Clarkson on Cars (26 page)

Things that are intended to make you, the driver, feel decadent and extravagant and stupid.

In Italy, if you drive a fine car, you are revered. In England, you are a parasite.

Back in the sixties, Pinin Farina, one of Italy’s top designers, found himself driving a Ferrari through an anti-Vietnam march.

The protesters banged on his window and roof, demanding to know how fast it could go. In a poll-tax riot here, they would set you, and your car, on fire.

Even Britain’s more affluent road users are strangely indifferent when it comes to a new car. Keep your head pointing forwards but swivel your eyeballs to the left so far that it begins to hurt. Now swivel them a little more.

You have just done a passable imitation of the driver of a 7-series BMW who knows that I am alongside in a Z1, a two-seater Bee Em with no doors. He absolutely will not let me see that he is interested. It is not the done thing. It is not the British way.

And this is odd because according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, one working person in ten in this country owes his or her job to the motor industry.

Furthermore, Britain is unique in the world for its specialist car makers. Our major players may have been decimated but AC, Morgan, TVR, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Lotus, Caterham, Westfield, Marcos and a host of even tinier outfits continue to thrive.

Outside the UK, there are no tiny car firms. Here, there’s nothing but.

Then there are racing cars. Take a look down a Formula One grid and count the cars not made in Britain. You’ll only need one hand.

There is nothing so American as an Indycar race except for one small thing. Every single car in the series is made in Britain. The car Nigel Mansell used to win the title uses a chassis from Huntingdon and a Ford Cosworth engine from Northamptonshire.

Even Ferrari, the greatest racing team of all time, has been forced, after a four-year spell away from the winner’s rostrum, to employ a Brit, John Barnard, as chief designer.

In the world of rallying, the all-conquering Subaru Legacy upholds Japan’s honour, but it was built in Banbury.

There must be a deep enthusiasm for cars in Britain but is it buried even deeper than the vast number of classic cars we own?

Just the other day, I needed to borrow a Ferrari Daytona – like you do – and as I was in Italy, I figured they would be ten a penny. After two days, I gave up trying to find even someone who knew someone who might have one.

In England, after two hours on the telephone, I had ordinary people from ordinary places queuing up to lend me one. They use a Sierra most of the time but in their barn, they have ‘just a few classics’.

So why, against a background like this, is it considered poor form to talk cars in public? Why, when there are 132 different car magazines on sale in Britain, does the biggest seller have a circulation of just 130,000? In Norway, Norway, for Chrissakes, one car mag alone sells to a million people a month. And why are there so many people in this country who’ll gladly tell you they don’t like cars?

I’m not talking about the bearded environmentalist types who have just cause but about normal people, like my mother, who actually says she hates cars. Is this not like saying that you hate tables, or light fittings or plants? How can you hate what, at worst, is an inanimate object?

Any why get so hot under the collar about cars being sold for £5 or £10 million when you don’t care two hoots about someone buying a painting for £22 million?

To the heathen, a painting is a piece of canvas with some oil on it, and a car is some metal. But to the enlightened, both are art forms. I’m amazed that rare cars, which are both art forms and tools for moving around in, don’t fetch more than paintings.

But this is a sentiment rarely heard in Britain these days. And I have a sneaking feeling that our company-car mentality is to blame.

Because 50 per cent of cars sold in Britain are bought by companies, people don’t bother talking about or ogling cars because they have what they’re given.

In other countries, people buy their own cars, with their own money, so they need all the information they can lap up. They will stare at new cars in traffic jams, because who knows, next time round, they might buy one.

But in Britain, why read a car magazine when next year you’ll get another Cavalier whether you like it or not? Why aspire to a Mercedes Benz when you just know your company will never buy you one, and you don’t need one anyway because you have the Vauxhall for free?

Why talk about cars with your friends when all you learn is of no real importance?

And of course, because company cars are such a huge thing in Britain, the manufacturers target fleet buyers, enticing them with things that matter most on the company balance sheet: fuel economy, residual values, insurance ratings.

These things don’t make a car look or feel good. They don’t make it sexy or fast. They make it dull so who can blame the people who drive it for not taking an interest.

Of course you won’t talk cars down at the pub if you have a horrid beige box parked outside. It’s a functional tool like your washing machine or fridge and such things do not make for lively conversation.

Underneath it all, the British have a deep-seated love for motor cars; they must do because Britain, not Germany or Italy or even Japan, is the capital of cardom.

The RAC rally is still the country’s biggest spectator event and
Top Gear
still pulls enormous audiences, but unless the company car culture is stamped out, the concept of watching people driving cars around, and finding it interesting, will eventually become positively weird.

It was inevitable really, but we go into 1994 with a major omission from the list of new cars you can buy in Britain – Lancia.

Founded in 1906, the company built up an awesome reputation with its sporty yet luxurious motor cars but by the late sixties, it was in financial trouble and had to be rescued by Fiat.

Things got worse. In the late seventies, horror stories began to appear in the British press about Lancia rust protection and how there wasn’t any. This culminated in a much-talked about campaign on the
Nationwide
programme which served to decimate sales.

In Britain in 1978, Lancia shifted 11,800 cars but from then on in, it’s been downhill all the way. In 1993, excluding December’s figures which aren’t available yet, they sold just 569.

That isn’t enough to pay for a full-page advertisement in the
Sunday Times
and it certainly isn’t enough to keep the 46 dealers happy.

‘We just never recovered from that rust problem back in the late seventies,’ said a spokeswoman. ‘And we couldn’t because of journalists,’ she added.

It seems that us lot always began every piece we wrote about Lancia talking about how the cars didn’t go rusty any more, thus ensuring that the words Lancia and rust remained as inexorably linked as Wimbledon and strawberries.

Now, back in the seventies, this wasn’t so bad because after we’d finished talking about the rust, we’d go on to say how pretty the cars were, and how the engines were lusty and how the design was clever. Remember the old HPE? Half estate, half sports coupe and 100 per cent drop-dead gorgeous.

So what if it fell apart after twenty minutes. They’d be twenty great minutes, twenty minutes you’d always remember.

Then there was the Integrale. This was based on the old Delta and is one of the most successful rally cars of all time. With a 2.0-litre, 16-valve, turbocharged engine and four-wheel drive, it afforded the keen driver the sort of thrills that normally go hand in hand with a Ferrari badge.

Yes, the last time I drove one, the centre console came off and pinned my right foot to the throttle, which was a bit unnerving, but hey, until then, I’d had a great time with it.

But this is the rub. In recent years, the Japanese have taught the world’s car-buying public to expect total reliability.

Other car manufacturers caught on but Lancia did not. And that was fine because they had pretty, clever cars with lusty engines and there was always a band of enthusiasts who’d want one.

Even in 1990, they sold 308,000 units throughout Europe and that was pretty good. But by then, they had stopped making pretty, clever, lustful cars and the enthusiasts simply gave up. You could have a pretty, clever, lusty CRX from Honda, the people who powered the McLaren F1 cars.

What chance did the Dedra have? Built on a Fiat Tipo platform, and with Fiat Tipo engines, this car felt, unsurprisingly, just like a Fiat Tipo when you drove it. But it looks like the dinner of a dog and the name Dedra lacks any kind of cocktail-party prestige.

The Thema too had its work cut out. As it was basically the same as the stunning Alfa Romeo 164, anyone after a luxurious Italian express bought the Alfa. And anyone just after a big car remembered
Nationwide
and bought a Toyota.

The Y10, or white hen, as it became known, made a brief appearance and I liked its quirky charm and suede-look trim but I was alone and it was retired two years ago.

And now the rest of the range has followed suit. Oh, you can still buy one with left-hand drive, but that’s just another reason for not buying one. And there are too many of those already.

The really worrying thing is that in Europe, sales are now down to just 214,000 and at the present rate of decline, they’ll be below 100,000 by the turn of the century.

Then, Fiat may just pull the plug and use the name Lancia as a badge on upmarket Fiats, like Ford do with Ghia.

Damn shame. Damn damn shame.

With the exception of a few child molesters, Nazi memorabilia tend not to feature very highly on anyone’s shopping list.

Jackboots have an appeal, for sure, but only in the sort of clubs frequented by government ministers and television personalities. Iron Crosses are collected by people with beards, which is fair enough. And panzer tanks intrigue children at military museums.

But none of these things are sweet, or cuddly, or nice. Normal people collect thimbles, or teddy bears, or the numbers on the side of trains; harmless things. It takes a special kind of person to be interested in a vicious bunch of sadistic murderers led by a man with facial hair.

So what, I wonder, went wrong with the Volkswagen Beetle?

Here is a car that was designed by Ferdinand Porsche in 1933, which gives it some pedigree, but only after he’d been ordered to do so by Hitler who wanted a people’s car – literally, a Volkswagen.

By rights then, it should be remembered with the sort of fondness we reserve for Dachau and the Blitz. It may have been designed by a genius, but it was the vision of a loony.

It was nearly a short-lived one too. After the war, the factory in Wolfsburg was a bombed-out ruin, but to keep the locals busy, the allied powers appointed a British major, Ivan Hirst, to get it going again.

Things once again looked good for the Beetle even though Lord Rootes, Britain’s head motoring honcho, apparently told Hirst he was a ‘bloody fool’ for attempting to make what seemed to be a silly car.

Henry Ford thought it was a foolish idea too, and very nearly bought the factory for his own rapidly expanding operation. He pulled out at the last minute because he felt it was too close to the fast-closing Iron Curtain.

So, miraculously, the Beetle survived, and here we are, in 1993, smiling when a Beetle clatters by. Students sit around discussing the merits of anarchy and the evils of Thatcher, and then drive home in a Nazi staff car.

Woody Allen, a man who has more cause than most to have a problem with the Nazis, used a Beetle for laughs in his film
Sleeper
. He even had a flattering word or two for the people who made it.

But it was not
Sleeper
that turned the Beetle around. It was Herbie. That little white car with the number 53 on the doors and a superimposed screen going on outside the windows transformed the image of the Beetle. No longer was it a Nazi staff car. And nor was it a living testimony to British military stupidity. It wasn’t a car at all in fact. It was a cuddly puppy dog.

The kind of people who like to give their car a name – people who have musical lavatory-roll dispensers, usually – fell for the Beetle hook, line and sinker.

Despite the rudimentary suspension, despite the air-cooled engine, despite the wayward handling and despite the fact it performed with all the gusto of continental drift, it sold incredibly well.

To date, 21 million have been made which makes it the best-selling car ever, and by a huge margin. By comparison, there have been just 5 million Minis.

Not only that, the Beetle is still being produced in Mexico and Brazil and is by far and away the most popular car in the distinctly un-Aryan continent of South America. Especially so in Paraguay where the local importer is a Mr A. Hilter.

That’s a masterstroke for VW. When Morris finished building the Oxford, they sold the rights and the manufacturing equipment to Hindustan of India. Today, it stills sells well but the original creators get nothing in return.

VW owns its operations in Mexico and Brazil and making a car designed more than 50 years ago is very nearly as profitable as South America’s only other big industry.

The Beetle, then, has been a good thing for VW who, because of the
Love Bug
films, managed to fool all of the people, all of the time.

And the charade looks set for another few years yet because at the Detroit Motor Show earlier this month, VW unveiled a new concept car.

It is brand new from tip to toe, but it doesn’t take someone with a degree in car spotting to work out what inspired the Californian designers.

The engine may be at the front, and the passenger compartment may be an air-bagged and -conditioned palace but this is a Beetle. VW themselves say it is a back to the future concept car.

It’s been born because by 1998, VW, along with every other major car maker must ensure that 2 per cent of all the cars it sells in California produce no emissions.