Obsession for a quieter car finds ex-IRB man a niche

A staff extracting the various insulator shapes that the machine had cut earlier.

GENERALLY, men love cars. In 2007, The Secret Life of Cars and What They Reveal About Us study in the UK revealed male drivers considered their vehicles to be a part of themselves.

With the few exceptions of women like Bertha Benz, wife of automobile inventor Karl Benz, who was dubbed the first person to drive an automobile over a real distance — about 106 km from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany in 1888 — to the recent appointment of Mary Barra as General Motors chief executive officer, the auto industry is very much a man’s world.