Jenkins

"Jenkins suggested that Gibbs turn his attention to the two places in the world with excellent low-volume, specialist cultures for car making: northern Italy and the British Midlands. Since Gibbs spoke no Italian, it made sense to look first at the Midlands. In the UK half a dozen companies, including Morgan, Aston Martin, TVR and Lotus, manufactured cars in low volumes. They were supported by engineers with the sorts of skills and mind-set that Gibbs needed. The decision was made; Jenkins merged his business with Gibbs’, and Gibbs and Jenkins became partners. The project moved across the Atlantic. In Neil Jenkins, Gibbs had found a Trevor Farmer-like figure to help him with the car project. Since the engineering challenges fascinated him, Gibbs would have a more hands-on role than he had had with his former businesses, such as Freightways and Ceramco, but he’d long since learnt that he needed a trusted and capable partner on the spot."

"The dominant mind-set in Detroit, Gibbs discovered, was completely orientated toward high-volume manufacturing and intense specialisation. If you weren’t making 100,000 units of something, nobody was interested. And it was impossible to find anyone who had designed a car, only people who had spent their entire careers designing door handles, fuel pumps, window wipers or other such small pieces of the jigsaw. When they tried to find someone to design the electrical harness — the vehicle’s wiring — the best they could manage in Detroit was a subcontractor who offered to put together a team of 10 people to do the job. That didn’t suit a small start-up company. Gibbs wanted one person who could take responsibility for design and manufacture. Jenkins had to travel to Chicago to find someone, and he came from the whiteware industry."

"Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. Jenkins spent a lot of time with Steyr, an Austrian firm that made PTOs, trying to resolve their problem with the GM PTO. In frustration he asked them one day to nominate their best PTO; they pointed to the one attached to the Land Rover Freelander engine, the KV6. Jenkins went back to London, bought a Freelander, ripped the engine out and started tests on its PTO. Its performance was an order of magnitude better than anything else they’d tried. The KV6 was also a tidy engine that delivered the power they needed and was very compact. The next problem was to persuade the owners of Rover to let them use the engine for the project, which they did only after Gibbs had been through ‘somersaults and hoops of burning fire’."

"Afghanistan had been a nice diversion. Back in London, however, not everything was going according to plan for the Aquada. The cars were being built, and the invention had received numerous golden accolades. *Time Magazine* named it as one of the ‘Best Innovations of 2003’. A feature on design in the *New York Times* highlighted the car.[19](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477408-606132179-19) Leader writers fought over good lines to tell the story. The *Daily Telegraph* alighted on ‘Drink Driving — could Aquada be the ultimate plaything?’[20](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477408-606132179-20) But Gibbs’ basic business plan, to wow the world and then find a car manufacturer to make it under licence, wasn’t coming off. To his great annoyance every company they approached said that he hadn’t demonstrated the size of the market, therefore they couldn’t measure whether there’d be a return on their investment. They also worried about the effect of US product liability laws on such a radically new product. On reflection Gibbs concedes, ‘Quite naturally, people were sceptical as hell; would it work in salt water, could it handle rough conditions, would its complexity frighten customers, was it too expensive?’ Jenkins laments, ‘Our licensing idea fell on stony ground at that point; we needed someone with the balls to create the market and no one materialised. So Alan had to do it himself.’[21](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477408-606132179-21)"