Das Forum der Ersten Deutschen Biersekte

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THE ghosts will be rattling their chains down at the old Toyota Port Melbourne plant. While for many, the major worry over the Christmas- New Year break will be what degree of blockout to buy, at Port Melbourne they'll be packing the tea-chests. The company will be moving its entire Camry production to join the Corolla at the new Altona plant, with the aim of full production by next March. The first months at the spectacular new $420 million factory have gone well, with the first quality audit showing the standard of Corollas coming off the line improving by 45 per cent over the Dandenong plant.
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This first international audit showed what's called a "deviation- from-production standard" rate of less than two points per car - the previous best in Australia had been three-plus. This is about three months ahead of management target and puts Altona in the top three of Toyota's 19 factories. The audit was run by a team of engineers from Toyota Japan over two weeks. Port Melbourne will continue as a producer of components and an engineering headquarters, but there will still be some memories haunting this funny old plant, with its aisles so narrow that the original Toyota assembler, Australian Motor Industries (AMI), "cut- and-shut" little 700cc Toyopet sedans to make them narrow enough to squeeze through as courier shuttles.


From the mid-1950s, AMI assembled an amazing range of vehicles, including the Standard Vanguard, Triumph Herald, Fiat tractors and three American Motors Rambler models. Today's Mercedes-Benz (Australia) Pty Ltd was formed in 1959 to work with AMI to assemble Benz 220 sedans on the Port Melbourne line. Altona is - along with the new BMW Spartanburg plant I've just seen - the newest and most modern in the world. Interestingly, it cost almost as much as Spartanburg and, like it, has one of the few water-borne technology paint shops in the world.

It's about the same size, but with a different layout, and both are assessed at a potential annual production rate of between 100,000 and 120,000. While Spartanburg looks bigger, because it adopted a remarkable open- plan layout, where even the president doesn't have an office and the administration section is cheek-by-jowl with the production line, Altona loses absolutely nothing in comparison. Both are extraordinarily quiet and both run on the principle of small, self- managed squads responsible for their own quality-build standards and the housekeeping of their own work stations. Spartanburg has also begun with the principle of everyone wearing the uniform bomber jacket, no preferential parking spaces, even for the bosses, and a single cafeteria.

That's how another US plant, the Mazda operation at Flat Rock, near Detroit began. However. after a couple of years the American workforce started demanding a return to some of the old ways - maybe they didn't like sitting at the same table as the bosses in the cafeteria. NEW RELEASES. AFTER a record year of new model launches, we'll be no sooner into 1995 than three all-new vehicles destined for the Australian market will make their bows. What are The Speaker Sizes in My Car
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The Detroit Motor Show on 2 January will see the hankies whipped off the new BMW roadster and Chrysler's Voyager and Honda's Odyssey people-movers. The 3-Series-based roadster is being built at the new BMW plant at Spartanburg in South Carolina. I've just come back from having a look at the place, but the three prototypes of the roadster were under dust-covers with several large workers ostentatiously leaning on them. We'll see the car here early in 1996. Honda is assessing the Odyssey's probable pricing here, but it's a 50- 50 chance at the moment.

On the other hand, Chrysler is building the new Voyager in both right and left-hand drive forms and local importer Hyundai Automotive Distributors Australia (HADA) has pencilled it in for mid-1996, after the launching of the bigger and more luxurious Grand Cherokee version of the Jeep. SEARCH. EVERY time you turn a corner in this fascinating business there's another surprise; after years as a motoring writer, I'm still learning. And so it was that in trying to find the color of the top of my desk after two weeks overseas I found a note from a company called Miele Australia.

Better known as the maker of quality domestic appliances, the German company has launched a world-wide hunt for any survivor of more than 120 Miele cars built in Germany from 1912 to 1914. I had no idea such a car existed among the thousands that sprang up, world-wide from the turn of the century, but it wasn't silly to extend the search to Australia, because a lot of long-dead names found their way here. Miele wants to find a survivor to display at its museum in Gutersloh in Germany as part of its centenary celebrations in 1999. It says it lost track of what happened to the modest production, but believes some of the four-cylinder open-bodied tourers got as far as Russia and South America.

I raided my fairly good library without coming up with a reference, except for one clue. In the magnificent book Wheels Across Victoria 1824-1984, published by the VACC and edited by the authoritative pair of Harold Paynting and Malcolm Grant, I found a reference to a Miese OHC4. It's contained in a record written by one Reuben Tishler, born in Carlton at the turn of the century and working in the motor trade by the time he was 15, his first employer A.G. Healing, makers of motorcycles and pushbikes.

He raced motorbikes at Aspendale and Kyneton and started his own service garage and used car business. His son, Noel Tishler, still runs the family business in Malvern Road, Prahran. Reuben Tishler wrote that in 1937 when he had to sell up the business. He disposed of a large stock of parts, including Hispano-Suiza, Bentley, Mercedes, Delage and Miese OHC4. There is no such car as a Miese, and my guess is that he meant Miele. It's highly unlikely any spare parts would have been in stock unless at least one of the cars had come here, so who knows? Miele Australia is offering a reward of up to $5000 for information leading to the recovery of a car, so start looking in the chook shed. Call the company at its Knoxfield office (7647124) for further details.

SEAT-BELTS. WHEN I got into the Miami hotel people-mover shuttle and clicked-on the belt the driver eyed me off and said sharply: "You don't have to do that, you know". I assured him that it wasn't a comment on his driving but an automatic reflex and he relaxed. But that and the next few days in South Carolina reminded me just how stupid America is about seat belt wearing. It's mandatory in about 30 states, but enforced in only a few. Fines averaging US$25 are hardly stern enforcement and American drivers still believe that airbags alone will save them - which they won't.

So it was interesting to get the latest Status Report from the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. It reported that a special program that targeted North Carolina to enforce belt use had pushed the wearing rate state-wide to just on 81 per cent, compared with 64 per cent a year ago. The University of North Carolina's Highway Safety Research Centre estimated the program saved 45 lives and another 320 potential serious injuries. Under the slogan of "Clickit Or Ticket", the program was the most intensive yet in the US, run over three weeks with the full back-up of the state's law enforcement agencies. They set 2938 check-points in all 100 counties and found 23,401 violations of belt and child restraint laws. But as a bonus the program picked up about 7000 licence offenders and hundreds of drug and firearms violators, plus 42 stolen vehicles and 34 people described as "fugitives".

However, the fine of $25 is still piffling by Australian standards, so now North Carolina is looking at following the Canadian example of (surprise, surprise) issuing licence demerit points for belt offences. Somebody should tell them to do their homework and find out about Victoria, the world pioneer in so many areas of road trauma counter-offensives. HERO. THE widow of a trucker from Western Australia has received $10,000 as a posthumous award naming her husband as Goodyear's inaugural "Highway Hero". Erwin Harders, a 20-year veteran, died at the wheel of his semi-trailer in trying to make room for an overtaking truck that was threatening five young people in an oncoming sedan. Goodyear started the award last year to highlight the unsung heroes of truck and coach drivers who too often are the focus of the bad news stories.

The judging panel included radio personality John Laws, Kathryn Greiner and trucking magnate Ron Finemore. The nine finalists included a Vic Roads driver who saved a drowning boy in the Traralgon floods, another Victorian trucker who helped save a driver trapped in a crashed car with fuel leaking into the interior and the first Australian truck driver to be sent by Care Australia into Bosnia. Harders was killed 116 kilometres north of Perth on 1 October last year, when a truck overtook him. A sedan appeared coming the other way, and the truck swerved left. Harders took his truck off the road to give the other more room, but his rig jack-knifed and he died in the wreckage. His widow, Mary, said she never expected him to die in a truck crash, but was proud that his actions had been recognised. BRAKES. THERE'S some confusion around about new develeopments in electric trailer brakes and it needs to be sorted out before people take off on towing holidays this Christmas. What's happened is that a new type of controller, sometimes called an "actuator", has come on to the market and there's a bit of flapping about going on.

Electric brakes have become the standard on most newer rigs over the past decade, particularly for horse floats and caravans. Apart from the fact that they're required by law with some combinations, they are far, far better than the old mechanical override brakes. Alarmed by the confusion, Australia's leading supplier of trailer brakes, AL-KO International, has started a campaign within the trade to educate dealers and consumers about the most commonly used electric brake systems. There are three different types: a controller brakes the trailer in tandem with the car's braking; an actuator that applies a preset amount of braking to the trailer irrespective of the car's braking; and the third is a "variable resister", generally mounted only on small trailers.
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AL-KO says an electric brake controller uses a proportional rate that senses the conditions and varies its delivery to the trailer to match the towmaster. An actuator uses a predetermined rate of braking independent of how the car's brakes are used. The best-known electric controllers are the Kelsey 81741A and the Tekonsha 2030R. CD RELEASE. I LEAVE music reviews to the experts, but a just-released CD is worth a mention because it was originally created for in-car sound systems. In fact, it was produced by Sydney-based Devine Music for the giant Japanese Alpine Electronics firm as the standard reference disc. After two years the licence has now reverted to Devine, which has released Highway One for general sale. It uses all Australian talent in full digital recording and is just slightly short of sensational. It has four new tracks and some updating of reference tones over the original, which itself was so good that Highway One was selected as the standard judging software for those enormous boom-box systems used in car audio competitions. I'll be using it as my own assessment master in all future CD-equipped test cars