“It turned into a business, and car companies originally were invented by people who had a passion for the internal combustion engine, like Henry Ford, but essentially they went through these very passionate people who were hugely enthusiastic about cars to becoming a business in the 80s, and it became a world renowned business and those guys disappeared and they started to make it cheaper. And these cheaper brand cars were coming out and it became this horrible dispassionate people with accountants involved, but since then they’ve figured out how to make cars a little more reliable into the 90s, but Japanese continued to make reliable cars but Europeans become the problem as we tried to compete with the Japanese on price and just couldn’t.”
Today my guest is motoring journalist Bob Flavin. Bob has a real passion for cars and with over 13 million viewers on his YouTube channel, Bob is one of the most popular motoring journalists in Ireland. I have a great passion for automobiles and was looking forward to chatting with Bob, so I hope you are sitting comfortably and happy to stay with us.
We began our chat with Bob explaining how he got into motoring journalism (01:45), before moving on to how cars went from being unreliable to becoming almost universally reliable machines (03:24). We then started chatting about the history and how the bigger companies went on mass buying schemes of smaller companies (06:00), before discussing the incredible success of the internal combustion engine (07:30). I then asked Bob about the rising popularity of electric powered vehicles, the future of diesel and petrol driven vehicles (10:02), and the new alternatives coming along (15:52). My next questions were about hydrogen and how it is going to be used in future vehicles, and about the alternatives for larger fuel powered machines such as ships (24:22). Next, we discussed the car design history and why modern cars are so much larger nowadays (39:20), as well as what the next big thing in motoring will be (46:40). We finished up our chat with me asking Bob what he is reading and watching at the moment (53:55).
Show Notes
- Bob’s YouTube channel.
- Bob on Twitter
- Bob on Instagram
- For more, hear my conversation with Lt Cdr Grace Fanning, Richard Jones and Mark Piesing
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The Comfortable Spot Podcast 