The man who cut time off the road . . .
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WHEN Sir Peter Thompson, chairman of the National Freight Consortium, began as a Unilever trainee he cannot have imagined that one day he would become the leading owner of an important slice of its empire. Although he never worked for SPD, which the Consortium has now agreed in principle to buy from Unilever, he was intimately concerned with national distribution, notably as transport manager of Unilever's Bird's Eye Food Co.
It was there that he exerted an influence on motor manufacturers and oil companies for which the whole road transport industry should be eternally grateful. The service interval for commercial vehicles and cars at that time was generally 1,000 miles, which Peter believed was unnecessarily short. So he persuaded Bill Cotton, former technical editor of Commercial Motor and at that time Unilever's transport technical adviser, cars and commercial vehicles, to put his foot on makers' necks.
Behold, they then discovered that their vehicles and the oils used in them could be made to function equally satisfactorily on a 3,000-mile schedule and so the movement towards extended maintenance intervals began.