Page:Motors and motor-driving (1902).djvu/86

56 far as this country is concerned, there are very few roads on which they can, so to speak, be let loose. On the long, straight roads of France, it is pleasant to indulge in a sixty miles an hour spin now and then, but when one considers the rapidity with which these monsters consume tyres, the fact that they are not at all suited for the conveyance of ladies, and are most uncomfortable on wet, windy, or dusty days, I am inclined to think that a few years will see their disappearance.

Quite the most important point on which a purchaser should be satisfied is the hill-climbing power of the motor vehicle submitted to him. It is not only necessary that a car should take its full load up a steep hill, but it is essential for satisfactory touring that it should take its load up the steep hill at a good speed.

Many of the earlier cars were so under-powered (the engine-power being insufficient in relation to the weight of the carriage body and load) that on an incline of any steepness they could not pull their load at a speed of more than four miles an hour.

This matter is of urgent importance, and I propose to illustrate it very fully by showing the average speeds arrived at by one of these earlier cars and by a modern car respectively, over a distance of two miles, consisting of one mile up-hill and one mile down-hill.

If the old-fashioned car mounts the hill at four miles an hour and descends it at thirty miles an hour, its average speed for the two miles would be, in spite of the illegal and break-neck rush down hill, only a shade over seven miles per hour. If, on the other hand, the modern car goes up the hill at ten miles an hour and comes down at thirty miles an hour its average for the two miles will be fifteen miles an hour. At the foot of the descent the modern car would be nine minutes ahead of the old-fashioned car.

One may easily calculate what this difference would represent in a long day's run.