We’re discovering the ingenious weight-saving features that make this the car it is
ANDREW FRANKEL
MILEAGE 7311
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT
To see if one of the world’s best driver’s cars can also prove sufficiently easy to live with for it to still make sense
I know. Of all the pictures I could have taken in all the locations to which it’s been, I choose one of me filling up the A110’s washer bottle at some motorway services on the M4. Could I really not have thought of anything more interesting to illustrate this story? Or, indeed, to spend the next 600 words writing about? Well, no, as it happens. I won’t spend all the space below talking about the car’s on-board windscreen-clearing strategy, but there is a very specific reason why I am doing so now – and it has very little to do with ensuring you can still see where you’re going.
It is, instead, indicative of the extraordinary measures, many of which remain secret to this day, that ensured the A110 remained as light as was humanly possible while keeping its price within the budget of the merely comfortably off rather than the unfeasibly wealthy.
It’s one thing to use carbonfibre and titanium if you’re designing a car that’s going to retail for a million quid, quite another if it’s one-twentieth of that price. So its engineers had to get clever, and I think the washer fluid delivery system is as good an example as any of what is nothing more or less than honest-to-goodness smart thinking that extends from one end of the A110 to the other.
There are no trick materials here, just the usual confection of plastic and rubber used by every other car manufacturer in the world. The clever bit comes from how they are used.
Alpine’s engineers realised that in most cars with conventional washer jets, an enormous amount of liquid is simply wasted, either not reaching or overshooting the swept area of the screen, or dripping off it before the wiper blade or blades have had the chance to reach it. Which means almost all cars have to have much larger bottles than they might otherwise need to obviate the need to fill up with washer fluid almost as often as you fill up with fuel.
So instead they designed a wiper blade with dozens of strategically positioned needle holes through which said fluid is not so much squirted as misted over – and only over – the precise parts of screen required. And as the liquid is distributed by
