Cult Cars

A researcher from the BBC phoned me . . . ooh, a couple of years ago, it would be . . . to ask about cult cars.

Motoring writers quite like these phone calls because there is always the possibility that you will be wheeled on to a radio or TV programme as an expert on the subject. It's worth a bob or two, and you feel moderately important for a day or two until you discover that nobody you know was watching because they were all tuned into Brookside at the time.

In this particular case I didn't even get that far. I think I passed on someone else's phone number, and that was the end of the matter. Frankly there wasn't much else I could do, because what the researcher was looking for was a definition of a cult car, and how you could predict what cars were going to achieve this status.

There is no sound-bite answer to this - at least, not a sensible one. But I've been thinking it through, and if you don't have anything else on at the moment I'd quite like to share my ideas with you.

First you've got to decide what level of popularity a car has to have reached before you can include it in the list. A cult film is, broadly speaking, one which hardly anyone has seen but which is rated extremely highly by the people who have seen it.

In other words, Top Gun, Casablanca, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are not cult films, but Withnail and I, Eraserhead and Deadsy are. (I'm cheating with Deadsy because I am the only person I know who has ever heard of it and I thought it was terrific.)

By that definition you could say that the Honda S800, the Ford Sierra Cosworth and virtually everything ever made by Bristol are cult cars, but I don't think that works. Anyway, the BBC researcher specifically mentioned the Citroen 2CV, so we're looking at cars that are very well known, which in turn means that there have to be millions and millions of them, probably built over a very long period of time and preferably long after it was sensible to continue doing so.

The cars must also be basically the same. Toyota occasionally pops up with the claim that it has built more Corollas than there are grains of sand on Bondi Beach, or something like that, but the first Corolla bears absolutely no resemblance to anything Toyota is building now.

Bearing all that in mind, I would narrow down the list of genuine cult cars to the Model T Ford, the 2CV, the original Volkswagen Beetle and the Mini. E-mail me if you have any more suggestions, but make sure they keep to the definition I've given.

What do these cars have in common? They were all designed to provide cheap, reliable transport for the masses. The fact that people became so attached to them is more due to their vast numbers than to the manufacturer's original intention (the Mini's popularity was helped by a big marketing push in the mid 1960s, but that was some time after the car went on sale).

When a manufacturer makes a big deal out of a car's cult status, it's because that status has already been acquired, not because the manufacturer is trying to make it happen. For that reason I'm absolutely sure that the new Beetle will not become a cult - it's simply taking advantage of the original car's popularity, and it will only be bought by people with enough disposable income to buy something that is relatively impractical while also being good fun. I think the same will apply with the new Mini, and it is certainly the case with all Minis built in the last twenty years or so.

So, if you are a car manufacturer and you want to make untold millions by building something that people will fall in love with and buy for decades, how do you do it? The answer is simple: don't try.

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