The past catches up
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Many chickens have come home to roost in the transport world in the past few years. We are seeing the latest example in the effects of proposed noise, smoke and power-to-weight legislation on engine and vehicle design. A report in this week's issue spells out some of the ways in which manufacturers are in trouble on this front, and how they are pleading an inability to meet the proposed figures by the dates laid down. The origin of most of the present troubles can be traced to a fuel taxation policy which encouraged small and economical engines for so many years that low power became a traditional aspect of British trucks.
Now environmental pressures have brought demands for a swift change in the situation, and manufacturers find the going even tougher than they had expected. But not all the blame lies with taxation policies and the conservative outlook of users: when the noise limit for new vehicles was introduced in April last year, it was an open secret that some models could not meet that figure, yet the industry had had eight years since the Wilson Report on vehicle noise to prepare for just such a possibility. As long ago as June 1963 the Ministry of Transport circulated draft regulations calling for a 1968onwards limit of 86 dbA for heavy commercials, yet the SMMT is now reportedly saying that this is a figure which the industry cannot meet before 1975—and even then not for over-200 bhp vehicles.
To obtain further noise and smoke limit concessions in the present social climate will not be easy. Whatever the outcome, manufacturers are going to have to spend vast sums on research, and operators more for the product. It must be a bitter pill for British manufacturers to see operators, who only a year or two ago were still devoted to low bhp for low mpg, now purchasing high-powered foreign vehicles. British truck makers failure-to persuade customers to be more powerconscious in the past is now going to cost them, and the operators, dear.