Death of special building in NZ

[Tony Press]

Simon, you can be too honest as I tried to tell you! Your rolling chassis is as you found it other than you have completely restored it, but everything is still standard Austin specification. When you purchased the car the body work was totally beyond salvage so you have built a period correct body for it ( abet 1950's style construction, but that not an issue ) that falls nicely into the VCC dating criteria. There were two recent cases of A7 builds here where one guy built a special carried out and proudly told the inspectors about every modification he could think of, and as a result he went through the mill trying to get it registered. Another where the owner was more restrained, carried out only pre war style mods, with his own take on bodywork and it flew through. There is a crowd in Auckland who a sympathetic to our cause, I thought I had given you a card, certainly some of the other guys in the Auckland body building group have them, afraid my records are still with the rest of my stuff in Auckland. I hear that because of the drive towards an electric revolution authorities are trying the make it harder and harder for fossil fuel cars to be on the road but I feel sure that if you speak to the RIGHT people you will get there.
On that note to meet current demand and fuel our power stations we are now (2021) as a country importing more then double the coal (which is the dirtiest fossil fuel) into out country than we did in 2017 and 2018 combined and struggling with our aged infrastructure to distribute that power. That will change of course once we dam a few more rivers for hydro, build further geothermal power stations, wind farms and totally overhaul the national grid. But we do have a couple of years to do that and you know how quickly we undertake major infrastructure projects in NZ..... just look at transmission gully!

Probably a sensitive issue but how is Christchurch progressing ?