There was panic at Land Rover last night as it emerged that the new Discovery could be delayed because it has been fitted with the wrong doors.
‘Oh God, what are we going to do?’ wailed one anonymous engineer. ‘The doors don’t match at all. I think they must be off a different car.’ According to a bloke we spoke to, the problem stems from the deep groove which runs along the front and rear wings, in stark contrast to the doors which are completely smooth. ‘We used a lot of black tape to disguise Discovery prototypes,’ explained one slightly less anonymous engineer. ‘So when we first peeled it off we initially thought the missing groove must have just come off and be stuck to the sticky side of the tape. But it wasn’t there. I think we’ve somehow ordered the wrong sort of doors.’
Due to the complicated way the car industry works, doors must be ordered long before a model goes on sale and there is plenty of scope for errors. In this instance experts believe Land Rover simply forgot to tick the box marked ‘groove’ on their special door order form. This is in marked contrast to former sister company Rover’s experience with the original 800 where some clot ticked the groove order box far too many times.
‘It’s not uncommon for a groove to be lost,’ noted Dr Upe Geoffpex, Head of Stuff at St Gobain College. ‘For example, the Artist Now Known As Prince Again lost his groove some time in the late 1990s and, judging from his pedestrian new single, he still hasn’t got it back.’
This story was originally published in April 2004
