Exclusive: The Wheeler Interview
Ted quizzes TVR's Chairman on ABS, airbags and safety
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TVR's Chairman Peter Wheeler puts his faith in TVR's engineering every time he races |
Journalist Andrew English obviously has a chip on his shoulder with regard to TVR, but his comments on safety issues will have left many with a highly innacurate perception of Blackpool engineering.
It’s common practice these days for journalists to round off any review of a TVR by pointing out the lack of ‘active’ safety devices in TVRs. Invariably it’s portrayed as TVR’s desire to build red-blooded sportscars without any namby-pamby safety devices getting in the way of enjoyment.
Looking Deeper
I had the chance to quiz TVR's Chairman Peter Wheeler today about TVR’s attitude to safety. The reality is very much at odds with the lackadaisical attitude assumed by many.
Wheeler has a passionate dislike for both airbags and antilock brakes. Not as I thought because they might interfere with the driving experience or present tedious packaging problems but because he believes his cars are safer without them.
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T350's come with full tubular steel roll cage |
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On anti-lock brakes Wheeler happily pointed out that a car with anti-lock brakes will always take longer to stop than a car without, as demonstrated by Autocar’s 0-100-0 challenge in previous years. “The only purpose of ABS is to allow steering in wet conditions ,” he maintained, adding that in extreme situations “most modern cars understeer anyway ”. The systems don’t help panicking drivers he claimed. What was interesting was that his views didn’t come across as bloody-mindedness, but very much a belief that to add ABS wouldn’t help drivers of his cars more seriously could worsen a critical situation.
His attitude to airbags is driven by the same desire to engineer the safest car possible. It’s not driven by a hatred of new technology as has often been suggested. The latest range of TVRs are built with either full roll cages or in the case of the open top cars, a windscreen surround that is an integral part of the chassis and provides roll over protection.
Despite all the legislation that manufacturers have to conform to these days, roll over protection remains a weak point in most saloons. Despite this Wheeler ensures his latest cars are designed to be “relatively safe upside down ” - “proven by customers, ” he quipped.
The use of an airbag in a convertible fills him with horror. In the event of a roll or even the car simply tipping over slowly the driver can at least make some effort at self preservation – an airbag inflating simply pops the head up into the danger zone he told me.
The Philosophy
It was at this point that I began to understand where he was coming from. Being the owner and figurehead of TVR, Wheeler feels a unique sense of responsibility for the cars built by his company. He knows that his cars will be driven hard and fast and he has a conscience to wrestle with. “If someone crashes one of my cars and it’s their fault then I can live with myself. If we were to put an airbag in one of our cars and it ended up killing someone, I couldn’t live with that ”.
It’s that attitude that drives his whole approach to safety these days. The backbone chassis and GRP body may seem like a simple – even cheap – way to engineer a car, but it’s a formula that Wheeler believes provides a perfect balance of strength and safety. He wants his cars to stay in one piece in the event of an accident rather than break in two – “it’s safer to be attached to the body of the car than to be flung off on a fragment,” he told me.
The steel chassis have demonstrated their strength on many occasions but the lack of ‘crumple zones’ concerns many people. Where a monocoque car will compress its chassis and bodywork in the event of an impact - via its crumple zones – a TVR will absorb a huge amount of energy in the glass fibre before the chassis takes any impact.
It ain't pretty but it works
Take a look at any crashed TVR and you’ll often find relatively minor damage to the chassis yet many of the panels will be shredded, mashed or shattered - it’s that behaviour that Wheeler takes such comfort from.
Stunning Curves
Whilst some will joke about the plastic cars from Blackpool and assume that there’s no strength in the flexing bodywork, the opposite is in fact the case. TVR’s stunningly curvaceous bodies provide both good looks and strength. The engineer in Wheeler came out again at this point as he explained the construction methods. “A curved panel is stronger than a flat panel – that’s why our cars don’t have any flat panels ”, he told me.
Whilst TVR don’t have to subject their range of cars to crash testing – due to the low volume of production – they did subject a Tuscan Speed 6 to an offset impact test. The car not only passed with flying colours but was fixed up with some new body panels and new wishbones and then crashed again! The car proved both its strength and its ability to absorb energy whilst leaving the passenger cell intact.
Having spent half an hour with the Chairman I left buoyed by his positive attitude to the issue of safety. Contrary to what I’d been led to believe over the years, safety isn’t an option box they’re leaving unticked, but as ever TVR have found a different way of doing things which they’ve proved works extremely well – even some of us close to their products don’t always appreciate the logic, reason and above all belief that goes into the design decisions.
Omitting active safety features on TVRs isn’t an omission by Wheeler, it’s a positive statement that he believes his cars are safer with his safety features than adopting mainstream thinking for the sake of it.
PW pic courtesy of Deb Morgan
I for one can say when i had an accident last year if there had been a passsenger airbag my passenger would now have had a fence post sticking out of his chest, fortunatly he managed to lean forward and down and the post went through the windscreen and out the back window not touching him.
BB
Bottom line is that TVR chassis is massively strong, and very few people realize the energy absorbant properties of fibreglass. The energy required to tear apart all those bonded fibres is enormous, and the chassis is massively strong.
Metal monocoques are cheap to produce; period. Mass manufacturers use them because they are safe, they use them because they are cheap to mass produce. Crumple zones are a sop to crash testing and misguided concerns over passive safety.
Give me the power to accelerate out of trouble, massive controllable braking power, and nimble steering; these primary safety features will hopefully help me avoid any impact situation. If I still screw up, an inherently strong chassis wrapped in a naturally energy absorbant material (from any angle, not just the narrow specs of a rigged crash test) gives me more confidence than being the mushy contents of a crushed tin can.
Have you ever stood on a tin can? How was it compared to standing on a six inch nail?
Look at it another way; what is one of the first, and I think compulsory, chassis mods required in saloon car racing? A full steel roll cage. I guess they don't put much faith in steel monocoques in racing circles. A TVR is a roll cage with wheels on the corners. Sounds good to me!
4.5 hours later I was able to drive the same car in another race. The chassis was undamaged, despite the huge impact to both sides of the vehicle.
Ok - mine is a race car - but the road cars TVR sell today evolved from the chassis on my race car. They are very strong cars.
As mentioned by previous posters, i also did not realise the problems encountered by an air-bag equipped convertible. I've seen quite a few crashed TVRs on this site and it does reassure me that in all of them the passenger cell has been fine. Similar case with Porsche GT2s which are of a similar gene pool (no abs, rear-wheel drive etc).
It would be interesting (but extremely expensive) to see how an example of each model would fare.
I suspect you would be surprised how well a GRP car would do.
>> Edited by JonRB on Sunday 18th April 23:12
We drivers know how solid the cars are - particularly if you (or you know somebody who) has bent one - but the world thinks
"tupperware wrapped around chassis with no modern driver "aids", now that cannot be safe!" Absolute TOSH, and now the Guvnor (PH) has told us the engineering reasons behind his philosophy, let's tell the world. Send the details to Mr Clarkson or the Daily Mail (God forbid !!
) Its also nice to know that PH knows how we'll (ab)use his product.
A.G. said:
Good article and all points agreed with but the discussion as usual was about front enders, ie. An accident that would probably be YOUR fault,
If however you were to be in an accident that was someone elses fault. ie You were T boned in a side impact by Mrs Q Citizen in a Voyager/Shogun/etc etc would you rather be cocooned in an NCAP Nissan Micra/Citroen Saxo etc etc. monocoque structure or be sat wrong side of the aforementioned extremely strong chassis with the protection of 2 outriggers, a GRP door casing a couple of CDs and a michelin map to fend off the school run missile?
Just playing devils advocate and NOT doing a Jigs.
All the above is of course IMVHO.
I will have to correct your misassumption that the TVR range has no side impact protection. I graduated from Manchester University where the STATUS vehicle testing facility is based and where TVR side impact bars were developed. They pioneered a unique impact bar which absorbs energy over an extended period of time to decrease the posibility of intrusion from a side impact.
I can assure you a lot of mainstream manufacturers copied their idea, many years after TVR were already using it.
. There doesn't have to be a right way or a wrong way for car safety, as this proves just different approaches for differing applications (cat skin remove
). I would love the likes of JC to take up this mantle, I'm sure he browses here
so come then how about it........ Harry
Although there was a large amounty of damage to the GRP, the chassis remained untouched. The Space Wagon was a write off. Modern cars may have engineered crumple zones, but a well designed GRP body takes a lot of force, before it finally gives way.Even old kit cars like the Midas, stand up extemely well in an inpact.
Cars with crumple zones get written off very easily by virtue of the fact that they are designed to collapse. To make matters worse they attempt to distribute the impact across the structure of the car. This limits the maximum accelerations suffered by the passengers, but trashes the car. Badly bent cars may be that shape after a crash precisely because they did their job.
>> Edited by ATG on Monday 19th April 00:35
ATG said:
Before we all get too carried away with the indestructability of our cars, it is worth noting that for those of us in Chimaeras and Griffiths (and I guess the same is true of the S models), there is no roll over protection and damn all side impact protection, certainly no side impact bars. >> Edited by ATG on Monday 19th April 00:35
Really? I find it hard to believe that TVR threw away the idea of side impact frames that were in the Wedge doors, once they started making the S series.
Though I could be wrong, of course.
Agreed that the windscreen frame of the Wedges wouldn't do much in a roll (although allegedly 'reinforced', it flexes like hell just with hand pressure).
You have to consider that the centre of gravity of most sports cars is somewhere down by the centre of the earth, so a roll is only likely if you clip something and flip the car over.
Remember that a car will always slide before it rolls...
As for direct impact resistance; a mate stuffed his 400SE into a lamp-post. A new nose cone later and even though I know where the join is, I can't see it. Most tin boxes would have been in the scrapyard with ripples as far back as the tail lamps...
Ian
wedg1e said:
Before we all get too carried away with the indestructability of our cars, it is worth noting that for those of us in Chimaeras and Griffiths (and I guess the same is true of the S models), there is no roll over protection and damn all side impact protection, certainly no side impact bars. >> Edited by ATG on Monday 19th April 00:35
Really? I find it hard to believe that TVR threw away the idea of side impact frames that were in the Wedge doors, once they started making the S series.
Though I could be wrong, of course.
.....
on this occassion you are right, that you are wrong
. No such protection in the S/chim/griff, it was only re-introduced into the cerb onwards 
(IMHO) harry
Well done for securing the interview
.ATG said:
Before we all get too carried away with the indestructability of our cars, it is worth noting that for those of us in Chimaeras and Griffiths (and I guess the same is true of the S models), there is no roll over protection and damn all side impact protection, certainly no side impact bars.
It's something I was concious of when writing this article. Sadly the older cars do have gaps in their armoury.
PetrolTed said:
Before we all get too carried away with the indestructability of our cars, it is worth noting that for those of us in Chimaeras and Griffiths (and I guess the same is true of the S models), there is no roll over protection and damn all side impact protection, certainly no side impact bars.
It's something I was concious of when writing this article. Sadly the older cars do have gaps in their armoury.
And putting it all back in perspective, ALL older cars are less technologically advanced than their newer counterparts.
The main safety equipment remains the "nut behind the wheel" in all cases anyway!
Excellent article, mind, Ted!
The Article said:
On anti-lock brakes Wheeler happily pointed out that a car with anti-lock brakes will always take longer to stop than a car without, as demonstrated by Autocar’s 0-100-0 challenge in previous years. “The only purpose of ABS is to allow steering in wet conditions ,” he maintained, adding that in extreme situations “most modern cars understeer anyway ”. The systems don’t help panicking drivers he claimed. What was interesting was that his views didn’t come across as bloody-mindedness, but very much a belief that to add ABS wouldn’t help drivers of his cars more seriously could worsen a critical situation.
Is there a possibility that PW could be wrong for the majority of cars for the majority of the general public here? Most TVR drivers are enthusiasts, I would say, so they're positive, committed drivers who are on the ball for most of the time they're driving. Most of the general public however, are not. Give a numpty a non-ABS car in a panic-braking situation and they'll plough merrily onwards into bus-stop queues, traffic jams or roundabout islands with all four wheels singing.
Give the same numpty a car with ABS and maybe - hopefully - they'll steer around these obstacles and avoid an accident. 
PW could well be right for his particular market/audience and shame on the Torygraph journo for blindly writing off our beloved marque on such a serious matter, but I disagree fundamentally with PW's logic for most cars and most drivers.
(On the airbag issue I remain open-minded, however.
)It's an interesting point though. Take the new Elise for example (might be a poor example given it's light weight). It's got fantastic brakes. Step hard on them and you'll come to a rapid stop. Locking up the wheels is very difficult and I couldn't actually get the ABS to kick in. I simply stopped very quickly doing an emergency stop. I'd argue that the ABS is completely unnecessary in that car and is only there for marketing purposes.
PetrolTed said:
I'd argue that the ABS is completely unnecessary in that car and is only there for marketing purposes.
Interesting that you said that as I was going to make a similar comment - let me explain. I have recently ordered my new company car. It comes standard with Vehicle Stability Control because to quote the manufacturer "the torque of the diesel engine means that it requires the standard fitment of this advanced safety device".
Now dont get me wrong, I am not complaining that it is fitted, but if it wasnt, would I have it fitted? Probably not and to be honest does a saloon car with 140BHP and 230lbs torque really need VSC? The equivalent petrol engined car has 153BHP and 140lbs torque.... or is this just something that they can put in the brochure to say that its a "safety feature"? Seems pretty pointless and un-necessary and just a marketing exercise to me.....
My fear is that safety is becoming the new differentiator and we are actually loosing sight of what we really need - which is better drivers and a better understanding of the current driving conditions - VSC, ABS, Airbags, BFD and all of the other stuff wont stop a moron from going into a corner too fast in the first place..... the reliance on technology is getting towards the dangerous in my opinion....
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