Growing up in a relatively wealthy country in the 1980s, after getting through most of the 1970s, youâd be forgiven for thinking that the world would just keep getting better and things would make more sense as humans evolved.
From a teenagerâs perspective: home computers, with a modulatorâdemodulator (modem), could bring you information instantaneously and from around the world. As an immigrant kid, that excited me: contact with people âback homeâ and from other places, making communication quicker. You could hear from others, and you could help others who needed you. And if you didnât have a computer that could connect to a bulletin board, there was Teletext, which gave you regularly updated information through your TV set.
Cars were getting more aerodynamic, which meant they would use less fuel, and that was understood universally to be a good thing. MPVs were very practical vehicles that had small footprints yet fitted a lot of people, or stuff, inside. Here in New Zealand, natural gas-powered dual-fuel cars were mainstream, and that meant we werenât reliant on overseas oil. They also didnât pollute anywhere near what petrol didâthey burned cleanly.
And since saving energy was understood to be a good thing, who knew? Before long solar power would be the norm for new homes and weâd be putting electricity back into the grid.
I also heard about recycling for the first time as a teen, and that seemed like a good thingâall that old paper and plastic could have a second life.
People were interested in being more efficient because no one wanted a repeat of the oil shocks of the 1970s. Nor did we want the government imposing carless days on us again.
That same teenager would have thought that by the dawn of the 21st centuryâif the US and Soviet Union behavedâweâd have evolved to have recognized that we had the tools to make things better.
When the internet came to our house in the 1990s, I saw it as a direct evolution of the 1980sâ optimism. It made sense.
So through that lens, a lot of what the world looks like today doesnât make sense.
We have connected computers, milliards which are handheld, yet some of us are addicted to them and others use them to express outrage, rather than delight in having any contact at all with people thousands of miles away.
SUVs outsell regular cars in some size segments. They are less aerodynamic, use more fuel, and are less efficient. We have American companiesâFord in the US and Holden hereâsaying that theyâll stop selling cars in most segments in favour of utility trucks, crossovers and SUVs. Petrol is expensive, and I complain about it, but I guess no one else thinks itâs expensive. Dual-fuel cars are a thing of the past here, for the most part, yet lots of people marvel at hybrids, conveniently forgetting we were decades ahead in the 1980s.
And solar power isnât the norm.
We still, happily, recycleâbut not everything we collect winds up being recycled. We have an awareness, but if we kept on progressing as I expected us to when I was Greta Thunbergâs age, then we wouldnât have Greta Thunberg reminding us that we havenât.
I wonder if others in middle age realize that humans have the potential to go forward, and in many respects we doâbut collectively there are enough of us who go backward and prevent any real advance in society.
I like to have the same optimism as teenage me about the future. In terms of myself, many things bring me happiness, particularly in my personal and work lives. Yet in terms of society, I wonder if I can be as optimistic. I know deep down that we are interested in efficiency and treating our planet better (or we say we are), so then who are the ones holding us back, and what are we doing that stops us moving forward? Is it personal greed, hoping others will pick up the slack? Many of us choose products and services from companies that align with our views about what we wantâyet are we doing the same when it comes to politicians?
I know Wikipedia is full of fiction, so what’s one more?
I know, you’re thinking: why don’t you stop moaning and go and fix it if it’s such a big deal?
First up, for once I actually did try, as I thought the deletion of a sentence would be easy enough. But the site (or maybe my own settings) blocks me from editing, so that’s that.
Secondly, it reinforces this blog post.
This one sentence was presumably written by a New Zealander, and one who knows very little, though they have more editing privileges than me.
Like the 12-year-old ‘Ford CE14 platform’ piece that only got corrected after I posted on Drivetribe, I have to ask: what possesses someone to invent fiction and to be so sure of themselves that they can commit it to an encyclopĂŠdia? (Incidentally, subsequent Wikipedians have reintroduced all the errors back on to the Ford page since editor Nick’s 2017 effort to correct itâyou simply cannot cure Wikipedia of stupid.)
I know we aren’t being set very good examples by American politicians (on both sides) and by British ones these days, but surely individual citizens have some sort of integrity when they go online to tell us how great they are?
For the record, the Familia nameplate was never used here in the last generation for a new carâyou only see it on Japanese imports. Secondly, the three-door BH shape was only ever sold here as a Ford Laser, never a MazdaâFamilia, 323 or otherwise.
“Post-truth” is nothing new: it’s been the way of Wikipedia for well over a decade. It was all foreshadowed online.
It still begs the question why I don’t see such callous edits on the German or Japanese editions of that website.
I thought downgrading to an earlier Instagram would have solved the frame-rate problem, but I was wrong. Here are two videos using the same file. The first was uploaded using my new phone, but running v. 43 from April 2018, given that using the latest Instagram produced very stuttered video. However, it was the same story, so we can conclude there’s something wrong with using newer phones with Instagram. I’m not alone: others reported this bug earlier this year and the one solution appears to be upgrading the OS to Android 8. The conclusion I have to draw is that there is a fault with Android 7, or how Instagram works with Android 7.
The second was uploaded using my old phone, running probably the same version from April 2018, since that was the last time I performed an Instagram update. The frame rate is now normal.
The first took four attempts to upload. The second took nine attempts, meaning that I have uploaded this file 13 times on two phones, only to have Instagram show two. There is a problem with Instagram making videos publicly visible, a bug I first reported here earlier this year.
I’m going to have to pray my old phone holds up despite its damaged screen. Looks like all video uploads will have to be done using it, at least till Instagram fixes the frame-rate issue.
Attempt no. 4 at uploading this video: tailing a #Ford Mustang GT, March 2017. This is the full video. Iâve downgraded to a version of Instagram that was current in April 2018, but it hasnât solved the frame-rate problem. I also havenât solved the need to repeatedly upload until Instagram makes a video visible to followers. #fordmustang #USA #Stangers #Aotearoa#Wellington #whanganuiatara #NZ #car#waka #ponycar #benteight
Testing the #Ford Mustang video on the old phone. Will it be smoother? Seems the newer the tech, the buggier it is. This is the 13th attempt at uploading, since Instagram refused to show the earlier ones publicly. #fordmustang #ponycar #Stangers #benteight #USA #musclecar #Aotearoa#Wellington #whanganuiatara #NZ
Failed uploads Above: Finally, the video uploaded after nine attempts on the old phone. One attempt never made it to the wall. Instagram refused to show eight of the uploads.
I don’t know if Instagram does this on all phones, but when I make multi-photo posts, it often leaves behind a very interesting image. Sometimes, the result is very artistic, such as this one of a LotusâFord Cortina Mk II.
You can see the rear three-quarter shot just peer in through the centre. I’ve a few others on my Tumblr, but this is the best one. Sometimes technology accidentally makes decent art. I’m still claiming copyright given it’s derived directly from my work.
Iâm fascinated by the 1970Âœ Ford Falcon for a number of reasons. The first is the obvious one: rarity. This car was built for only half a model year, from January to August 1970. If you think it looks like a contemporary Torino, youâre right: itâs basically a very stripped-down Torino. Yet you could spec it with any of the engines from the Torino, including the 429 inÂł V8 (and some did). Which brings me to the second reason: why would anyone really bother with it, if you could get a Torino for a bit more? (That answers why this car only lasted half a model year.) And that leads me to the third reason: what was going through Fordâs mind at the time? Thatâs where it gets interesting.
At this time, Ford was undergoing managerial changes, with Henry Ford II firing Bunkie Knudsen (who had been lured away from GM). That happened in September 1969, by which time the decision to go ahead with the Falcon had already been made. This is, in other words, a Knudsen initiative.
Federal regulations made the 1966â70 Falcon obsolete because it had a dash-mounted starterâthe rule was that they had to be in the column. However, itâs curious that Ford made this call to put the Falcon nameplate on a mid-sizer, considering it had made its name as an âeconomyâ car (by US standards). If you read the brochure, youâll find that this was all about size. Ford bragged that the car was 2 ft longer. Yet for this half-model year, it was still marketed as an âeconomyâ car.
I imagine as the US headed into the 1970s, there was no sign of the fuel crisis on the horizon, so there was nothing wrong about size. Why not spoil the average Falcon buyer, used to a smaller car, with something much larger? Hadnât upsizing already happened on every other model line out thereâby this point the Mustang was about to grow into a monstrosity with massive C-pillars and terrible rear visibility?
Ford (and the other Big Four makers) had been known to blow one model line up, then start another little one, and the Maverick had already been launched for 1970, and was now doing the compact work. By that logic, Falcon could grow more, even though other solutions might have been to either replace the Falcon with the Maverick or simply shift the Falcon nameplate to the Maverickâbut both would have involved âdownsizingâ, and in 1970 that was not in the US car industryâs vocab. The panic hadnât set in yet.
Fourthly, this is a beautiful shape. Unnecessarily big (till you consider it had to accommodate the 429), but a beautiful shape. The 1970s hadnât really started in earnest, so we hadnât seen some of the really garish shapes that were to come. This has that 1960s classicism coupled with 1970s uncertainty. Thereâs still some optimism with jet-age inspiration, but the lack of practicality foreshadowed the style-first, single-digit mpg âroad-hugging weightâ cars that were round the corner, cars which no one truly needed but Detroit, in its optimism (or blindness), believed Americans did. Thereâs still something very honest about the last US Falcon. After this, only the Australians and Argentinians kept things alive, but those are other stories.
Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years. Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the âFord CE14 platformâ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipediaâs inadequacies, in part based on an earlier blog post I wrote here.
I am grateful to Nick who I expect saw my story.
However, errors still abound, and as I pointed out in Drivetribe, another user called Pmeisel, who appears to have been an automotive industry professional, said back in February 2005 there was a real confusion between development codes and platforms on Wikipedia.
While Nick has largely fixed the problemâhe has noted that it was the European Ford Escort of 1990 and its derivatives that CE14 should refer to, and not much earlier American carsâthere remains the lesser one that there is still no such thing as a âFord CE14 platformâ, just as there is no such thing as a âFord C170 platformâ, and so on.
Ford did not use these codes to refer to platforms, they used them to refer to specific models.
Letâs see if the Wikiality of this page will at least begin to disappear from the ânet, 12 years after ApolloBoy made up some crap and allowed it to propagate to the extent that some people regard it as fact.
I have enquired into Wikipedia from time to time, enough to know it is full of mistakes. But the errors do seem to happen far more often in the Anglophone one. Perhaps those of us who speak English are more willing to commit fictions to publication. Goodness knows we have seen an example in print, too. Does this culture lend us to being far less precise with a poorer concern for the truthâand does that in turn lead to the ease with which âfake newsâ winds up in our media?
PS. (September 17): How much worse can it get, as I continued through? A lot.
On p. 320, we get an admission that Parissien was wrong on p. 314: the Honda Accord was the first Japanese-branded car to be made Stateside. At least an earlier error was corrected. But they begin again on p. 321: Parissien claims the V30 Toyota Camry dominated the US mid-size car market (it was never sold outside Japan; he’s thinking of the XV10, or the Japanese-market Scepter, which was badged Camry). Correcting his error on p. 322, the Camry was not specifically targeted at the US; it was Toyota’s attempt to create an efficient car from the ground up, and it was not done in 1980, but 1982 (the 1980 Celica Camry was not sold outside Japan). The Paykan deal was cemented long before George Turnbull got to Iran (p. 324), though local content rose in the 1970s for it to be truly Iranian-made and Parissien might mean the shifting of the engine tooling there, if I’m being generous. There is only one world, not multiple ones (also p. 324), unless Parissien knows something about parallel universes that the rest of us don’t. Surely Chrysler managed to launch its T-115 minivan (Dodge Caravan, Plymouth Voyager) before Renault launched the Espace (p. 330), and the Triumph Acclaim was never called the ‘Ronda’ (p. 334), though its successor was.
On p. 360, in a single paragraph, Parissien makes several errors. The MG 6 launched as a five-door car, not his claimed four. There is no such thing as the Roewe 150, in China or elsewhere. The MG 3 has five doors and is not a three-door counterpart to the 6. The five-door MG 6 launched not in 2011, but in 2010, and the Magnette name was only used in the UK for the four-door. The founder of Chrysler was Walter Chrysler, not Walther (p. 364). The Lancia Delta only became a Chrysler in the UK and Ăire, as far as I know (p. 365), and remained a Lancia in most countries. The Belgian designer is Dirk van Braeckel, not van Braeckl (p. 368); Mercedes-Benz never bought an 18·53 per cent stake in Volkswagen (p. 369); and CitroĂ«n’s BX was not the last car in that range to have ‘pneumatic suspension’ (p. 372). The Malibu was not a Saturn, but a Chevrolet (p. 375), and Buick was never sold off (p. 376). The Ford Mondeo did not replace the Telstar in all Asian markets (p. 377), and it shared far more than the ‘windscreen, front doors and rear’ with the Contour and Mystique (in fact, the rear was not shared, though there were common engines, platform, and plenty more). It’s not entirely certain that the US market judged the Contour to be too small (p. 378), but there was a lack of marketing (which would have made an even better story than the one Parissien writes about). Ford subsequently filled the Contour’s niche with the smaller Focus Stateside. The CD338 Fusion was never sold in Australia (also p. 378). Ford never resurrected the Taunus in Germany under Alan Mulally (p. 381)âthis invention is incredible. VAZ did follow up the 2101 with something similar after it ended production in 1983 (not 1984, p. 382), viz. the 2105, which was about as similar as one could get to the 2101.
On p. 384, Parissien claims Acura’s Legend sales were ‘disappointing’, after saying they were ‘beginning to sell rather well’ 50 pp. before. The Hindustan Ambassador was not based on the 1954 Morris Oxford (p. 389): that car was actually the Hindusthan Landmaster. The Ambassador was based on the 1957 Morris Oxford III, and was in production from 1959, not 1958. The Red Flag (or Hongqi) marque was not reborn on an Audi A6 (p. 391), but the marque had been used on a version of the Audi 100 C3 from 1988, and no Hongqi bore an AudiâChryslerâHongqi brand name. The Chinese company is Dongfeng, not Dongfen (p. 391), and Parissien’s claim that the Everus was sold in the west (p. 392) is news to me, as I am sure it is to its own management. I’ll stop there for now.
P.PS. (September 18): Some bedtime reading, or should I say error-finding, last night. On p. 394, Toyota and Aston Martin did not jointly develop the Cygnet: Toyota developed the IQ in 2008, and Aston Martin converted that car to become its Cygnet, and ‘hot hatch’ is a very optimistic description for a city car. Toyota did not launch the Cygnet in 2008 as Parissien claims, nor did it have a say in what customers were expected to purchase the Cygnet: it was aimed specifically at existing Aston Martin owners, not ‘Toyota and Aston expected initial demand to be limited to those who already owned an Aston Martin sports car.’ It was certainly no ‘eccentric experiment’ of Toyota, but of Aston Martin. Volvo never made a model called the A40 (p. 395), and I bet Nissan is surprised to find that the original Qashqai was designed ‘at the firm’s Milan design centre’ (p. 397) when it was designed in London. Maserati never launched a Jeep-based SUV called the Kubang (p. 397), but it did have a concept of that name, and the Levante appeared in 2016 after the book was published. There is no such car as the Porsche Cajun, and if Parissien refers to the smaller Porsche crossover, then that is called the Macan, and it has five doors, not the claimed three (p. 397). The Volkswagen New Beetle was not on a Polo platform (p. 399), but a Golf one, as was its successor (though a newer Golf); and Ford would dispute that its Mustang is a sedan (p. 401). If J Mays’s first name is J (as footnoted), then there is no need to refer to him as ‘J. Mays’ (p. 401). The Ford Ka’s name is not derived from StreetKa (p. 402): that was a model spun off from the Ka in 2002; and some would regard the Mk II model was being superior to the Fiat 500 on which it is based (especially as Fiat adopted some of the changes for its own model). I have yet to see a Smart with a Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star or marque anywhere, unlike Parissien who seems to think they are badged Mercedes (p. 403), and a Smart SUV does not exist unless Parissien is reporting again from his parallel universe (p. 403). There is also no such car as the Kia Exclusive (p. 410).
