Small firms driving UK car industry
The News Review:
- Small firms driving UK car industry
- Lunchers lurch behind lean, mean machine
- Without Bonds, the West is an open range
Small firms driving UK car industry
BBC News – Mar 28, 2005
In small workshops across the country, a host of home-grown, home-owned companies continue to make a wealth of characterful high-performance vehicles. Free from the globalised, homogenised constraints of shared car platforms, or whether the boot can hold the weekly shopping, they focus instead simply on engineering pure driving pleasure, be it raw or encased in luxury. Lamborghini-bashingOne such company is Ariel, based in the tiny village of North Perrott, in the middle of the rolling Somerset countryside.
Lunchers lurch behind lean, mean machine
Guardian Unlimited – Mar 28, 2005
When they met in Lisbon five years ago, leaders of the European Union made a commitment to becoming the “most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010″. This pledge now looks embarrassing, if not downright ridiculous. The gap between Europe and the US has grown and is likely to grow wider still. When it looks for a prospective challenger, America looks across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. The cartoon on the front of a pamphlet produced by the Centre for European Reform to chart progress on the Lisbon agenda sums it up nicely: Europe is a tortoise, the US and China are hares. The moral of that particular story, of course, is that the tortoise won in the end. So is there any hope that Europe can defy the doubters and return to the days when it grew more quickly than the US and closed the gap with the world’s richest nation? Or is it the case – as many in the US believe – that Europe is too tired, too old, too lazy, too inward-looking to compete in the rough, tough world of globalisation? The paper presented to the Royal Economic Society casts doubt on whether it can…
One school of thought says this need not matter, because what goes around comes around. The American economist Lester Thurow says Europe and Japan come into their own in the mature phase of technological development, when the emphasis is on gradual product improvement rather than on the big bang idea. To take one example, Henry Ford pioneered the massproduced car but the reason the Japanese made such big inroads into the American market in the 70s and 80s was that their cars were better than the shoddy home-grown models. Although it is a gross generalisation, the argument is that once something has been invented, the Americans with their butterfly minds are quickly on to the next thing, leaving scope for the plodding Europeans and Japanese to upgrade product quality through constant tinkering. Huang says in his paper that it is quite possible for uncertainty-averse countries to catch up later in the technological cycle. A word of caution needs to be entered here, though. It took many decades for the consumer products of the last wave to make it from the drawing board to the shops, leaving plenty of time to catch up with the innovators.
Without Bonds, the West is an open range
SportingNews.com – Mar 28, 2005
At 6-5, 225, he’s already bigger than Guerrero, who is 6-3, 220. Depending upon how other Dodgers prospects develop, Guzman could move to third base or right field. The Padres aren’t nearly as deep, though their future core already includes two home-grown talents, staff ace Jake Peavy and shortstop Khalil Greene. Revenues from Petco Park should enable the team to keep its best players — Peavy recently signed a four-year deal with a club option for 2009 — limiting down cycles for a franchise that never has produced three straight winning seasons. What’s more, the Padres’ spending power will increase when the contracts of two oft-injured plodders, first baseman Phil Nevin and left fielder Ryan Klesko, expire after ’06. Then there are the Diamondbacks and Rockies, who both are trying to regain credibility. The Diamondbacks’ finances remain mysterious, making their future difficult to predict.