Dennis Tito’s Mars 2018 flyby is a dumb idea and I won’t be going.

What do you think of Dennis Tito’s plan to send a married couple on a 501 day trip past Mars?

Composite panorama of Mars. Not going to be seen by the 2018 expedition, as they’ll fly past the night side. NASA, public domain.

I think it’s dumb. Three-course dumb, with a side-order of dumb.

What Tito’s apparently proposing is to jam two people into a sealed space the size of a large camper van – which means, in practise, that they will be living inside a commode after about Day 5 – soaked with radiation that will lift their chances of cancer by 3 percent. Or kill them, if there’s a solar flare. To get back, they have to endure a risky skip re-entry on Earth – where, if anything is wrong with the angle, they’ll incinerate on the first plunge or bounce into deep space forever, assuming the heat shield hasn’t broken. All that, just so they can scoot past the night side of Mars at interplanetary speeds. Uh – hello?

What happens if something breaks? Or one of them dies, leaving the other to spend eight or nine months trapped with the rotting corpse of their spouse? Ewwww.

Yeah, there’s the point of being the first humans to get near another planet, it’s heroic, the human spirit and the rest.

I took that into account when forming my opinion.

Cut-away of the modified Apollo/SIVB ‘wet lab’ configuration for the 1973-74 Venus flyby. The rocket stage accelerates them on the interplanetary transfer orbit, and once the LOX is burned, the astronauts move in and set up house (hence ‘wet’).  NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Flyby is not a new idea. The Soviets toyed with schemes in the 1960s, NASA studied ways of using Apollo hardware to send a modified Apollo CSM/Skylab on a Venus flyby. It was feasible, but the engineers couldn’t guarantee the astronauts would be alive at the end.

We know now they would likely have died. The mission was scheduled for 1973-74, and there was a coronal mass ejection on 5-6 July 1974, when the astronauts would have been in deep space on the return leg – heavy radiation, months away from home.

In the event, nobody could see much science from it anyway, and Congress killed the scheme on the drawing board in 1968, along with most of the rest of the Apollo Applications Programme.

To me, that zip science return is likely true of Tito’s Mars flyby, quite apart from the marginal safety of the venture. I suppose the FAA will see it the same way.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go to Mars – but let’s do it properly. It comes down to energy. Chemical rockets don’t provide enough That’s why the journey takes so long – everything we send has to use a Hohmann-type transfer orbit.

Conceptual artwork by Pat Rawlings of a Mars mission rendezvous from 1995. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

The problem is that the laws of physics are clear about what can be done, and the more exotic your energy source, the harder it is to contain and direct it. We’re already pushing what metals, plastics and even carbon can do. However, the VASIMIR electric-ion system looks promising. In theory, VASIMIR might reach Mars in 39 days with the right planetary alignments - round trip in five months. That reduces the radiation, life-support and maintenance problems straight off.

There is one catch. Solar escape velocity at Earth’s orbit is 29.8 km/sec. Peak speed during the trip is 34 km/sec. If the motor breaks before your deceleration burn, you’re on a one-way trip to interstellar space. (“Goodbyeeeeeeee….”)

What it will really take is political will. Money. And, I think, wide public engagement of the Apollo-era variety – something which, alas, may not happen again.

What do you think of Tito’s idea? Would you go yourself? What do you think of sending humans into space anyway, when robots can do a cheaper job without risk to life? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Note: I was going to cover UFO’s this week – but Tito’s announcement is more interesting. ‘Inspirations’ moves to Wednesdays. And coming up, more writing tips, more ‘write it now’, and other fun. Stay tuned.

A wonderful act of kindness – and its sequel

 I thought I’d tell you today about a random act of kindness. And what followed.

My photo of a ‘Matangi’ commuter unit in the Wellington railway yards.

The other evening I took the train from Wellington to the Hutt Valley. A woman a few seats up proffered a 10-click concession ticket to the conductor. He shook his head. ‘All the clips are used, but I can sell you a ticket’. At that moment a fellow sitting behind the woman proffered his own ticket. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take one of these. ‘ With typical Kiwi self-deprecation he added, ‘I needed to use them up anyway.’

The exchange was done. Did the woman thank him? No. Not even – given her prominent Dutch accent – with a ‘dankuveel’? Nothing. He got off at the next station. She didn’t acknowledge him. I got off at the stop after, reflecting how in a few minutes I had seen a complete demonstration of a big slab of the human condition.

For the guy who offered the ticket, I suspect the fact of making the offer was reward enough. But hey – it’s courteous to say thank you… isn’t it.

Has anyone been randomly kind to you lately? Have you ever been randomly kind to a stranger? Any thoughts? Talk to me!

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012, see terms below.

Worldbuilding: flying cars, the end of cinema, and other predictions

I’ve been ripped off. I was meant to have a flying car by now. Where is it? They’re not hard to make…are they?

Well, kind of. You end up driving a mediocre car hampered by aircraft parts, towing its wings. Or flying a mediocre aircraft lugging the stuff it needs for road driving around in the air. Joined by 50,000 other pilot/drivers with 37 flying hours between them. Air Traffic Control has conniptions.

What about meals by pill, then? Around the turn of the twentieth century, the discovery that you could pack your daily vitamins and minerals into a few tablets offered a convenient future. By the 1920s it was axiomatic that by, oh, maybe 1983, dinner would be delivered as a handful of pills. Glug down your three-course dinner with a glass of water. Except for one problem. They couldn’t contain the calories and bulk. Doctors and dieticians pointed that out at the time. I discovered it myself when I ate emergency rations on board HMS Invincible in 1983. Glucose sweets. Not filling. But the trope’s stuck. I’ll have extra topping on my cheesecake capsule, thanks.

The Roxy cinema lobby, Miramar, Wellington – the whole facility restored to fabulous 1930s art deco condition by Peter Jackson. A photo I took in 2011.

There’s a lesson here for SF writers intending to build their own story worlds. My favourite future-prediction clanger is The Death Of The Cinema.  This was thought inevitable in the 1950s when TV appeared. Cinema survived. The next apocalypse was home VCR in the late 1970s. Then DVD. Today it’s home entertainment systems and streaming pay-to-view downloads, I am told.

Anybody coming to Wellington, New Zealand had better check out the Roxy Cinema in Miramar, literally just down the road from Peter Jackson’s vast movie-making empire. Quick. Before it disappears into The Inevitable Future.

And what about the Paperless Office and Cashless Society – neither of which seem likely soon. Check out this recent graph of US currency in circulation. It’s climbing. But the belief that the Cashless Society is inevitable persists – apparently it’s because we haven’t waited long enough. Get with the program.

The reason why these predictions fail is because the popular view of how society changes is framed by social Darwinistic notions of new replacing old automatically – of inevitable, directional progress, sometimes defined by a transient product or sales gimmick that seizes popular imagination.

The real world is more chaotic. Inventions sometimes re-define us, sure - but from left field. We were meant to have manned Mars rockets and megalopolis cities with aerial motorways by now. Nobody predicted how the internet and hand-held computers would re-define life instead. Except Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who devised the communications satellite in 1945. In 1964, he outlined the way cheap mass communication would change society. Then, ten years later, he absolutely nailed the internet and its social effects, in specific detail. Remember, in 1974 the world wide web and desktop PC hadn’t been invented. Be humbled. Oh – he also precisely described the functionality of the iPad. In 1968.

Clarke told us how things really work when it comes to societies changing in the face of inventions.

Which brings me to the next prediction. We’re in the middle of a digital book revolution. I’m prepared to bet we’ll still have print books in a century. They’ll adapt and remain alongside the other ways we read things. What do you think?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Marking the century since Titanic sank

It’s exactly a century today since the Titanic sank, and I’m interrupting my usual weekly worldbuilding series to mark the moment. Titanic has been capturing headlines in New Zealand this week with Kiwi archivist Lemuel Lyes’ discovery that the Titanic’s captain, Edward Smith, had been to Christchurch 22 years earlier, in command of the Coptic.

Lemuel is a regular commenter on this blog. And he’s made a fascinating discovery. Until recently New Zealand had a self-image of being historically isolated at the bottom of the South Pacific. But dig far enough – and we can usually find some connection, however small, with the world. Proof of the degree to which the world was globalised back then.

For me the Titanic generally reveals much about our perceptions of the past. Titanic wasn’t the only ship of her class. There were three – Olympic, Titanic and Britannic. Their careers were filled with drama – Olympic was involved in various collisions and helped rescue crew from HMS Audacious in 1914. My great uncle was a witness that day - more on that another time.  Britannic went down in almost identical way to her sister ship. Yet only Titanic has captured our imagination; it has become a metaphor for failing to face up to the facts – fixing things by ’rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’. And that night to remember has itself been mythologised; such as the irony of being labelled ‘unsinkable’ and then sinking. It is ironic; but not because the ship was thought to be unsinkable – it was a marketing slogan.

A quick dip into geekery. The three liners differed in detail but were built around one design, and had more internal subdivision than earlier vessels.  Ships sink in two ways: (a) loss of reserve buoyancy, and (b) loss of reserve stability from asymmetric flooding (more complex than it sounds – it also relates to metacentric height) – the ship rolls over or sinks by one end. Capsizing also happens if reserve stability is still good, via free-surface effects (‘slopping)’. That’s what sank Wahine in Wellington harbour, 44 years ago this month and the Herald of Free Enterprise off Zeebrugge in 1987, among others.

Both Olympic and Titanic were designed to stay afloat if two compartments were flooded – and Olympic did so, when she collided with HMS Hawke in 1911. They could also float if four forward compartments were flooded.But it was a flawed design. The transverse bulkheads extended only to B-deck, not far above load waterline, and were open at the top. Once the ship was down even slightly by the head, water could spill between them. On Titanic, spill-over began within 20 minutes of the collision with the iceberg. This made it impossible to establish flooding boundaries and hastened the sinking. She would have sunk anyway; a recent study has shown that the collision caused structural failure of the hull plating across six compartments. The damage was compounded by faulty steel; the plates were not ductile, and in low temperatures the rivets were brittle and suffered shear failure. However, if the bulkheads had been of effective height, the ship would not have sunk so quickly – and lives could have been saved.

The more interesting story for me is the loss of Britannic. After the disaster, Olympic was modified to improve the subdivision, extend the double bottom into a double hull, and add more lifeboats. These features were then built into the third of the trio, RMS Britannic. She was a shade larger than Titanic, launched in 1914 and still fitting out at Harland and Wolff when the First World War broke out. Yet despite the improvements, she sank in exactly the same way as Titanic. This time it wasn’t an iceberg – it was a German weapon. She was requisitioned as a hospital ship and sent to the Mediterranean. And in the early hours of 21 November 1916, while off the island of Kea, she either hit a mine or was torpedoed. The weapon struck at a junction between two watertight compartments and shock response damaged the watertight doors elsewhere.

At first the ship seemed likely to survive. However, the loss of reserve buoyancy and resulting sinkage left some rows of scuttles underwater; and they had been left open by the nurses to give the patients air. Britannic began to settle rapidly by the head – much faster than Titanic. Captain Bartlett ordered the ship driven for the shore, hoping to beach her; but this may have hastened the rate of water ingress. She went down  just 55 minutes after the explosion. Fortunately the water was warm and there were plenty of lifeboats; of the 1066 people on board just thirty died. It could have been far worse.

Which brings me to the weirdest thing. One of the survivors was Violet Jessup – who had also been on board Olympic when she collided with HMS Hawke – and the Titanic, when she sank. Jessup survived all three catastrophes. Either very bad luck – or very good. I can’t tell which…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Worldbuilding: raiders of the secret U-boat

One of the best ways for writers to world-build is to look around. Not just sideways into the present, but back into the past. Sometimes there are stories back there that have all the feel of a Hollywood blockbuster – but they’re better than that. They happened.

A reader commented the other week on the tale of a U-boat that came into New Zealand waters during the closing months of the Second World War. It’s been the subject of a book, and I’ve written a fair amount on it myself. And in true worldbuilding style, the details have been mythologised, fictionalised – even turned into a play – underscoring the way writers can add creativity to past drama. Yet the original events were dramatic enough of themselves.

New Zealand was lucky during the Second World War – the country was virtually untouched by enemy activity, although the Kriegsmarine sent surface raiders into New Zealand waters early in the war. Later, wireless interception from the United States kept New Zealand officials well informed of Japanese submarine movements.  Coast-watchers and patrols completed the net. In any event, Japanese activity south of the Solomons was minimal after mid-1942. There were attacks in the Tasman during early 1943, and another national alert in November.

Then in January 1945 – as the war was all but over - the Type IX-D2 submarine U-862, Käpitanleutnant Heinrich Timm, slipped into Hawke Bay, on the North Island’s east coast. The moment has been mythologised; there were suggestions that he entered Napier’s breakwater harbour;  or even that the crew came ashore and milked cows — this last spurring a stage play. None of this was true.

Reality was a little more mundane, though still dramatic. In May 1944 Timm sailed from Narvik for the Far East, reaching Penang in September to pick up a cargo of rare ores for the German arms industry. He was given permission for a raiding cruise and went on to Australasian waters. He found no opportunities off Gisborne and Wairoa, and at dusk on 16 January 1945 motored across the bay to Napier. He knew about the beacons marking the route into the breakwater harbour, but although new wharves were opened in 1939 and 1943,  the harbour was still shallow in 1945 and ships had to quit the place in certain tides and swells. Timm had no chance of entering - and even if he had, there was no room to manoeuvre.

The only vessel in harbour was the Pukeko, but Timm knew none of this as his boat idled less than a kilometre from Napier. Blackout was long gone. The Germans saw what they thought were well-lit street cafes, watching couples dancing to jazz music that echoed across the quiet water.  It was a curiously European way of looking at the town; Napier had no waterfront cafes in 1945. It is possible the submariners were looking at the Joylands cabaret at Westshore. The Napier waterfront Soundshell was a popular roller-skating venue — but there was nothing scheduled that evening, though the swimming baths, on the waterfront a few hundred metres south of the breakwater harbour, were jammed with spectators watching a swimming championship.

At any event, Napier’s people were enjoying themselves, little realising the enemy lay just offshore.We can imagine the thoughts of the Germans, seeing a town apparently in peacetime routine after five years of war. As the hours wore on the Pukeko left harbour, fully illuminated. Timm followed, attacked at dawn on 17 January — and missed. A sailor on deck saw the torpedo as it streaked past, but it was such an unlikely sight in Hawke’s Bay he thought he must be mistaken.

Timm continued to stalk the little vessel, but when she began signalling the Portland Island signal station, he decided they had been seen and sheared off to the south. Next day he was ordered to abandon the cruise – and a few months later the war ended.

It was a salutary lesson in what could have happened, if either Germany or Japan had been sufficiently motivated – or had sufficient resource – to do more in the southern Pacific. New Zealand’s Second World War at sea was mainly fought in other waters. A few years ago I collected the tales and personal reminiscences of Kiwi sailors in my book Torpedo! – available online. The war took New Zealand seamen all over the world; and many of the places they went were as strange to them as Napier must have been to a war-weary U-boat crew on that hot summer night in January 1945.

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Worldbuilding: credible steampunk and how to write it real

The other day a reader from the Netherlands asked me for help with a story. How, specifically, to describe a commercial steampunk airship.

Funnily enough, I did just that in a science fiction book I wrote a few years back, Fantastic Pasts (Penguin 2008). I included an airship tale but had a terrible job getting the punch-line ending intact through the editorial process. I wanted a sentence to end with a dash. Grammatically incorrect but dramatically appropriate because it left the reader hanging over whether the airship blew up on landing. Unfortunately the editor kept ‘correcting’ it and killing the effect.

1. A credible steampunk airship
One of the keys to credible science fiction is making the incredible into something ordinary. Characters should not boggle at the amazing tech – it’s just part of the background. A commercial airship is going to be an ordinary thing people fly on. To my mind, it should be ‘explicably credible’ – meaning at least a nod to everyday physics. Check out Winch Chung’s fantastic site for ways and means that authors can do that.

Real airships in the early twentieth century were filled with hydrogen,  partly because it was almost impossible to get enough helium at the right price. But a steam driven airship will have to be helium-lifted (those chimney sparks – think super-Hindenburg!) For various reasons helium has almost as much lift as hydrogen (93 percent, in fact).

That still doesn’t get around the issue of lift vs weight – which is why dirigibles were so big and the weight in them had to be so carefully controlled. Hindenburg had an aluminium piano. If we want steampunk, the issue is that even lightweight pressurised water-tube steam engines have terrible power-to-weight ratios by comparison with internal combustion engines. All of which implies that a commercial steampunk airship, following these rules, is going to be very big indeed for any useful scale of payload – which means expensive. Ultra-luxury travel.

Of course these aren’t the only rules. But with fiction the principles of consistency and believability still hold true – because they make it possible to ‘suspend disbelief’ in the reader.

2. Describing it in prose
Presenting that credible steampunk airship – with all its look, feel, operational costs and so forth – implies a pretty big information dump. Which is the kiss of death for good prose – it interrupts the flow of the story, interrupts the character acts, and besides, it’s usually boring. The key is showing not telling – avoiding the ‘information dump’, and working the information you need into the flow of the story. That can be done quite subtly – for example, by outlining how your characters react to what they see. And – more importantly – you can reveal much about your characters along the way. For example, suppose your hero is nervous about flying and has all sorts of rituals to get over the anxiety. What better way to describe the surroundings as the hero interacts nervously with them?

I won’t detail that further – I’ve written a spot of flash fiction. Tomorrow.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

A walk through time in art deco Napier NZ

I’ve been in my home town. Napier, New Zealand this weekend. It’s a special time – art deco weekend, a three-day fantasy celebration of 1930s life, inspired by the architectural style that has put the place on the world map. I got a bit enthusiastic with my camera. The pictures here are a small selection from the shutter frenzy.

But hey - it’s a weekend to party – a weekend where the town fills with period cars, where there are steam locomotive rides, aerobatics displays by period (ish) aircraft, jazz bands, art deco themed picnics and 1930s-homage street entertainments – all to the backdrop of a city architecture that was openly inspired by Santa Barbara and Hollywood movie fantasy.

The Tom Parker Fountain, a gift to the people of Napier in 1936, modelled after a fountain in Britain – but evocative of a Hollywood fantasy. Coloured bulbs illuminate the sprays at night. I know the guy that once had to change the bulbs.

Today’s joy emerged from tragedy. Back in 1931, the town was flattened by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that destroyed the surrounding district and killed 258 people. Over the next few years, Napier’s town centre was rebuilt to the latest styles of the day – Chicago School. Streamline modern, Spanish Mission and Moderne. It was utterly new, utterly up-to-date – an expression of all that defined the look of the 1930s – and absolutely inspired in detail by what Hawke’s Bay architects saw across the Pacific in California, a place with very similar climate.

Now, I wrote the last major book on that disaster, and the reality of the recovery and lifestyle is very different. The architecture wasn’t even called art deco – that was just one specific aspect of the styles most people referred to as ‘modernism’. Penury destroyed early plans to re-create central Napier as a theme ‘Spanish Mission’ city modleled after Santa Barbara. Instead, small buildings went up as property owners could afford it. And the lifestyle of the day wasn’t the carefree partying of the Hollywood rich, either.

Back in the 1930s, kids wore sugar sacks over their heads to keep the rain off as they ran barefoot and hungry to school. Families jammed cheek-by-aunt-and-uncle into houses that went unpainted, though not unloved. Things were pretty bad.

But razor-accurate history isn’t what art deco weekend is about. It’s all about having a good time today, and doing it in a city with an architectural heritage that is unique in the world. That’s something which wasn’t realised until the 1980s, by which time some of the best modernist structures had already succumbed to the relentless march of urban renewal. The revival of interest in a unique heritage that began back then has blossomed into a three day annual summer festival that brings tens of thousands of people to the city. To party.

And, to me, that party also carries the real meaning of 1930s Napier. Back  then, town boosters such as the ‘Thirty Thousand Club’ were eager to to bring something of the magic of California and Hollywood to depression and disaster-wracked Hawke’s Bay. Their efforts included the ‘sound shell’ on the Napier foreshore – a scale edition, basically, of the Hollywood Bowl. it’s just visible in the background in the second photo from the top. The fountain on the left in the same picture was put up in 1936 and glows at night with multi-coloured lights (I knew the guy that had to change the bulbs). In the dark, it looks like a Hollywood set of the period.

To me, that is what Napier’s art deco festival really echoes. It brings alive the spirit that those folk of 75 years ago hoped might one day come to their town. It’s just magic. Hollywood magic. The spirit of 1930s dreams, made real through a twenty-first century lens.

I think so, certainly. I hope you do too.

My Sunday ‘worldbuilding for novelists’ series returns next week.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

A recommended read

It’s Monday, and that makes it Slightly Shameless Plug Day. I discover my book New Zealand On The Move was listed as a ‘recommended read’ on TVNZ a week or so back.

Good stuff. I wouldn’t quite say every reference in it was ‘affectionate’, as they kindly suggest (I slated the Honda XL-100S, and with good reason). But hey, most of them were – what I didn’t say in the intro of the book was that I’ve driven most of the more recent cars I’ve listed. Especially the Mk V Ford Cortina. Owned one once, very fond memories of it indeed. Affectionate memories? Sure.

But don’t just take my word for it. Check the book out. Hey – (quick Googling here) it’s also available from ‘The Warehouse’. Actually, so’s my other current book Guns and Utu. Excellent.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

The inevitable Peter Jackson Morrie Thou reference

Soon after Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring came out there was talk of a Morris 1000 in one of the ‘leaving Shire’ sequences.

I watched that movie several times and never saw the car myself, and I believe Jackson didn’t either. But that car certainly featured in one of his earlier movies -  Meet the Feebles.One of the funniest movies ever made in New Zealand, a brilliant, brilliant take on puppet theatre – and the  Morris 1000. Including a stretched limo version.

It wasn’t surprising. For a while from the mid-1950s, just about everybody in New Zealand had the money around to buy a Morrie Thou (intentional Stranglers reference here). My family had four between them over the years. I actually learned how to drive in a 1952 Series II two-door Minor with 803cc four-cylinder OHC motor offering 40hp at 4800 rpm, four-speed box and a top speed somewhat less than that of an asthmatic ant. My grandfather’s was fitted with twin Weber carburettors and nicknamed ‘Herbie’ for obvious reasons. It kept breaking half-shafts (also for obvious reasons, if you think about it). My sister’s was a panel van – very rare.

They were assembled new in Auckland from knock-down kits. They became the ‘teenage car’ of the 1970s and 1980s. A friend of mine had a true ”Thousand”, the variant introduced in 1956 with the 948cc four-cylinder motor. That was original in his. But the mags and wide tyres weren’t. He had to cut out the wheel arches to stop them scraping, and then it began cracking its suspension struts.

A few Kiwi owners got more radical. A couple of decades ago or more, I spotted one next to me at some traffic lights on Napier road in Palmerston North. I was in my 1980 Mk V Cortina – Weber DGAV 32/36 twin-throat carb and 1993cc four-cylinder crossflow HC motor rated at 115 ft·lbf max torque. Not bad for its day and easily out-speccing a ‘Thou’. Well, a stock one anyway. The Morrie driver looked across from his driving position towards the back seat and blipped the motor with only a slight roll of thunder. I didn’t even contemplate engaging. Only idiots drag race on public roads. The Morrie driver took off anyway, like a rocket. Pow!

The fact that a Thou could be made to go from nought-to-lose-your-license in about two seconds was Alec Issigonis’ fault. You see, when he first designed the car, back in 1941, he had an air-cooled motor in mind, so he incorporated a huge engine bay. The tiddly Austin and Morris motors that it ended up with scarcely intruded on the space. It wasn’t unusual for enthusiasts to bolt in the Datsun 120Y engine, or the Rover 3.5 litre V8. Or maybe, as I suspect was the case in Palmie, something bigger.

Of course the Thou had to feature in my book New Zealand On the Move. Sans some of the OTT super-geek data – we don’t want people to think I might be too much of a petrol-head, do we.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

In memory of my favourite Batmobile

I’ve mentioned before how difficult it was, at times, to winnow down the topics I’d selected for my book New Zealand On the Move. Cars particularly.

Take the four door family saloon of the 1950s or 1960s, redolent of Kiwi Sunday afternoon drives, beach picnics and camping holidays. Humbers? Fords? In the end I couldn’t go past the PASX and PASY Vauxhall Velox of 1957-62. Britain’s effort to make an American style car – and what a car it was. Veloxes had been around for a while by the late 1950s. The E-series was itself somewhat Americanised, and a very popular four-door family car in New Zealand.

Either power plant gave the Velox a good deal of poke by period standards, up there with the Zephyrs and in sharp contrast to most mass-market British cars of the mid-twentieth century, which didn’t race about so much as pootle. Think Morris 1000 or Hilman Minx (Humber 80 to many Kiwis).

The Velox was big, it was powerful, and it brought such novelties to Kiwi roads as the strip-speedo, an instrument that changed colour with rising speed. And servo-assisted brakes – though they were a bit academic over about 45 mph, where stopping the wheels turning didn’t equate to actually stopping the car. Later, Vauxhall replaced it with the boxier PB model. But that didn’t have the raw chutzpah of the PA.

Or the epic weights of chrome.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011