You can joke about Estelle, but you wouldn’t have laughed about Skoda during the Battle of Jutland

You can laugh at this model - but Skoda jokes nowadays are passé.

Alf likes the story of the 12-year old boy who was walking down the main street of Eketahuna when a car pulled up beside him and the window was wound down.

“I’ll give you a bag of lollies if you get in the car”, said the male driver.

“No way, get stuffed”, replied the boy.

How about a bag of lollies and $10?” asked the driver?

“No way”, replied the irritated youngster.

“What about a bag of lollies and FIFTY dollars, eh”? quizzed the driver, still rolling slowly to keep up with the walking boy.

“No, I’m not getting in the ******* car!” answered the boy.

“OK, I know what you want – I’ll give you $100 and a bag of lollies”, the driver offered.
“NO,” screamed the boy.

“What will it take to get you into the car”? asked the driver with a long sigh.

The boy replied: “Listen Dad, you bought the Skoda – you live with it!”

Foreskins by the tonne

Only some of us will remember the days when a car might have a rumble seat or – depending on which school you went to – a dicky seat, dickie seat or dickey seat.

Alf went to Wikipedia to jog his memory on the matter, and found a dicky seat described as

an upholstered exterior seat which hinges or otherwise opens out from the rear deck of a pre-World War II automobile, and seats one or more passengers.

GM is in overdrive with its sales prospects

Some fascinating insights into the decline of a once-great motor company are provided by the New York Times.

The newspaper reminds us GM has been hemorrhaging customers for decades.

For the last 30 years, it has been losing almost one percentage point of market share every year. It sold 45 percent of the new vehicles in this country in 1980, 35 percent in 1990, 28 percent in 2000 and 19 percent so far this year.

Readers then are invited to imagine making a conservative forecast of GM’s market share five years from now.

Greens dump on car scrappage scheme

Government incentives to buy new (more efficient) cars seemed such a great idea, Alf was about to raise it with The Boss.

One of its great merits is that environmentalists have dumped on it.

Its biggest impediment, on the other hand, is that Labourites seem to be thinking about implementing it. The Telegraph says Britain’s Government

is tipped to announce a £2,000 incentive to buy a new car, according to briefings from the Treasury in advance of next week’s Budget.