The Solihull Rover Jaguar factory is only a couple of miles from our house and we often see car development mules driving about.
Today we followed a heavily disguised 4 x 4 - clearly a range Rover and drew up behind it at red traffic lights. There was a noticeable amount of water vapour leaving the exhaust. It was definitely not smoke.
When the lights changed to green the 4 x 4 took off like its arse was on fire, trailing a plume of water vapour in its wake. There was no way even a sports car would have been much faster. We again pulled up behind it at the next set of lights and again there was water vapour visible and again it shot away in a cloud of steam when the lights went green. We didn't see it again - it was soon a speck in the distance.
My guess is that Rover are experimenting with fuel cells - either that or they have found a way of burning water.
As an aside the Solihull factory has doubled the number of people employed there over the last 5 years. There are now 9,000 people working there on the Range Rover, Sport, Discovery etc and the Jaguar XE. They claim it is the largest and most modern plant in Europe producing aluminium bodies.
That's the good news for Solihull Town - it brings a lot of money into our coffers. The bad news is that at shift change-over times, traffic in our area is horrendous with 3,000 madmen tear-arsing to get home and another 3,000 tear-arsing to get into work and trying not to be late. We have to plan our local journeys to avoid the peak times and the traffic nightmare.
