Our Third State-or-war Volume.
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" Over by October," it now transpires, may be regarded very much as yet another instance of the wish being father to the thought. It was, none the less, a several-sourced report, and one that was voiced with authority both in Berlin and Petrograd. We had hoped, in common with millions the world over, that it might prove a correct forecast, but the slow grinding of the mills of war is at last more clearly discerned.
Caveat emptor—let the buyer beware—is an old, if weahening, rule of law which increasingly admits new constructions in so far as we may legitimately apply it to theasituation in which users and would-be users of commercial motors are still placed. They, indeed, must be wary, alike in their decisions and their dealings. Many hundreds of them have waited, have held back orders and, somehow or nohow, have done without vehicles. Can this want of road-transport facilities be accepted as an abiding condition of uncertain duration, or must a majority of the orders be placed? We urge the course of holding out, of carrying-on with minimum fleets, of high-pressure service at the cost of known additions to rates of depreciation, in preference to any wholesale going-over to the new and untried. The lack of drivers is a conjunctive reason. The buyer who can afford to take risks, or who must do so, will not wait for that after-the-war rotational delivery from his old sources of supply, but we believe that more than half of the orders will be saved for the older British makers against that day.
We again urge buyers not to rely upon any prospect of their picking up bargains at non-reserve prices in the shape of war-used chassis. We give no credence to rumours which are based upon such anticipations; we believe them to be false conjectures, and they are confessedly based upon estimated surpluses in the hands of the military authorities at some future and indefinite time. There will, we repeat, in our judgment, be no very large surplus of war-used chassis: W.D. vehicles will be absorbed by (1) wastage when the advances take place, (2) requirements too maintain transport in Europe during repatriation and re-settlement, and (3) permanent supply of the enlarged British army with its own mechanical transport.
Let the buyer also beware of tales to the effect that " all American lorries are poor." That is untrue. The belligerent powers have taken many thousands of the best, of these lorries, and they continue to do so. The weakness of the American case is absence of backing by any long period of consistent and uninterrupted records of user with present-day models. A rapid rate of depreciation is accepted, and such has as a fact been experienced, in America. We should put the average life there at less than half what it is in the United Kingdom. There are sound seasons for claiming a priori that the superior roads of the U.K. will help to lengthen the working lives of U.S.A. chassis, and we endorse those claims, bute the irresistible evidence of realized costs on any such basis is not yet on the side of our American contestants for trade over hero. That it will be creditable, at least in the cases of the best models, we have already owned, subject to a willingness on the part of the purchaser temporarily to accept higher first and running costs; these may jointly vary, under war-time conditions, from 0.5d. to 3d. per vehicle-mile, according to the load capacity of the machine. Whereas we now rate a good British chassis at 150,000 miles of running for purposes of depreciation, we are not prepared, on the evidence and records before us, to go higher than 100,000 miles (under U.K. road conditions) for American chassis, with, perhaps, three exceptions.
We attach little relative importance to the economic argument that money should not be spent outside the U.K. If road motors for urgent transport work, and which work is of a class that it cannot otherwise be done, are not obtainable in the U.K., the true economic situation is, that the earnings and productive worth of each such machine quickly make good and exceed the effect of the primary addition to an adverse trade balance. It is continued production of wealth in the country which counts now, and it is dangerous to exclude or limit facilities to that end. Quite a different case may be made for protection in the future, but it will have to be made as a whole, by the conviction of one of the great political parties when reasserted ; it will not come piecemeal. The heavy-motor industry will do well not to beat the air.
We have sufficient belief in the demand hereafter for commercial motors of all types, coupled with the necessary degree of confidence and pride in the abilities and resources of our leading British makers, to look forward to unprecedented years of prosperity for them, whether there be a tariff or net. We again ask them, for the present, to do nothing themselves which will hinder the user from carrying on.