‘Twas not a good week to be the owner of a shiny new Porsche GT3.
You may have slapped down a hefty deposit on the mere sight of a grainy scoop photo of some disguised prototype tearing around a test track Somewhere in Germany, waited, salivating for months, or even years, for delivery and then, just as you’re settling in, the nice man from Porsche phones and says ‘don’t drive it, it might catch fire; we’re taking it back for a check’.
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This week’s reports suggest that, so far, only two of around 800 cars delivered have actually self-combusted but, as the recent Ferrari incidents showed, no matter how much development time goes into a car, there’s always going to be some snafu that shows up only once units are on the road. We’ve yet to learn the cause of the Porsche fires but Ferrari’s was a glue that didn’t like getting too hot. Yet this didn’t show up in the thousands of hours of development time, prototyping, trial build and millions of miles of road testing in all sorts of weather conditions needed before today’s highly complex cars go into series production. Porsche has done the right thing and it’d be mean not to wish them a speedy resolution and a little sympathy.
This week’s read-it-and-weep story was from an auto blog claiming the owner of this GT3 managed a mere 80 miles from the dealer before, allegedly, losing traction at 50mph in a 60mph limit. Judging by the pictures, most of the powertrain was also lost…
Back in the real world, PSA announced a much reduced loss plus a capital injection from China and the French state. That, and the long-awaited confirmation of date of change of CEO, was enough to awake Our Man in the City from his winter hibernation to pen a pithy comment.
Another interesting confirmation came from BMW: the former NedCar Mitsubishi (and Volvo and DAF) plant in the Netherlands has been contracted to build the new Mini hatchback in parallel with Oxford. Cue spirited owner forum debate in future – is a Dutch built Mini better than an English one? And, guess what? The Mini has been assembled from kits in Holland before. Nothing is ever really new in this business.
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By GlobalDataHave a nice weekend.
Graeme Roberts, Deputy Editor, just-auto.com
