Nokia 1011 (1992)

Introduced November 1992

Nokia 1011

The Nokia 1011 wasn’t the world’s first GSM mobile phone – that was the Orbitel TPU 901 – but that was always a bit of a niche product, and it was Nokia who took this technology and mass-produced it.

Nokia had been in the mobile phone business for a few years at this point. Starting off in wood pulp in the 19th century, Nokia had diversified into rubber, then electric cable, then electronics and by the 1980s, Nokia was a large industrial conglomerate. By the early 1990s, Nokia had started to focus on communications products – although mobile phones were more commonly branded “Mobira” rather than “Nokia”.

So when the Nokia 1011 was launched on 10th November (possibly the reason for the phone’s name) it was also sold as the Mobira Cityman 2000. Physically rather similar to Nokia’s analogue phones, the 1011 was a fully digital 2G GSM device. Compared to earlier networks, GSM offered better call quality, and it couldn’t be listened to by eavesdroppers. The 1011 also supported SMS (like the Orbitel), although you’d need to find someone with another SMS-capable phone to exchange messages.

It was a big and heavy device, coming in at nearly 500 grams. It was also massively expensive, costing 2470 Deutschmarks at launch (about £1000 at the time, or £2500 today). Prices very quickly dropped, however and in just a few years an equivalent model would only cost a few hundred pounds. The Nokia 1011 didn’t last long on the market either, being replaced two years later by the 2010 and 2110 devices.

If your mobile carrier still supports 900MHz GSM, then the Nokia 1011 should work today, with an estimated price of £300 or so if you can find one. It’s not really a practical device for everyday use, and it’s not really one of the more iconic Nokias either.. but it is one of the most important.

Image credits:
Nokia

Ford Mondeo (1992)

Launched November 1992

A decade after the launch of the icon 1982 Ford Sierra, the Ford Motor Company was losing its way. Instead of being the engineering and design-led company that had been successful in previous decades, the beancounters had taken over and Ford’s cars in the late 1980s had a reputation for being built to maximise profit rather than for driver pleasure. This lack of attention to customer needs had a stark impact on the bottom line, Ford went from posting a record profit of $4.6 billion in 1987 to a record loss of $2.3 billion in 1991.

Changes were afoot though. Ford had started working on a replacement for the Sierra in 1986 – just four years after it launched – and six years and an astonishing $6 billion later they had the replacement, the Ford Mondeo.

The Mondeo was meant to be a world car (the Latin word for “world” is “mundus”) which could be sold in every market on earth with minimum modifications. At the time, Ford’s worldwide markets were fragmented with very different models which shared very little, apart from perhaps engines.

Early Mondeos were conservatively styled, but Ford became bolder with later models

Finally making the shift from rear-wheel drive to front-wheel drive, the Mondeo was somewhat conservatively styled for the early 1990s but did have the flexibility of coming in a hatchback, saloon or estate configuration at launch which was something the Sierra lacked.

Interior design was good for the time, and the Mondeo had excellent driving dynamics. It could also be loaded with the latest automotive technology – at a price – including traction control, a heated front windscreen, ABS and an airbag. The car was designed to take just about any engine from the Ford range, which meant that the engine bay was larger than some rivals which impacted on cabin space. Engine sizes varied from a basic 1.6 litre 90HP engine at launch to an impressive 202HP 2.5 litre V6 engine in the final year’s ST200 model.

The first generation of Mondeo lasted until 2000, with a substantial facelift in 1996 which replaced almost all the body panels, lights and grille and improved the interior. But it never quite got to be the world car it wanted to be – North American versions were heavily reworked into the Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique, but it went a long way to rationalising Ford’s fractured product range.

Perhaps unfairly sales reps sometimes called it the "Mon-dreary-o". But the higher the spec of Mondeo, the higher your rank as a rep.

The car was a significant success, particularly outside North America. In 2000 the second-generation Mondeo was launched, built on the same platform as the original but completely reworked with a more European flavour. The third generation was launched in 2006 and lasted another six years until 2012, when the fourth and final generation was launched. In 2022 Ford discontinued the Mondeo in worldwide markets, with the last one produced in March of that year.

After thirty years the Mondeo died, a consistently good car that lost sales to SUVs and crossovers. Although a fifth-generation Mondeo is built in China, it is not for worldwide markets. Indeed, the Mondeo isn’t the only Ford casualty to crossovers, the Ford Fiesta was also discontinued late in 2022.

Most early Mondeos are as cheap as chips, except for high-end models such as the ST200 which easily command prices north of £10,000. When you consider that the price for the current model of Ford Focus – one size down from the Mondeo – starts at an eye-watering £27,000 then perhaps that doesn’t seem so expensive…

Image credits:
Vauxford via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0 [1] [2]

 

Jaguar XJ220 vs McLaren F1 (1992)

Launched 1992

If you wanted a really fast British supercar in 1992 and you have about half a million pounds in your pocket, you had an intriguing choice between the Jaguar XJ220 and the McLaren F1. Thirty years later, one of these cars is considered to be a success and one a relative failure. But which is which?

Let’s start with the Jag. By 1992, Jaguar was owned by Ford but had spent the previous few years struggling with a range of increasingly elderly cars. However, a successful foray into racing (largely thanks to TWR) had resulted in a supercar project… not just any car, but a street-legal machine capable of hitting 200 miles per hour.

The concept version of the car caused a shockwave. An all-wheel-drive sports car powered by a mighty 6.2L V12 engine mounted in the back, this version of the XJ220 also had scissor doors and the slippery design made it look like no other Jag. The “220” part of the name was the top speed that Jaguar was hoping for and despite the then eye-watering price tag of £470,000 there were 1500 people who put down a deposit.

Jaguar XJ220 - not your grandfather's Jag

Between concept and product though there were several changes. Perhaps the most significant was the engine. The V12 that Jaguar had proposed was big and heavy and also had problems meeting emissions standards, but Jaguar had ended up with the rights to the engine in the short-lived but legendary MG Metro 6R4 rally car. The 6R4 had a relatively lightweight V6 unit somewhat inspired by the (also) legendary Rover V8. It was a promising engine for Rover, but Group B rallying was banned in 1986 after a series of accidents, and the 6R4 and its engine became essentially redundant. Jaguar took the 6R4 V6 and thoroughly reworked it, adding twin turbos in the process, giving about 542 horsepower. It was arguably a better engine than the V12, but people were expecting a V12 and not a V6. In addition, one other major change were the door – the scissor doors were dropped in favour of more conventional ones, and the car moved to a simpler rear-wheel-drive configuration. Many customers were very unhappy, and these changes plus a recession in the early 1990s led to many cancellations.

The XJ220 was extremely aerodynamic, including the underneath of the car. Body panels and the chassis were made from aluminium. Advanced technologies could be found everywhere from the braking system to the transmission… Jaguar were not short changing customers on kit. Being a Jag, the inside was a lovely place to be. Top speed was around 212 MPH, not quite as much as the 220 in the name, but nonetheless blisteringly fast.

The XJ220 concept had a massive V12 engine, the production car a more compact V6

The bad points? Well, it was more than two metres wide and lacked power steering and ABS, so it wasn’t much fun as a daily driver. There was also limited luggage space (despite the huge size) making it impractical as a grand tourer as well.

It wasn’t a sales success – Jaguar had never intended it to be a high-volume car, but with just 281 built they fell short of their targets. It did help to raise Jaguar’s profile as a sports car manufacturer, but ultimately the XJ220 was a little too flawed and compromised. The XJ220 was in production for just two years – and Jaguar never made another production car that was anything like it afterwards.

At around the same time, McLaren were developing their first road car around similar themes. A bit more expensive than the XJ220 at £540,000 (in 1992 money), the McLaren F1 wasn’t saddled with the compromises that the Jaguar possessed. The F1 was powered with a normally aspirated (i.e. not turbocharged or supercharged) V12 like the XJ220 concept. McLaren chose the normally aspirated route for reasons of control and predictability – early 1990s turbochargers gave uneven power and suffered from turbo lag, so a normally aspirated engine was much smoother. McLaren shopped around for a suitable V12 eventually settling on a power plant made by BMW.

The McLaren F1 would look fast parked up in Sainsbury's

The body of the F1 made extensive use of carbon fibre, except for the engine bay which has gold foil acting as a heat shield. A combination of other lightweight and strong materials are found throughout the car, including magnesium, Kevlar and titanium. The whole body shape produces downforce rather than having a fat spoiler, but one clever trick was the introduction of two fans in the base of the car with both produced extra downforce and cooling at the same time. The top speed? The McLaren F1 was (and still is) the world’s fasted normally aspirated car with a top speed of 240 MPH.

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The McLaren F1's three seats practically make it an MPV

Inside the F1 is highly unusual, featuring three seats – the driver sits in the centre and slightly in front of the two passengers either side in the rear. Entrance to the cabin was through the dihedral (scissor-like) doors, something the XJ220 sorely lacked. Luggage compartments are hidden around the car, although best used with the proprietary matching bags. The F1 also included air conditioning and a number of other aids to make it usable on the roads, transforming the F1 into an almost practical grand tourer as well as a sports car. It wasn’t designed as a track car, but it was pretty good at that two with race variants such as the F1 GTR being made. 

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The McLaren F1 looks purposeful from the back as it disappears over the horizon

However, despite the advanced engineering, only 106 cars were produced (including prototypes). McLaren did turn a modest profit on the F1 during the six years of production, ending in 1998. McLaren didn’t build another road car until 2011. Nonetheless, the F1 was an engineering success and it didn’t make the compromises that the XJ220 did.

Today a McLaren F1 is worth around £16 million, but an XJ220 is only worth about £450,000 – about the same as it was new in actual pounds, but adjusted for inflation the XJ220 cost around £1 million when new. According to collectors at least, the F1 is a far more desirable car.

Image credits:
Vauxford via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Morio via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Jaguar Cars MENA via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Craig James via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Ank Kumar via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Neilhooting via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Orbitel TPU 901 (1992)

Launched May 1992

Early mobile phones were terrible things. Not only were they big and clunky, but the old analogue networks that they ran on had terrible call quality, poor reliability and were very insecure. These early technologies such as AMPS, TACS and NMT became retrospectively known as “1G” – these days often forgotten and unloved.

By 1992 these 1G networks had been around for a decade or so and their weaknesses were becoming obvious. The market was ripe for something better, and in 1992 the world’s first 2G GSM networks came online. These digital networks had better call quality, security and required a smaller slice of the radio spectrum, and the first certified GSM phone to be available was the Orbitel TPU 901.

Orbitel TPU 901

A bulky device even by the standards of the time, the 901 had a handset connected to the base station via a curly cord and it weighed a whopping 2.1 kilos. It wasn’t a big seller – smaller and cheaper GSM phones were not far off – but the Orbitel TPU 901 does have the distinction of receiving the world’s first SMS text message with the words “Merry Christmas” sent in December the same year.

Orbitel was a British-based joint venture between Racal (who owned Vodafone) and Plessey which eventually ended up in the hands of Ericsson and effectively vanished in the noughties. Today the TPU 901 (and the car-mounted TPU 900) should still work on 900MHz GSM networks, if you ever managed to get your hands on one.

Orbitel TPU 901

Of course, the 901 was the first of many GSM phones on the market, more memorably the Motorola International 3200 launched later in 1992 with a memorable brick-like design that summed up the era perfectly. About a million others followed, but the Orbitel TPU 901 – largely forgotten today – was the very first.

Image credits:
Science Museum Group - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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