Inner Cover Page

riding the bumpers of emergency vehicles in the hard shoulder. It would have been easier to have pilgrimaged Tibet-style on my knees than this year's 35mile daily commute to Farnborough Air Show. I'd have needed a jet fighter to have got there on time. There's a reason why there were only 3 journalist's present at the London 2012 stand when it was announced we'd won. Within 24 hours death and carnage had visited itself on the Tube in what the recently deposed Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone described as the greatest single high and low of his career all within one day. The truth about our World is more strange than any fiction we can conjure up and as Engineers and Scientists it is our role within Society to find solutions to the insoluble.
For the love of mankind can we please stop building disasters. I worked for a big company before I came here and I remember surveying the Manhattan like skyline of all of our estates and properties with my protégé. I told him, each one of these buildings came to be here with all these people and computers, their lives and jobs each time somebody screws up the design of a business's processes. 15 years previously the company had been run from a two-storey single building and during the intervening period had accrued 18bn in debts. Business process re-engineering and its fangled solutions currently comes in somewhere between 500 and 10,000% over budget in terms of time and money. Contrast that with a 9.3bn budget and a deadline of August 2012. this is going to make the millenium projects look well managed but remember the london eye opened 3 weeks late, I'm sure they won't mind waiting that long for an opening ceremony maybe we could just computer animate it like they did in Beijing - nobody will be there to see it anyway. With the tubes on strike or just struck, petrol prices and shortages I'd say sell all of your investment property and start stockpiling diesel now - its illegal by the way. With your own reserve of fuel at 2009 prices you may not be able to physically get to the 2013 Olympics but at least you'll be able to keep warm during the frosts of our Gulf Stream free summers.

All material appearing in this journal is subject to copyright and no part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means or stored in any retrieval system of any nature without prior permission except for permitted fair dealing under the Copyright, Design or Patents Act 1998. The views expressed in the journal should not be regarded as the official view of SAE-UK or IvehE Services Limited unless expressly stated. Neither SAE-UK (Reg. Charity No. 288094), the SAE-UK Council, the Editors and Publishers of VehicleTechnology.org accept any responsibility for any errors or omissions in the material within the journal, or for loss occasioned by to any person acting or refraining from action as a result of reliance on such material including, but not exclusively, reliance on any endorsement of any company or business nor any products or services. All contributions are gratefully received, but we reserve the right to edit any material as may be considered necessary or desirable.