Crossing borders within the European Union today is accomplished at 90 mph, with just a double snap from the tires as they cross the expansion joint where the two countries' road surfaces meet. This is followed a few seconds later by a chime from the cell phone, signaling the arrival of a text urging you to switch to the provider's preferred partner in the new country. For us in the British Isles, it's easier and faster than ever to travel to the Continent, thanks to the Channel Tunnel, where we drive our cars onto efficient trains that haul us 23 miles under the sea in 35 minutes.
The French customs are installed at Dover and the British at Calais, the latter concerned mainly with control of liquor and tobacco, which are up to 40 percent cheaper on the Continental side. The hardest part is remembering which side of the road to drive on; at one stage before the Autoroute went directly to the port, more than half of all road accidents in the Pas de Calais region of France involved British tourists in righthand-drive cars. We traditionally have the lowest accident rate per mile of any EU country. Fewer than ten of the many thousand Corvettes in the UK have been converted to righthand drive, so driving on the right side of the road feels natural. If you drive fewer than 300 miles from Canterbury in England to Essen in Germany, you have to travel through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to get there. In turn, these countries speak English, French, Flemish, Dutch, and German.
There are also great differences between the driving and the roads in the countries of Europe, or "member states," as we're now supposed to call ourselves. In the UK, the speed limit on divided highways is 70 mph, so we tend to keep below 90 or even less since the wide introduction of speed cameras. France and the Benelux countries have a general 81-mph limit on their equivalent roads, and happily cruise all day at 90 mph. Germany has no speed limits on its narrow two-lane autobahns in rural areas during daytime, but you cannot drive dangerously or aggressively. The lane discipline on these roads is extraordinary, with everyone concentrating all the time, each driver alert and knowing who's behind them and spending the minimum possible time in the left lane, which is reserved for passing.
I like driving fast, but most modern German cars are governed to 155 mph. Even in a C5 or a C6, which will exceed this by more than 30 mph, I keep below 130. It's less tiring and I have never forgotten the experience of a customer who bought an '85 from me and hit a piece of debris in the road on the way home at 160 mph. He burst a back tire, which flayed around and took out a brake line, making it hard to slow down. By the time he finally stopped, the tire was burning from the heat, and his Corvette was consumed by fire in minutes.
The French love their Renaults, Citroen, and Peugeots (most of which are diesels because that smelly, heavy oil is half the price of gasoline there). They drive them flat out, which is what diesels do worst. Build a kit car in the Netherlands, and the only way to get it registered for the road is to trailer it to the UK, put it through the Single Vehicle Approval register here, then transfer the registration back to the Netherlands. While we British can go shopping for cars in the United States, bring them back and register them here after paying 30 percent import duty and taxes, some European countries no longer permit this.
Twenty years ago, Norway-which is physically part of Europe, but still wisely not a member state-levied 100 percent import duty on cars, but just 10 percent on pickup trucks. A Norwegian arrived at our shop offering to buy a nice black '77 Corvette, provided we could convert it into a pickup truck in 24 hours. The rules were about to change because the Norwegian authorities felt they were being abused, as all rules involving tax should be. He paid in full for the car and we had to convert it. Stage one was to install a plywood bulkhead between the underside of the vertical back window and the steel panel behind the seat. Then we had to take out the spare wheel and carrier, drop the gas tank into this area, and hang it on new brackets with the existing straps. Then we cut out the whole rear deck from above, including the rear fiberglass bulkhead, and built a new pickup bed and sides from plywood. The gas cap was accessed through a hole we drilled in it. The spare wheel was popped back into this space, and the rear deck we had cut out previously was screwed back in place as a hard tonneau cover. It was crudely but neatly done, and the new owner rushed back to Norway in time to beat the import deadline.
Two days later he phoned to say his Corvette pickup had successfully reached the border in time and crept in at the 10 percent rate. Waiting in line with him were more than a hundred Porsche 924 "pickups," each of which had a vertical sheet of plywood and a little Plexiglas window replacing their usual big glass hatchback.