ADAPTATIONS—STANDARDIZED AND IMPROVISED.
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THE SHORTAGE in the present supply of motor vehicles of almost all kinds, coupled with the new and rigid petrol restrictions, certainly tends to encourage attempts to adapt chassis to purposes for whichthey were not originally intended. Such adaptations fall into two classes, namely, those which are made in individual instances .and those which are, so to speak, standardized. In the latter class come the outfits which a-re now marketed for the , deliberate purpose of rendering some well-known chassis produced in large quantities suitable for work for which its original designers did not intend it. Without for the moment entering into the question,cf. . whether adaptations are in principle ever desirable, we have at least td adm4 that just now they are frequently necessary. Th . being so, the standardized units, specially contrived to turn some particular car chassis into a, van or char-it-banes chassis, are obviously more likely to prove satisfactory than the more makeshift attempts which have to be made to convert an individual vehicle to some new purpose. •
What this amounts to is that it constitutes at the present juncture 'a new and quite important advantage possessed by vehicles produced in huge numbers over those produced in -comparatively small quantities. Nobody is going to the trouble of standardizing a conversion unit for a car of which only a few examples exist. Conversion in such a case must, therefore, remain expensive, because it involves a great deal of hand work.. If, on the other hand, there are a few million chassis of some particular make in use, and this ehassis is at all adaptable, it is, as it has proved to be, well worth the while of somebody to standardize a conversion unit, by the aid of which the chassis in question can, at low cost, be made extremely useful in classes of service for which it was not originally built. One wonders whether the final development will be that the manufacturers of such chassis will themselves construct their own conversion units to be embodied either in the first instance or at a later stage to the order of their clients. ' If the .conversion were effected before the car ever went on to the road; some' money would be saved, because a certain number of partsdesigned for the normal purpose would never have to. be .used at all. What the ease would amount to would be that the manufa;cturer in question would build a private car and a commercial vehicle identical in most respects,' differing in design only where necessary, and so ar-• ranged that the differences betweeü the two types would, in effect, be contained entirely in some one unit which could replace another unit equally corn
plate ill. itself. We are, however, considering here possibilities of the future and not of the present. For the time being at least, standardized conversion units not produced by the cars themselves appear to filf a, really considerable demand, and undoubtedly have great advantages over less co-ordinated attempts to improvise a commercial vehicle out of a touring-car chassis.