Saturdays' Financial Times featured an interview with Alex Moulton.
The interviewer spent two half-days in conversation with Alex and described some of his daily routine.
He enters his adjoining workroom, where he pores over papers, manuals and books piled on long tables. For the next few hours, or “as long as I feel inspired and interested”, he works on the designs for his latest engineering creation
It explores in a fair amount of detail, Alex's career, from the family business, through BMC and the Moulton Bicycle.
The Mini’s suspension was a crude compromise – which Lord demanded for reasons of economy and speed of production – compared with the advanced hydroelastic system that Moulton devised for Issigonis’s 1962 1100. That four-wheel independent system used fluid under pressure to connect the front suspension with the rear, providing a smoothness of ride which had never been known in a family car. The 1100 and its successor, the 1300, were Britain’s best-selling family cars throughout the 1960s, consistently beating their leading rival, the Ford Cortina.
Most interestingly, there were hints of a new bicycle under development
a machine “more radical than anything I have ever done”.
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Moulton has never yet designed a bicycle made from carbon fibre – immensely strong but expensive, and impossible to repair when damaged – but he dropped a few hints in our interviews that carbon composite materials might be included in the new, radical bicycle he is presently designing. “Watch this space,” he twinkled.
When asked about the ruin of the British car industry Alex states “I blame it on this new culture of seeing personal gain, of maximising personal gain, as the primary objective rather than concentrating on the continuity of the industry. I think part of the problem is that too many senior executives these days come from an accountancy rather than from an engineering background and they assess value solely in book-keeping terms.” “So it’s a matter of personal greed?” “Answer: yes.”