Why being a car bore is far more fun than you'd ever imagine

I like being boring. I don’t mean the song, though I like that enormously as well, I mean the very act of being a bit of a dullard. Yesterday I spent quite a lot of my time reading up on the ill-fated Advanced Passenger Train of the 1980s. Last week I was so excited to merge smoothly from the M5 to the M6 without the usual queue that I just had to tell someone (and thankfully it was another dull man so he was able to share my excitement at this extraordinarily rare moment). I check tyre pressures a lot. My own, mostly, though if you asked I’d probably do yours too. I recently lost more time than was prudent while on a Dickie Meaden-style sticky deadline pointlessly researching the complicated history behind the Natalie Imbruglia song ‘Torn’. I wasn’t working on a story about the Natalie Imbruglia song ‘Torn’, I just wanted to know more about it.

As you can gather, then, I like nothing more than to wallow in my own banality and the dangerous, day-derailing wonders of the curious mind. It’s therefore no surprise to learn that I’ve just published the fourth book in a series I came up with in 2020 called Boring Car Trivia. It has been, frankly, a labour of love to get episode four out of the door. The first book was an easy distillation of many arcane facts I’d jotted down in notebooks and on my phone. The second became a mop-up of anything left from my notes that needed rewriting or double-checking. The third was made easier by cantering through car books and a massive trove of old car magazines. Then there was a pause. It seemed the well of boring trivia might be dry. I began to wonder, what do I mean by boring?

> Some cars feel better parked than driven, and that's not always a criticism

I publish these books myself because they started as something to do during Covid lockdowns and also because I can’t imagine many publishing companies would be especially interested in slender, inky volumes full of things you didn’t know, or want to know, about the Rover 800. Even if they did give it a go, someone from the marketing department would eventually email ahead of publication with the inevitable ‘Do we really have to have “boring” in the title?’

Actually, having that word on the cover is quite liberating when it comes to compiling the books. If I’d called this series Really Interesting Car Trivia I might have felt some pressure to ensure the contents were genuinely jazzy and remarkable. Pre‑emptively labelling the entire thing as boring is a release and so, as I sat at my desk compiling the latest one, I could re-read some entry about the crucial exterior difference between base and upper model versions of the last-generation Renault Clio or the source of the rear lights on the Jaguar XJ220 concept or the free gifts given to buyers of the MG Montego Turbo and know that no fact was too obscure and too dull. After all, what’s anyone buying the book going to do, complain about it? ‘Dear sir, I paid good money for this publication with “boring” in big letters on the cover and I can’t believe one of the entries is about which special edition Mk3 Cavalier was the first to be fitted with a CD player as standard…’

Instead, I began to fret that the information in the book was actually not boring enough. Someone sent me, for example, a fantastic first-hand experience of engineering the 1990s Aston Martin Vantage and of how a crucial mechanical part of that car owes its existence to a Peugeot 505 V6 found in a scrapyard. I mean, it’s not necessarily the kind of anecdote you’d unleash on a first date or while collecting an Academy Award, but it’s a fine yarn nonetheless and, I’d argue, not actually that boring.

I had the same concern when I found out which car almost caused Spandau Ballet’s drummer to miss the band’s high-profile appearance at Live Aid. Or when I discovered what unlikely hatchback was presented to French president François Mitterrand on the day of his retirement. Or for that matter the story of which high-profile customer requested, and was initially turned down for, a top-spec Vauxhall Vectra estate with the power tailgate feature deleted for a very specific reason.

These all made it into the book in the end even though, for most people, they’re a bit more interesting than, say, the reason the Austin Maestro was originally codenamed ADO 99, what’s unusual about the exhaust design of the Dacia Jogger, or the precise changes made to the Isuzu Piazza when it earnt ‘Handling by Lotus’ badges. Personally, I find all of these things interesting but then, as we’ve established, I’m the sort of person who can lose a morning reading about tilting trains and ’90s pop songs. Because I’m afraid I find boringness quite interesting.

Boring Car Trivia 4 is on sale now via Amazon.

This story was first featured in evo issue 317.