Free Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson

how the Japanese make their cars so well. I’d already been to one of their car factories and could find no differences at all between their processes and ours.
    We have robots. They have robots. We have line workers. They have line workers. They have big digital boards showing targets. We have big digital boards showing targets. And yet, when their cars roll into the sunshine, they don’t break down. And ours do.
    I’ve even asked Japanese people why this should be so and I genuinely believe they don’t know. They simply can’t work out why a car should ever go wrong.
    I mean, a Japanese car made in Britain is more reliable than a European car made in Britain. Why?
    And all I can assume is that errors are eliminated in the design stage; that the engineers spot potential problems before the car comes off the drawing board. Mazda’s R&D centre might provide an answer.
    The man sent from the reception area to welcome the ‘respectful journalists of UK’ had brought an umbrella but it was of limited use because he was nine inches tall and I’m 6 ft 5 in. Plus, I was standing up straight and he was bent double in the best bow I would see all week.
    Now on my last visit to a Japanese car factory, the workers were lined up, standing to attention, as the intercom system played Johnny Mathis’s ‘When a Child is Born’ – a good English song, said our guide.
    But that was Daihatsu in the boom days and this wasMazda, a company that was losing money hand over fist during a time when the boom was no more than a long-forgotten rumble. So there was no Johnny Mathis; just a plate of Thai green curry in the canteen.
    And then we were shown into a bunker which looked like the inside of Pinewood when the James Bond team were in town. Every straight edge had yellow and black chevrons painted on it, there were banks of flashing lights and lots of men scuttling about with clipboards.
    But instead of a laser which would destroy the planet, they were in charge of a machine that ran up and down some rollers and which had cost about the same as an air force.
    Inside, you sit in what’s supposed to be the driver’s seat of a car, with pedals, a steering wheel and all the usual controls, but instead of a windscreen there was a screen which showed a computerised image of the road ahead.
    Never mind that all the other traffic looked like it came from the creators of
Postman Pat
or that the road didn’t appear to have any potholes or bumps. This was the world’s most expensive driving simulator, installed so that Mazda’s engineers could get a feel for what a car will be like without actually building or driving it.
    Well I had a go and can report that when you accelerate, it tilts backwards and when you brake, it tilts forwards. It rocks from side to side too when you turn the wheel and I don’t doubt that it’s very, very clever. Certainly, I couldn’t have designed it.
    But then I also couldn’t have designed the latest range of amusement-arcade machines which are faster and a damn sight more realistic.
    If Mazda really thinks this helps get a feel for what cars are like on the open road, there’s small wonder their cars are so unutterably dull. The only way to find out if a car is nice to drive is to get a real person to drive it on a real road, but this is not an option in Japan of course because all the roads are full.
    They’re probably a bit emptier in the countryside but your new car would be three years old before you got there.
    However, while a machine like this will result in a dull car, it is interesting to note that if they’re prepared to go this far in the design stage, I may well be right. Errors are hammered out of the equation on the drawing board.
    And now, having mastered that trick, Japanese car firms are starting to design their cars outside Japan. If they can marry European and American flair with an ability to get things right, they will be unstoppable.
    Honda didn’t start making cars until 1966 but