleet operators are ready full members of MIRA and the mual fee varies from around £100 to 1,250 for the biggest. This entitles them to ke their problems to MIRA and gives tern the right to use the proving ground or which they pay a separate fee according • actual use); it also brings them publications id a free information service.

The whole finances and membership ructure of the Association are under disission at the moment but any operator iterested in joining is assured of mention if he cares to contact the MIRA cretary at Lindley, Nr. Nuneaton.

1 Is this us?

eeing ourselves as others see us is seldom a omforting revelation and can sometimes be ather staggering. I have just been reading a 5port in L'Avenir du Transport Routier, ublished in Belgium, on an ERF 64CU335 rritten by their chief technical editor, acques Vestraete. The staggering thing is ot the technical report on the vehicle, which ails for a few alterations and improvements ,ut is otherwise very complimentary, but the icture which M. Vestraete paints of the lritish commercial vehicle industry as seen rom the other side of the North Sea.

He starts by saying:"Something's happenig when a British lorry manufacturer ,ecides to take a serious interest in selling nto the European market."

Rubbing salt in the wound of perfidious Ubion (nothing personal) he continues: For a British commercial vehicle manuacturer to deign to open his doors to a ontinental journalist is quite an event; to e cordially invited to visit a factory and to ry some vehicles is nothing less than a evolution. The politics of 'opening the door' tave never been the strong point of British nanufacturers. In this matter ERF are indoubtedly the first.

"The 'cold shoulder' treatment which we lave traditionally received from British nanufacturers has given us the disagreeable mpression that they would only consider with a certain condescension anything that vent on on the other side of the Channel... or countless years it has been almost mpossible for a journalist to pierce the ncredible coldness and indifference which tharacterizes the English 'gentry'. The result, as each of us knows, is that it is incredibly difficult for the importers of British industrial vehicles to push their goods onto our markets in spite of the good intentions and the competence which they generally show. ERF has the distinction for having made a breach in this wall of illplaced pretension and indifference."

Phew! Has M. Vestraete got a chip on his shoulder? Or is his view shared generally by his colleagues on the Continent? If so, it goes a long way to explain the difficulty of our entry into the Common Market—and it suggests that British manufacturers will need some pretty intensive publicity if they are going to make headway with Continental operators. M. Vestraete, for instance, has some rude things to say about Atkinson and its Krupp-cabbed vehicle in making the point that vehicles sold on the Continent must be designed for the Continent and not simply adapted from standard British trucks.

• A BRS loss At this year's NFC football cup final the Freight Corporation's chairman Dan Pettit cast many a wistful glance towards the playing field at Hurlingham Park from his seat of honour in the stand. At full time he confessed to my CM colleague that he felt fit enough to pull on a number 11 jersey. BRS Contracts Ltd lost 2-1 to Forth (Alloa), and it seems that no such brave thought entered the head of BRSL m.d. Len Payne. His team could have used his cool, calculating brain.

The competition attracted 78 teams this year, almost equally divided between the southern zone which starts at Wolverhampton and the northern zone which takes in all points north of Walsall.

• Nowt for nowt

I'm the last person to look a gift horse in the mouth but having seen the Annual Reports of the Licensing Authorities in their free-forthe-first-time form this year I wonder whether we wouldn't all be better off paying for a copy as in the past. Perhaps the two copies that I've seen are unusual, but they are both so appallingly reproduced by some form of duplicator that I'm suffering from a squint— and just for good measure page 20 is missing.

I hope the Secretary of State, for whom the reports are statutorily intended, gets a better copy or he'll never bother to read it. Come to think of it, that might be a good thing, because although the better standard of goods vehicles is commented on, several LAs carry on alarming about smoking exhausts, and you know how fidgety everyone is about environment.

• Not with an X The Odeon, Elephant and Castle, London, is showing a film called "Sabata" this week, but I'm assured that it doesn't star Tom Thirkell and in fact has virtually no road transport interest at all. Odd.

• Heads I lose If you thought this column odder than usual last week, I'm not surprised. And it's no good me trying to blame the decibellious piledriver across the road. The way I wrote it, paragraph 3 (IoTA remembers) was followed by paragraph 1 (Scots wha hae) but it wasn't printed that way, for some reason I've not yet fathomed. Sorry.


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