Dog & Lemon car guide author and road safety campaigner Clive Matthew-Wilson warns about buying flood-damaged cars and tells Jane Phare why he’ll never stop bothering the Government and the media.
A journalist needs to set aside a good amount of time to interview Clive Matthew-Wilson. He has a lot to say, on just about any topic.
We’re here to talk about cars and the floods and road safety, and why he feels frustrated that nobody’s listening. But he’s apt to veer wildly off-topic without warning in a stop/start interview that alternates between on-the-record and “turn the tape off” moments. He has firm views on immigration, the housing shortage, developers, bike lanes, “inept” Auckland Transport, corruption, climate change, ram-raids, consumerism, why advertising should not be tax deductible, the Ports of Auckland and concrete.
On the topic of road safety, Matthew-Wilson knows his stuff. He references research – years of it – and name-drops prominent politicians and journalists he has dealt with over the years, but later admits some don’t take his calls now.
We meet in Ponsonby, Matthew-Wilson’s ‘hood since the 1970s, when he left a not-so-happy childhood in Wellington and headed north. He got a flat back when the run-down villas needed a lick of paint and Urban Professionals were nowhere to be seen. He joined the Ponsonby People’s Union, and remembers well the notorious Dawn Raids in the ‘70s that targeted Pacific Island overstayers.
Back then he was a mechanic, working from a car repair shop at the top of Franklin Rd. An elderly Tongan man across the road sat on his porch late at night and kept an eye out for burglars. Today, the building is home to the Fat Belly Deli, where locals swing by for a flat white and a gourmet sandwich. The face of Ponsonby has changed, and so has Matthew-Wilson.
The 66-year-old no longer uses tools to fix people’s cars. For the past 26 years he’s used words instead, warning motorists through his Dog & Lemon Guide what could go wrong with the car they’re about to buy. He’s not known for holding back.
Take his review of the Land Rover Freelander, 1997-2006. “Possibly the most incompetently designed and built four-wheel drive in history,” he wrote. How reliable? “Appalling.” How safe? “Dodgy.” Overall? “Avoid like the plague.”
And finally: “You’d think that the people who produced this car would be in prison. But that’s not how it works in the motor industry.”
Little wonder car owners and dealers alike got cross. You can’t imply someone’s beloved car is a “lemon” (never a good car from the get-go) or a “dog” (once a decent car but now beyond repair) without racking up a few enemies.
He knows he’s rubbed people up the wrong way. One enraged AA member attacked him online with the ultimate insult, labelling the Dog & Lemon Guide a “lemon” and calling it a “misinformed and ignorant rag disguising itself as some sort of authority on cars”.
Matthew-Wilson shrugs it off. He won’t take his foot off the gas when it comes to saying what he thinks, although he admits to having mellowed a little in his car reviews. He’s recently test driven a new Mazda CX-5. And what did he think of it?
“Really good,” he grins.
He delivers his opinions - and there are a lot of them - in a well-spoken, measured voice he might well have inherited from his late father, who was an Anglican assistant priest at the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul.
If you can get a word in during his stream-of-consciousness speaking, Matthew-Wilson will answer questions about his family background in a matter-of-fact way, even the sad bits. When he was 12, his mother was admitted to what was then known as the Porirua Lunatic Asylum.
“They burned her brains out with shock treatment. She was a vegetable for the rest of her life. That’s a bad situation [to face] going into adolescence, particularly when school was a living hell.”
He went to Scots College, hated it, transferred to Wellington Boys’ and left at 15. He describes himself as a teenage “rebel”.
Like his three siblings, Matthew-Wilson sang in the church choir. His dad was closely involved with the Prisoners’ Aid & Rehabilitation Society, and the family used to attend prison concerts at Mt Crawford in Wellington. But there is sadness, too, in his father’s story. A long-time smoker, he developed lung cancer and died at the age of 56 when Matthew-Wilson was 22.
He has this to say about his past: “I sympathise with people who have had difficult childhoods, but I don’t sympathise with people who spend their lives whining about it.”
He still sings, drinks tea - he admits to having a tea trolley at home - and is a Buddhist. But he becomes very un-Zen-like when talking about Auckland Transport and the Green Party’s anti-car mandate.
“Let me go on record here. I am the biggest fan of public transport and have been consistently for the last 25 years,“ he says. “We can’t keep adding cars to the fleet, but until they sort out public transport, it’s dreaming to think people are going to give up vehicles.”
Getting around Auckland without a car doesn’t work unless you’re a “white middle-class person living in the city who rides a bike”.
Nothing wrong with bike lanes, he says. He owns a bike. But what’s the use of a bike if he can’t put it on a bus, he wants to know. And why are there no weather shelters over three bus stops in his district? And why are there no cameras to provide security?
He raises his voice now: “And they don’t give a f**k!”
“They” appears to be the Greens, the Government and Auckland Transport. Matthew-Wilson’s on a roll now. Why are huge buses ploughing routes with four people on board or, at times, no one, damaging the roads and adding to pollution?
Why not develop a transport app, and use mini-buses to take people to transport hubs? And the $51 million wasted on the (now abandoned) $785m plan to build a cycle and walking bridge across the harbour could have funded a free shuttle service to get cyclists across the Auckland Harbour Bridge for decades. As with many of Matthew-Wilson’s views, he has a point.
Don’t get him wrong, he says, he’s a “green” campaigner from way back: the Save Manapouri campaign, Save the Whales, pedestrian and cyclist rights. But now he thinks the country is run by lobbyists, that climate change has been hijacked by “woke elitists” in Wellington, and that people are more interested in symbolic wins than checking the research to see if a policy will work.
It was that urge to speak up that shoe-horned Matthew-Wilson into launching the Dog & Lemon Guide 26 years ago in the form of an annual print publication. He’d hung up his spanners and closed his repair shop after seven years, but people kept asking him to check out cars they were thinking of buying.
“It was clear that they had no idea what they were doing and they were about to get ripped off.”
His blunt, take-no-prisoners car reviews offended plenty, including car owners wanting to sell their beloved vehicles. But he was unrepentant and still is. The guide’s been online since 2010, with punters paying $4.95 a review to find out the good, bad and the ugly about a particular car.
Road and vehicle safety was a natural progression when Matthew-Wilson began reviewing cars, who now describes himself as an “outspoken road safety campaigner”. When he saw something dangerous, he wrote about it. Like what?
“Like the Holden VP Commodore.”
He kept coming across Australian crash results about popular cars being promoted in New Zealand in the 1990s. Some of them were “death traps” and no one was talking about it, he says. The problem with the Holden Commodore (VP) was the retractable seatbelts. The mechanism effectively allowed “stretch” (not of the fabric), resulting in a 300-millimetre delay before the belt pulled up tight.
“At the time, it was a vital piece of safety information that wasn’t being told. The seatbelts stretched like rubber bands. You splattered yourself all over the steering wheel.”
In 2003, he wrote a piece about seatbelts in the Dog & Lemon, pointing out that not all retractable seatbelts were safe in an accident. The article was reproduced in the Australian Police Journal, and he won an award for it.
He regularly tells the Government and the media – in the form of well-written press releases – what the country should be doing to improve road safety. It’s on this subject that his frustration builds, his quiet voice rising markedly as he makes his point. Why is the Government wasting time and money on road safety programmes that don’t work? Why is nobody listening? Do the research, he says often, you’ll see I’m right.
Matthew-Wilson knows how to play the game with his releases. They’re always connected to a news event, making them topical. A man backs his caravan and accidentally crushes his wife. Out comes a release from Matthew-Wilson advocating backing cameras on motorhomes and caravans, pointing out they can be cheaper to buy than a mobile phone.
After the dramatic rescue of a family of three trapped in a submerged ute on their way home from Gisborne to Ruatōria in early January when ex-tropical cyclone Hale lashed the region, his message was simple: don’t drive through floodwaters. It’s not worth the risk.
“Floodwater often has the power of a tornado: it can pick your car up like a toy and fling you into a raging torrent.”
That warning became even more pertinent after the latest North Island floods and the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle. Driving through floodwaters is incredibly risky, he says.
Apart from the very real risk of drowning, or being marooned in the vehicle, it’s one way to stuff the electronics and quite possibly the engine. Matthew-Wilson is specific with his advice: don’t drive through water deeper than 15 centimetres (a small car) or 20cm (a larger car or SUV), otherwise the car could start to float. And drive slowly - no faster than 5km/h.
Since the floods, his message is one of ‘buyer beware’. Thousands of motor vehicles will be written off by insurance companies to be either wrecked, or auctioned for a rebuild. But he predicts many more flood-damaged cars will come on the market, sold to unwitting buyers with no official records attached. In other words, people will be sold a “dog”.
He wants the Government to get tougher over damaged vehicle registrations - to make it compulsory for any potential buyer to be informed of the car’s history. And he advises buyers to get an independent inspection of cars being sold privately, and watch out for flood-damaged electric and hybrid cars. They’re fine on wet roads because the batteries are sealed, but once flooded, especially with seawater, there’s a chance the car will catch fire.
“Don’t underestimate how much energy these batteries contain: an electric battery fire can be really dangerous.” To prove his point, that media release was accompanied by a dramatic photo of a Maserati hybrid consumed by fire.
Matthew-Wilson thinks practical advice, like how to protect your car from being stolen by ram-raiders, is reasonably well-received. But, he argues, when he crosses the centre line and veers into the dangerous territory of questioning the status quo, he is stonewalled. He regularly disagrees with the “official” view, scoffing at claims that lowering speed limits in specific areas prevents accidents and saves lives. And he dismisses the effectiveness of road safety education programmes and ad campaigns.
“Telling people to drive safely does not work. Do you think the ram-raiders will listen? Show me the data that proves education makes any difference.”
Your average driver is not the problem, he says. Instead, it’s the “yobbos, blotto drivers and reckless motorcyclists” who cause accidents. Better to spend those road safety dollars on installing more median crash barriers to protect the average driver from them. And it would protect motorists who are not speeding but make a mistake or fall asleep.
His press release on that subject included a link to a story from June last year when seven family members, including a baby, died instantly after their van drifted over the centre line and collided with a refrigerated truck south of Picton.
“If a median barrier had been on that road, there would’ve been no collision,” Matthew-Wilson says. Open roads without barriers are like staircases without handrails. “You make a mistake, you’re going to get hurt.”
He’s campaigned for years to make full seatbelts on large buses and coaches that travel over 50km/h compulsory, again using links to fatal accidents to drive home his point. He wants the Government to ban the importation of buses without seatbelts and sees no reason why, apart from money, seatbelts can’t be retrofitted to existing buses.
But is anyone listening? Has he made a difference? Matthew-Wilson reckons he’s won some ground, and says he will never give up campaigning.
“They just want me to go away. They don’t want to hear it. They think if they ignore me I will, but that just makes me madder.”