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.With this settlement made, and it’s more than twice the size of any previously doled out by a car maker, the floodgates are set to open with 37 other cases being lined up to punch Chrysler on the nose.Experts are saying it could eventually cost the company £5 billion, which would pretty well finish them off.Now you have to remember that this is America, where there are two types of people: dim ones and lawyers.If a lawyer can ham it up in court, the dim people in the jury will think they’re watching Oprah and vote to finish the big, nasty, child-killing corporation.Apparently, the jury in Chrysler’s case were peeved that a car maker had seemingly put economy in front of safety, but look: having seen the Mercedes in which Princess Diana was killed, and noted that the front seat passenger survived, I am more convinced than ever that the S Class is about as safe as cars get.But Mercedes could do more.They could limit the top speed to 10mph and fit a device that would prevent the engine from starting if the driver had eaten some sherry trifle.They could fit airbags in the ashtray.All the technology exists to do this, but it is so expensive that no one would buy the end product.Even Mercedes could therefore be accused of putting economy before safety, but come on, if money wasn’t important we’d spend all day under the bed, refusing to work in case a tree fell on our heads.America seems to have forgotten that while life is precious, it isn’t much fun without at least some risk.So what’s to be done? Well, there’s talk that Clinton is going to limit the awards made by a jury, but this move would be fraught with danger.You must remember that in the bad old days Ford was alleged to have sold the Pinto knowing full well that in a rear-end collision it could catch fire.It was claimed they did nothing because the cost of changing the design outweighed the odd death.If this had been proved, and it wasn’t, obviously it’s only right and proper that a jury should have been free to beat Ford about the head and neck with a chain saw.If a company wilfully exposes its customers to an early grave, hit them with a fine that would wipe them from the face of the earth.And to hell with the thousands of workers who’ll be thrown out of a job through no fault of their own.And who cares about the towns and cities that depend on the auto maker for life itself? Close Ford down and in Britain alone you close Coventry, Essex, Newport Pagnell and big bits of Liverpool.Frankly, big awards aren’t the answer.We must find the individuals – accountants usually – who decided to carry on making a car they knew to be dangerous and sentence them to life, in a cell, with Neil Kinnock.Showdown at the G6 summitYou know how Greenpeace is prone to charging around the sea in small boats, trying to stop perfectly harmless oil rigs from being sunk.Well once – just once – they came up with a cunning plan.They argued that the earth is 46 million years old, a number that’s hard to handle.So they asked us to think of it as being 46 years old – middle-aged in other words.A leaflet explained that almost nothing is known about the first 42 years and that dinosaurs didn’t appear until just last year.Mammals came along eight months ago and it wasn’t until the middle of last week that apes began to walk on their hind legs.This was an amazing read, but it was all complete mumbo jumbo because their claim that the earth is 46 million years old is simply not true.It’s actually 4600 million years old, which makes their idea even more mind-boggling.The last Ice Age didn’t happen at the weekend.It happened half an hour ago!However, I don’t want to get into an environmental debate here.What I want to talk about, in fact, is the puniness of Nelson Mandela.If you divide time by a thousand million, to make the planet 46 years old, it means that 70 years passes in four-hundredths of a second.So, as far as the Earth is concerned, Nelson is simply not relevant at all.And nor was Hitler.And nor was Jimi Hendrix.Truth is, in four-hundredths of a second absolutely nothing that you do or say will make the slightest bit of difference.For 4600 million years you weren’t born, and you’ll be dead for even longer so it is therefore vital that you explode out of the womb like your hair is on fire.In real time, you’ve only got 600,000 hours and then you’ll wind up on the wrong side of the flowerbed.So what’s the best course of action? Well you could watch Pride and Prejudice which manages to make an hour seem like a day, but prolonging a boring life is worse than not starting it in the first place.That’s why you must also not drive one of the new Toyota Corollas.Certainly, it is not exciting to behold.Yes, it has a bobby-dazzler of a radiator grille and the sort of eyes that only exist deep in the ocean where light is at a premium.But from this point backwards, there is a styling vacuum whether you’re talking about the saloon, the estate, the liftback or the hatch [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]