We get what we deserve in this country
This article was originally written in the period 1995-2000
We get what we deserve in this country, we really do. Witness the Top Gear two-year-old car satisfaction survey when the most griped about cars are also the best sellers in the UK. It seems we don’t have the bottle to put our foot down, and so we put up with stuff that’s nowhere near what we want.
It’s a standing joke the way folk in restaurants in this country mutter about their food not being right, but when asked “Is everything OK with your meal?” they smile and nod politely. A friend of mine is an occupational therapist and sets up people having disabilities with equipment they need to get on with life, so she’s very good at spotting ergonomic nightmares at 100 yards. She is not small, but is certainly not as big as the average man, and explained to me that nobody makes cars that are appropriate for folk that size. Little things like sun visors that don’t come down far enough, high rear windows that she can’t see out of when reversing, and seat belts she can’t reach back to get hold of when her seat is fully forward.
And did you ever see a crash test performed with a dummy sat as far forward as a small driver will sit? (Come to that, why don’t the dummies in the official regulatory tests wear clothes?).
Totally inappropriate too are small cars for the ‘urban driving’ they claim to have been designed for. Aerodynamic styling is wasted on a town car. Why not make child locks that can be operated from the dashboard (for the ‘school run’), and why have a rear offside door at all (it opens into traffic)? If the keyring is going to open the doors by some clever non contact system, then how about a hands-free self opening and lifting tailgate for when you have armfuls of shopping? Rounding the corners off the front of a modern car could knock eight inches off the effective external turning circle, improving parking no end, but I guess that just wouldn’t look right, would it?
It is said that women have the major say in more than half of non-fleet purchases, and yet this lack of user friendliness towards the average height female driver suggests either appalling market research or a realisation that UK consumers are quite happy to get what they’re given.
I find the same thing in engineering sometimes. I often wonder just how bad a supplier has to be before some people will stop using them. When you meet a supplier consistently bad, it’s clear that they are only in business because some people continue to accept that level of service. Then you’ll hear those people say “yes, but they’re cheap”.
Perhaps it would be better to think of the extra spent with a company that gave better service as an investment in the future quality of our supplier base. It is worth the extra to get the message across to the bad supplier. If we want the market to evolve, the unfittest mustn’t survive.