Badge of Honor

I've spelled it the American way because this is a story from over there.

According to Car+Driver, Ford can't sell 40 to 45 thousand of their top-selling F150 pick-ups because they are missing a vital part.

Which vital part?

Is it something to do with the global chip shortage?

Nope.

It seems to be to do with a naughty company called Tribar.

Here's the story as told by the website of Michigan Radio.  Basically, Tribar accidentally released about 10,000 gallons of hexavalent chromium solution into the local water system.

It's not nice stuff and it's not the first time this has happened.

Oops.

Although it is quite useful, for example, in the manufacture of Ford badges.

Tribar are now running at reduced capacity while they are trying to clean up their mess and Ford have a shortage of car badges.

It is probable that the two events are connected - ether that or the lots of little badges have been melted to make one big one for this place:

After all, it is named after the Ford badge.  It's called Blue Oval City.  Hope they've got a nice, clean water supply.

Cognisance

Talking of TV shows involving Richard Hammond, I watched another episode of Richard Hammond's Workshop yesterday too.

It's now being shown on Freeview channel Quest.

I think I like it.

But then it's a show where they do up cars in need of restoration.

And I like all of those - but there isn't anything particularly different about this one.

They do have a frail-looking dog:

But apart from that - nothing else that stands out.  So it'll come down to personalities.  Father and son team Neil and Anthony Greenhouse are Richard's business partners and you get to see more of Richard's wife Mindy and their daughter - who, along with her boyfriend irritated me when they called Richard and his Land-Rover and trailer away to rescue her when she had a puncture.

The workshop is called "The Smallest Cog" - presumably a play on Hammond's short stature.

Series 2 has been greenlit so it will be a success as a TV show - which takes the pressure off it being a success as a car restoration business.

But it almost certainly will be - which is a presumption I am fully cognisant of.

Best. Grand Tour. Ever.

I watched A Scandi Flick yesterday.

Don't read this if you haven't watched it yet but do plan to!

The boys were on top form.

I suspect that Jeremy was very much involved in the writing.  It had a lot of the humour of Top Gear when that was at its best - like the camping trip adventure and the making-an-advert-for-the-VW-Corrado piece.

The bit on the ski slope was just hilarious.

I refuse to believe, though, that the two most shocking events in the show were scripted.

If they were, then somebody deserves an Oscar.

Firstly James smashes his Mitsubishi Evo at high speed sideways into a cave wall and breaks a rib and the car.

Then, once it has been made roadworthy again, he crashes it through a frozen lake surface and he has to escape a semi-submerged car.

It is after this second accident that Hammond (why does he get known by his surname?) comes to the fore and "remembers" seeing a way of using some trees to make a winch to retrieve the stricken car.

Now surely it was the production team who cut down the trees and set everything up to perform this rescue - Jeremy and Clarkson got the credit but whoever did it - it was very effective.

And excellent television.

You would have to be a very harsh critic to think otherwise.

Cars and Coffee (and cats)

 And Rita Ora.

Or should that be "Rita Aygo"?

No.  This story is about an Ora not an Aygo.  It's in Auto Express.

An Ora Funky Cat.

Formerly just known as the Ora Cat.

It has scored 5 stars in the latest NCAP Safety Testing.

But its percentage scores were beaten by Great Wall’s Wey Coffee 01.

So I guess it's hard to beat a coffee.

Trussed Up

I'm getting fed up of Autocar's car news.

It seems to just now be "business insights" that you have to register for or repeats of slideshows.

So I decided to go back to my old favourite - Auto Express car news.

There they had a couple of stories from earlier in the week about how our new feeble-minded, Thatcher-Wannabe Prime Minister was trying to woo the 180000 old white men who got to choose the replacement for the bumbling lecherous Churchill-Wannabe liar.

I'm talking, of course, about Liz Truss:

Hang on, that might be the wrong picture.

Yes, this one is Liz Truss:

You can tell by the spurious union flags.

Anyway, there is one story I actually find myself agreeing with the woman on - she is not a fan of Smart Motorways and suggests the evidence she's seen indicates the concept has failed.

Too bloody right it has - people have died!

The story is here.  Every time I drive to Manchester on the M56 I get slowed down by the roadworks behind the conversion of a stretch of it into Smart Motorway - I dread the day it is opened so that doubles the torture.

Just because you call something "smart" it doesn't mean it actually is - look at Liz Truss for example.

In the other story, she suggests that she is “prepared” to look into scrapping mandatory speed limits on motorways as prime minister.  Now using words like "suggest" and "prepared to look into" means that this is as likely to happen as the 40 new hospitals Boris promised us.

And is she saying she wants to make us more like Germany!?

We could have stayed in the EU for that.

This story wouldn't have chimed with the old men voting for the PM so maybe that is why the final voting went a lot closer than most people - me included - thought it would.

Never mind.

At least Priti Patel is gone.