It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Dave Plowman saying something like:
Not on Spagthorpe Gentlemen's Carriages - every component was hand-built by gnarled old craftsmen. In the case of the indicator unit, this involved some 100 hours of work, patiently filing the lens from a block of coloured Perspex.
Needless to say, this was reflected in the price of the car; it's 1958 price being some £120,000 - enough in those days to buy several large country houses.