Doughty widow challenges advertising claims.
TOUGH TIMES FOR FORD SOUTH Africa. First, that embarrassing business when some of their cars kept bursting into flames. Now it’s fuel consumption. A 74-year-old Cape Town widow, getting no satisfaction over her complaints of excessive fuel usage by her budget Ford runabout, has mandated attorneys to “institute an independent public investigation into the practice of misrepresented fuel efficacy figures in the motor industry”.
In January Ford SA recalled more than 4,500 of its 2012-2014 1.6 Kuga SUVs after one death and 46 confirmed fires, 11 in January alone. The apparent cause: cracking of the engine’s aluminium cylinder head, leaking oil into a hot engine compartment – and conflagration.
When Marie-Anna Cherenack went shopping for a new car in 2013 the foremost thought in her mind was fuel efficiency. And when she paid a visit to the Imperial Ford franchised dealership in Cape Town, she was impressed by the spec sheet for their Ford Figo 1.4 Ambiente, a face lift version of the Fiesta. The specs claimed a fuel consumption rate of 6.6 litres per 100km. Just what I’m looking for, said Cherenack, slapping down R90,000 cash for the white Figo (recommended retail price R118,670).
German is Cherenack’s mother tongue, and in addition to that nation’s obsession with exactness, her late husband was Paul Cherenack, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cape Town. Prof Cherenack died in 2002 at the age of 59, his quirky sense of humour and passionate tirades against bureaucracy, as well as his pearls on such mathematical mysteries as the exactness of the sequence of homotopy groups, much missed by his students and colleagues in the university’s Topology and Category Theory Group.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 2017 من Noseweek.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 2017 من Noseweek.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Lennie The Liquidator Faces R500,000 Defamation Suit
After losing his cool when his fees were questioned
Panel Beater De Luxe
Danmar Autobody and its erstwhile directors get a serious panel beating in court papers. Corruption and theft are said to have destroyed the firm chaired by Nelson Mandela’s eldest daughter, leaving 200 workers destitute and threatening to kill.
Meet Covid Diarist Ronald Wohlman
Ronald Wohlman – EX SOUTH African copywriter, author, and actor – never dreamt that his lockdown diaries, written on Facebook and followed by people all over the world – would become his “life’s work”.
A Picture Of Peace?
Beware: Appearances can be deceptive
Flogging A (Battery-Driven) Dead Horse
Why plug-in vehicles are not all they’re cracked up to be– and, likely, never will be
Everybody Drinks Corona
I am hesitant to go Into the pub today. Not because it’s illegal, but there is a crème colored 1985 Mercedes 300D parked behind the pine tree. This means the devil is inside; that’s what we call Dr. De Villiers. You don’t know whether you will encounter the good doctor with the charming bedside manner or the violent, bipolar bully. The problem is, most of the time, you can never be sure which it is, so it’s best to always keep a social distance.
Never Take A Hypochondriac To A Pandemic
From Ronald Wohlman’s New York Corona Diary
The money train
Transnet in court battle with liquidators of Gupta-linked audit firm over R57m in ‘corrupt’ payments and invoices
‘He's no pharmaceutical genius, he's a vulture'
Pharma con seeks prison release to ‘help find Covid cure’
Bush school – A memoir
OUR SCHOOL WAS IN THE MIDDLE of the bush, ten miles from the nearest town in the harsh beauty of the Zimbabwean highveld. It started life in World War II as No 26 EFTS Guinea Fowl, a Royal Air Force elementary flying training school and I arrived there in 1954, just seven years after it became an all-white co-ed state boarding school.
