4. The Cavalier CDi (1988)

Description

The new company I joined had a policy of giving new recruits a hand-me-down car from the pool for a period of 3 months whilst they went through a probationary period. Once through this probation period then I’d get a choice of car roughly equivalent to the Manager B cars at my previous employer, but you could ‘top-up’ the nominal allowance calculated for a standard car at that grade for a better car or an additional essential feature offered as an option, if you chose.

I’m not going to offer a chapter of recollections concerning this pool car which was a MkII Astra 1.6GL – it was a hateful car that at least was more powerful than my previous Cavalier with a slightly improved selection of standard equipment. The only one I can remember was that it had a rev counter (tachometer). This implied that there was a more powerful engine under the bonnet and this was only partially true, but it gave me a few hours of fun racing up through the gears, long shifting up to the red line. This proved very useful on just one occasion. I had received a mentor named Bill, a chap a few years older than me, with an other worldly perspective who could ‘charm the birds from the trees’. For the first couple of weeks following my initial training we would tour the West Country which was my chosen sales territory. Essentially, I would tag on behind him learning from his style and approach as he placated disgruntled customers. He was an absolute genius when it came to handling service or contract objections and I learnt a lot from him. He later emigrated to Australia leaving a hole which I was able to move rapidly into. Looking back, my time at this company was seen as successful, by me and the company too, this was largely because of the springboard Bill had inadvertently given me.

It nearly all went tits up and from the very start too.
Just before Bill was due to leave, he and I went on tour staying 2 nights deep in the west country, visiting customers and perspective customers in Plymouth, Yeovil, Bath and Bristol. Bill had left his car at my house in Hampshire and I drove him, as a dutiful acolyte should. As we travelled, we’d plan each sales call in detail considering various ‘what-if’ scenarios prior to each appointment and I had instructions to introduce this or that topic dependent on signals from Bill or planned swings in the conversations. Whether he knew that he was grooming me as his successor, I was never sure but that was the reality of what happened. On this trip, I would keep notes of the conversations and Bill and I would review in the evenings what had happened in the meeting: why this outcome was good and planned and why that one was just wasting our time and not worth further action. I kept extensive notes of all our meetings in a large lever-arch file which I took everywhere with me, it was never out of my thoughts, after all with this wisdom I’d make my fortune! This particular trip was deemed a success and on our return up the A303 late in the afternoon we stopped in a Little Chef to phone into the office in Rickmansworth (this was a long time before mobile phones) and to review the last call over a cup of tea. We had stopped on the A303 somewhere around the Somerset, Wiltshire border. After the break, we drove back to Basingstoke, Bill picked up his car and drove on to his home in Buckinghamshire. My wife and I settled in for the evening, it was about six thirty. At about eight thirty, I went out to the car to make sure my notes from the last couple of days were in good order, but to my surprise I couldn’t find the file. As I frantically searched the boot and under the front seats (assuming it had slid off the back seats) I feeling of imposing dread struck me.

I’d left it in the Little Chef in some God forsaken village split asunder by the A303 somewhere on the Somerset/Wiltshire border! Blind panic ensued. If that falls into our customers’ hands I’ll be sacked instantly or worse, I just had to get it and now.
It was the most reckless drive that I’d ever accomplished, hammering that hateful little car with my wife’s white knuckles clenched around the door supports and knowing that Little Chef’s shut at ten o’clock sharp and given its out of the way location, it may shut earlier than that. It was dark and passed 10 o’clock when we got there, but there were lights on at the back of the building. I knocked on the door like a rabid maniac. One of the chefs came out from behind the ovens and signalled that they were shut, but I continued to slam the door with both hands flat against the glass until he opened up threatening to call the police. I hurriedly explained my problem explaining that I’d definitely lose my job if I couldn’t get the file back now. He was a decent enough fellow and let me in. I went straight to where we’d been seated and there was the file on the bench seat hidden by the shadow of the table top. I gave him a fiver telling him to have some beers on me and left contented and exhausted. My wife drove home – slowly.

That, however, is my only memory of the Astra and, other than that, it is best forgotten. Once I was through my probationary period, I was able to choose a new car.

Being alert to the motivations of fleet managers, I decided to play a little game with them. Rather than take the option of a new car, I decided to wait a while longer. I was hoping that as the economy continued to boom competition for sales resources would increase in a limited market and therefore salaries and benefits required to capture the best salespeople would go up too. I hoped that the car scheme would therefore have to improve alongside the salaries. I did a deal with my boss and the fleet manager to transfer ownership of my bosses’ old car to me so that he, having been recently promoted, could get a BMW 320i SE 3 door in sapphire black. My boss was happy, the fleet manager was happy (with a bottle of champagne to share with the pretty new admin from accounts he was wooing) and I was happy because I was the proud owner of a one year old Cavalier CDi. It was an 1800 fuel injected top-of-the-range model. The first time I’d ever owned a top-of-the-range model. It had soft exotic velour seating, electric front and rear windows, an automatic gearbox, a sunshine roof, an upgraded audio system (from those I’d been used to), electric mirrors, multi-spoke alloys and an electric aerial which retracted when the audio system was switched off. It even had a tachometer, but this time it matched the power output of well over 100 brake horsepower with a reasonable acceleration up to and over a hundred miles an hour. For the time, it had just about everything! This was a seriously impressive car for a 25 year old to be driving around in even if it was just for a year until the mileage hit 60,000 miles. It was an unusual colour inside and out: metallic dark brown. I liked it, it was not a common colour and had a certain stylish mystic to it emphasising the fact that there were not many of them on the road because it was top-of-the-range. I was only slightly disappointed to find that my boss had not bothered to clean it prior to handover. So I had to re-locate some rather dreadful Celine Dion tapes and, most disgustingly, clean out the finger-nail clippings I found in the driver’s door pocket!

Before I got home I took it to the car wash and hoovered inside twice. Then I went home and took my wife out for a decent drive followed by an exceptionally good meal at the Bush Inn at Ovington. We had a high old time and all was well with the world. My admission to my mother that I was a salesman had not gone down well, she seemed to think that I’d sold out throwing away a perfectly good education in order to dance with the devil. No amount of explanation of the skills and role of an outsourcing salespeople seemed to make any difference, what did make her ease-off the abuse, however, was the car.
I was fortunate enough to have an early win with the subsequent early commission cheque and this changed our outlook considerably. Previous to this we’d been struggling, I think that would be a fair synopsis, since we’d got married with a 100% mortgage, but since both of us had received company cars and we’d achieved some decent pay rises – things were looking up. The commission cheque facilitated a move of house and for the first time an additional holiday on top of the obligatory summer holiday. We decided to visit my wife’s grandparents in Shropshire and stay a couple of nights at the Feathers at Ludlow, but prior to that we were to stay in the George at Hathersage and visit Sheffield and the Peak District.
Like an idiot, I planned the trip starting on Good Friday. The M1 was blocked off with an accident in the heavy traffic, so I decided to divert up A1, but I hit the mother of all traffic jams just outside St. Neots. This edged north at a depressingly tardy pace and I began to lose concentration. I was fiddling with all the gismos and changing tapes when I should have been looking at the traffic in front of me. The automatic gearbox was still fairly new to me. I lurched forward enthusiastically hoping that the blockage was over only to find that the enthusiasm was short lived and we will stationary again. It was during an exercise such as this that I lurched forward whilst changing a tape and crashed into the back of a Mazda 626 hatchback.
Shit!
I looked across to my wife who was making a face that suggested I was little better than a guy with his baseball hat on the wrong way around.
“Sorry. Are you OK?”
“I’m OK, but he’s not,” she replied, pointing to an irate Captain Mainwaring type shaking his head as he stared at the rear of his Mazda 626.
I got out sheepishly and proceeded to humbly explain to him that my foot had slipped off the brake and I’d only just got the car et cetera – wasn’t quite au faire with the machine as yet. He was a boorish and pompous pedant complete with a 1940s moustache and a huge chip on his shoulder, possibly because the idiot youth with the expensive car had ruined his turtle waxed Japanese tank. There was no way he was going to make it easy for me, even though, and this was the rub: his car had a tow-bar extension on the back of it which had formed a perfect v-shaped indent into the front of my lovely car crushing the front bumper and grill in by a good six inches. There was not a scratch on the Mazda. Not a fucking scratch. What made it worse was the fact that we had an audience, it was the only thing to amuse all the other drivers in the queue of traffic to help them break the monotony. It seemed to take an age, exchanging names and address and insurance details, me fawning apologetically and him giving it large.
As I said before, I know absolutely nothing about the workings of cars, but I did seem to recall episodes with my mum and dad involving burst and overheating radiators – this always seemed very serious. So, as he was berating me and to avoid eye contact I kept glancing at the indentation in my bonnet scrutinising it for the tell-tale wisp of steam and listening intently above his ranting for a hiss that would herald a punctured radiator. Surprising, I must have been very lucky because all was OK. Eventually, we got going and this coincided with the traffic moving again. I was so annoyed with myself for the slip of concentration that had caused the damage to my car, the car I was so proud of which was now irreparably tarnished, that I proceeded cautiously watching the temperature gauge and peering at the bonnet waiting for the worst. The Mazda 626 was still in front of me and somehow I didn’t have the balls to overtake and give him the satisfaction of turning to his wife and exclaiming: “bloody hooligan!”
So after a little while, I turned off into the small picturesque Northamptonshire village of Barnwell and went to the pub for lunch. My wife thought it was funny, not least because I had done it to my own car. After calming down with a good lunch and checking the car carefully we concluded that we were indeed lucky save for my dented ego. We could continue on our holiday and head for Sheffield.
The only other thing to add to this story is the rather misogynistic attitude of several innkeepers over the next couple of days who all assumed that I was driving the expensive dented vehicle as I pulled into the inn’s car-parks because I must have taken over from my wife after the accident! I was able to gain some much needed browny points from her by clearly and eloquently explaining that no it was in fact me who had crashed the car and my wife was a very good driver who would have never drive a vehicle forward whilst changing tapes on the stereo with her eyes focused on the Dolby button, not the road!
Humble Pie and Chips please, Innkeeper!

I have always been more at home admiring the ascetics of a car than understanding how it works or more particularly, what’s all that stuff under the bonnet. True, I can admire the magnificence of a thumping 5 litre V8 Jaguar when idling and revving hard and I can be impressed when looking into the engine compartment, especially when it’s full of stuff topped with a big V8 embossed in steel, but that’s about it. What I’m really after is a relative exclusive car that looks beautiful and is quick with a lovely engine note, the rest is for the mechanics.
What I am about to relate is a cautionary tale. In 1988, not everything always worked with 100% efficiency, this was true of cars too. There was always a little thrill when a depression of a lever or a switch resulted in the correct and anticipated action being performed by the car, but equally it was not unexpected if nothing happened at all. A simple smack on the dash would normally re-set the system and allow you to try again. It was most satisfying when, at the second time of asking and as a result of your intervention, the thing worked correctly. Warning lights were like that too. They would come on, flicker a bit and then go out and I would think to myself, “I wonder what that was all about?” The sensor must be faulty, it was very rare to take any warning lights at face value and then come to the conclusion that the oil pressure was low or you’re likely to run out of petrol.

I was merrily chortling to myself cruising around the M25 on my way to Rickmansworth when the oil lamp came on, as it had a number of times over the last couple of days.
Funny.
Either it’s faulty or perhaps the oil levels are getting low, but it’s not obvious to me which because I’m right on the cusp of the red line. Downhill we’re OK, uphill we’re not. In my defence I thought that when I got to Rickmansworth, I’d stop to get some oil and with that appeasement I settled back into the driving seat blanking the light from my mind momentarily. One mile later, the very much alive Cavalier CDi took on an altogether less active character. Suddenly, all the instrumentation lights came on, this was followed by a pop sound from the engine, a little puff of smoke from the rear and then nothing. All other priorities rescinded. Nothing. It died at seventy miles an hour in the outside lane of the M25 on a Monday morning.

Fuck!
It was a miracle I managed to fight the now non-power assisted steering and wrestle the terminally sick Cavalier CDi to the hard shoulder. I didn’t have time to shit myself, if I had had I would have!
It was very embarrassing to arrive back at the office on the back of a tow-truck especially with the rather lame excuse that I thought the oil-lamp was faulty. It turns out that the engine had seized, but fortunately it was repairable and a few weeks later I was back in it, which was annoying because the hire car that I’d been given was a Granada Scorpio 2.8i. This car had absolutely everything including electric movable seats which were heated!

It was around this time that a strange affliction struck a certain portion of the population, or that element of it that was out on the road. BMW craziness started to strike. Prior to this period, BMWs had been rather brick-like tanks from the fatherland, not particularly desirable and astronomically expensive. Within a few short years that had all changed, the pervasive introduction of the 3 series (E30) models in 1984 had got to the point that they were no longer rarities and overnight they became desirable as the quality embodiment of solid German design and engineering. They were still expensive but in order to keep successful sales people from being poached by competitors forward thinking human resources and fleet managers in the larger corporates had contrived to find ways of equating car allowances so that staff could take from the normal fleet with nothing to pay or they could pay a top-up over their allowance to get an entry level BMW or the other desirable: the Mercedes 190E (forerunner of the C class).
It was against this background that my boss, as I’ve already said, the original owner of my CDi became the proud owner of a BMW 320i SE, 3 door. This coincided with a mate of mine, the same one who’d challenged me to move into sales, exchanging his Vauxhall Cavalier SRi for a silver BMW 320i SE, 4 door. Everyone was at it! My wife’s boss took delivery of a new BMW 323i SE in a strange orangey-red colour complete with stripes and spoiler.

He was a bit of a knob, mine you!
To show the car off, he took my wife and I out to the Peking Inn in Cookham where if we were lucky (or unlucky!) we might catch a glimpse of Michael Parkinson or Billy Connolly who allegedly lived in the village. When he picked us up the normally egoistical maniac had been replaced by this depressed creature with a Neanderthal frown. It turned out that that morning he had bought the Sunday papers and was reading the motoring sections cover to cover only to discover that BMW had just introduced the new BMW 325i at the Geneva motor show which would arrive in this green and pleasant land in a few months or so. The journalist had joyously predicted that the 325i with its more powerful and perky engine would cream the redundant 323. He’d contemplated suicide, but settled on being a petulant grumpy prick instead!

Whilst I could enjoy this chap’s particularly form of hubris from a safe distance, I had to admit that I too was beginning to succumb to an illogical longing for the products of the Bayerische Motoren Werke. There was more than a little Schadenfreude at play here – I could empathise with him. He had had the dream and then watched it taken from him, to have to spin around for another couple of years miserably acknowledging every 325i that would cruise past him. Try as hard as you like to ignore them, you just know that you’re going to notice them everywhere you go from now on!

My mate had confidently told me that he had burnt off a Ford Tickford Capri 280 (still not sure I believe this) on the A33 from Winchester to Basingstoke in his BMW 320i.
With all this peer pressure going on around me, it seemed quite natural that I should volunteer to take the boss, his wife and their kid to the airport for their holidays thus saving him exorbitant parking fees and giving me the 320i for a couple of weeks so I could see what all the fuss was about. The first thing I noticed once I’d got rid of him and could let rip was the acceleration from the enthusiastic 2 litre straight six engine. That’s a boxer to you and me, just like the Ferrari Boxer. Well, not the same but similar, the pistons punching at each other rather than the V6 set-up where the pistons are at an angle. Once on the M25, I could accelerate in second gear from 20 mph all the way up to almost 60mph and it was pulling all the way and so smooth. I’d fallen in love! Nothing would ever be the same again. It was so stylish as well, there was no blatant unnecessary gadgetry, indeed there was hardly any creature comforts or nods to what other car a manufacturers were having to add to the boring models to make them more attractive to the uninitiated non-BMW driving moron. It did have electric front mirrors, windows and sunroof and extremely acceptable Blaupunkt Bavaria stereo system, but in the BMW none of that seemed important. It was the driving position and the instrumentation that got you, everything was in its right place, the dash curving round the driver like you were a fighter pilot, the gear knob small offering precise gear changes and at just the right height and length for your left arm. You could change gear quickly and this was the first car I’d ever driven that could actually respond instantly to a quick gear change and get on down the road a little quicker than before.

That ‘ultimate driver’s machine’ ethos had a darker side to it, it didn’t just mean that it was built for you, the driver, ready to dance to your every command, it also meant that you’d better fucking know what you were doing big boy otherwise there would be trouble.
That was my lesson for the next day – Saturday.
I was in possession of a BMW (at least for a week or two) and I was going to take my wife out to a nice restaurant a fair distance away, one we would only ever go to on special occasions. So we set off, it was dizzling but it had been all morning. I made for the A33 joining at a roundabout in Chineham, near Basingstoke. I accelerated onto the roundabout quite hard and once on the roundabout I proceeded to accelerate around the slippery service and that’s when she slipped from under me and for a split second everything went haywire! Adrenalin was pumping around my body, I was more alive than I’d ever been before and it looked as though that sensation would be quickly followed by another – being more dead than I’d ever been before too!

Somehow, not through training, nor through any counter-intuitive logic about a rear-wheel car slipping left with the front wheels pointing in the opposite direction et cetera but through sheer bravado and luck I was able to regain control without hitting anything, not even the kerb. There followed absolute silence from my wife for a good twenty minutes and I was forced to turn her Chris Rea up to avoid the recriminations that were surely about to issue forth from the rumbling Krakatoa sitting next to me.
There was no dynamic stability control, anti-locking brakes or traction control then, these aids were still years away; you really had to drive cars then! We’re all scared these days when you sit in a new car on a demonstration day with the verbose salesperson.

“What does that button do?” I ask, excitedly pointing to the button with the chequered flag on it.
“Are you Lewis Hamilton?”
“No, why?”
“Then you’ll never need to press that button, just leave it alone, Sir.”

After that experience in the BMW 320i, I was much more respectful of powerful rear-wheel drive cars, but the respect had only served to galvanise the longing for ownership of one of these beautiful malevolent mistresses of the highway!

SUMMARY (8/10): This was a car I was loathed to give up, all the limitations of the Cavalier 1.3L were overcome, it had lots of electric gismos, it had a smooth 1.8 litre fuel injected engine, a decent stereo and a sunshine roof (albeit self-winding). It was definitely a car for a person a grade ahead of me and therefore, given how important those things were back then, I score it highly because I remember missing it went it went.

Next time, it’s the Rover 213 Vitesse EFi (1989).