The 'sorry little vehicle' that became the subject of a literary classic

If you held a sharp stick to my eye and demanded that I name my favourite authors, I’d hum and haw and try not to sound like an oaf as I mumbled about Don Winslow and Jonathan Coe and how, when I was in my 20s and had just moved to London, I read a lot of Martin Amis because that’s what you did when you were in your 20s and had just moved to London. John Niven always makes me smile, I’d say, and Carl Hiaasen too, but it would all be bollocks because the only books I’ve read more than once, aside from Catch 22, are car books.

Normally these are terribly dry things, long on facts but short of pizzazz. But that isn’t always the case, as proven by the 1982 classic, Metro: The Book of the Car by Graham Robson. And if you think a small hatchback once described by an American magazine as a ‘sorry little reconnaissance vehicle’ isn’t likely material for a page-turner well, my friend, you haven’t read Metro: The Book of the Car by Graham Robson. It’s got everything, from comedy to tragedy to an actual inferno, all set against a backdrop of 1970s Birmingham.

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As with all great stories, there are many subplots and subtexts, from the industrial unrest of the era to the pluck and ingenuity of oily-fingered British engineers. As an accompanying text, you might want to try Back from the Brink, an account of pulling British Leyland from its late ’70s abyss written by the person tasked with tackling this problem, Michael Edwardes, who writes in the no-nonsense style you’d expect from a man who admiringly describes one colleague’s business style as ‘crisp’.

Back from the Brink is worth it just for the story of Edwardes arriving to address the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce on the day of a vital union vote about strike action with two very different speeches in his pocket. A vote for another mass walkout would bring BL to its knees and Edwardes would deliver a speech announcing that the company would be shuttered. With minutes to spare, however, he received news that staff had elected not to strike, at which point he tore up the doom-laden script and strode on stage to deliver a cheery message about the future of BL. Len Deighton couldn’t have come up with something so tense.

If, however, you’re less concerned about rollicking plot and favour gentle insights into the human condition, forget Ian McEwan or Maggie O’Farrell and head straight for my current favourite author, Steve Saxty. A former design engineer turned marketing maven, Saxty is unlikely to trouble the Booker Prize committee, more fool them, but if you want a compelling look at the way human beings function (when they’re designing cars) Steve is your man.

I first discovered Saxty with his masterwork, Secret Fords, a two-volume set bolstered by an additional pair of RS-themed sister titles. These books give a tremendous window into what goes into designing a car and they bring a humanity to Ford during times in its history when it seemed like a soulless monolith churning out bland best-sellers. You get the good stuff about the design stories of the RS200 and the Escort Cosworth, of course, but the workaday stuff is more interesting and Saxty’s books, written with a lightness of touch that’s rare in car writing, beautifully capture in prose and photographs the well-meant dead ends and the endless iterating that led, eventually, to a familiar showroom model. You want to know how the 1990 Escort ended up so bland (but almost wasn’t) or how that boggle-eyed Scorpio came about? You want to see the bold steps that gave us the original Focus, and learn how incoming design boss J Mays tried at the last minute to make it look more like a VW? You want to see the brain-scramblingly enormous number of exterior and interior design options that were presented to management in order to get the first Mondeo right? It’s all there and it’s all amazing. Put it this way, I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye only once but I’ve been back to these books loads of times.

You can therefore imagine my excitement when I discovered that Saxty has got a book out called BMW by Design. Better yet, it’s joined by two sister books, one of which is just design sketches and one of which is called Hidden Gems and reveals a load of unseen design schemes and projects, shown to the world for the first time after the author was given unfettered access to the normally padlocked BMW vault. I can’t resist this stuff, addicted as I am to the stories of how cars are made, or not made. Some time soon I’m sure someone will tell me that, I don’t know, David Mitchell has got a new book out and I’ll have to say, that’s great, but he’s no Steve Saxty and it’s hardly likely to be Metro: The Book of the Car.

This story was first featured in evo issue 318.