What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (39 page)

My children are not even remotely interested in cars. My son has a Fiat Punto, simply because it’s Italian and he quite likes pasta and Inter Milan. He has no clue about its engine and is really only bothered about fuel economy. Speed, he reckons, is dangerous and silly.

It’s the same story with all his friends. They can tell you who plays centre-back for every football team in Europe, and how many left-footed goalkeepers there are in the Premier League, but could they tell the difference between an Audi and a Mercedes? Not in a million years. Would they be able to identify Kimi Räikkönen? Nope, not even if he was all alone in a shed wearing a name badge.

Then we have my friends. Of these, maybe three are what you might call interested in cars. The rest simply aren’t bothered at all. Mostly they go out every couple of years and buy whatever Range Rover happens to be in the showroom that day.

I’m aware also that there are significant numbers of people who dislike cars in the same way they dislike soap and David Cameron. And all of this raises the question: who’s watching
Top Gear
? Who’s buying all the car magazines? Why has Ferrari just had a record year?

I’ve been pondering on this for quite some time and now I think I have the answer. It’s the people who go shopping in London’s gigantic Westfield centre.

The multistorey car park there is permanently packed with slammed Volkswagen Golfs, tarted-up Beemers and tricked-out Mercedes. It echoes constantly to the bellow of
big-bore exhausts, the squeal of tortured 35-profile tyres and the boom of megawatt sound systems. It’s a cathedral to the god of horsepower. A meeting point for the disciples of speed.

They’ve even worked out their own rules in there. The car park’s owner has introduced a one-way system and various give-way points, but they’ve been replaced with a simpler system, which is: whoever has the most expensive car has the right of way. It works rather well.

Of course, you get people who cheat. Recently a chap in an AMG-badged Mercedes tried to nick the only remaining space outside Waitrose, but I’d already clocked that he was actually in an E 250 so gave no quarter at all.

However, last week it all went wrong, because I was driving a Peugeot 2008 Cross Dresser. And that, in the car park at Westfield, is the bottom of the food chain. It is the speck that insects eat. So you have to give way to absolutely everyone and then you must park in the loser lane, miles from the shops.

It’s much the same story elsewhere. In Notting Hill two trendy-looking Dutch tourists stopped dead in their tracks, pointed at me and burst into peals of laughter. Then they took photographs and wandered off, laughing at those too. I think that if I’d just spent £19,145 on this car, and people laughed at me wherever I went, I’d be a bit disconcerted.

But I wouldn’t have just spent £19,145 on this car because I simply don’t understand the appeal. And it’s the same story with all its rivals. The Mini Countryman, the Ford B-Max, the Vauxhall Whateveritis. And that dreary new Renault. You pay more than you would for a standard hatchback and all you get in return is the ability to drive while wearing a busby.

I think they’re cars for people who’ve completely given up on life. They know they will never again have sex outside, or wake up with a hangover. Life has become a beige montage of comfortable shoes, nights in front of the television and excruciating anniversary dinners at the local Harvester. When you see someone
go past in a car such as this, you know that he will be actively looking forward to the cold embrace of death.

But the fact is that many people do like cars of this type, in the same way that many people like
All Star Mr & Mrs
and marzipan. So it is my job to see how the Peugeot stacks up. And the truth is … it’s really not bad at all.

It won’t go round corners very fast, and it’s about as exciting as being dead, but as a car for someone who sees no fun in anything at all, it makes a good deal of sense. Providing it doesn’t go wrong. Which, because it’s a Peugeot, it probably will.

But if it doesn’t, it’s surprisingly good. First of all, the suspension is so delightfully soft you don’t feel potholes at all, or speed humps, or your neighbour’s bicycle, or any of the other things that Peugeot drivers are prone to running over. It glides around like a hovercraft.

You can buy it with a petrol engine but why waste your money? You’re not interested in revs or speed. You’re just waiting for death, so save your pennies on fuel and have the diesel. That’s the engine I tested, and again I was surprised. It pulls so well from low revs that you could stick it in top and leave it there all day. And it’s not just torquey; it sips diesel in the same way that an old lady sips a sherry.

It’s a nice place to sit in as well. There are natty materials in the cabin, with some nice stitching on the upholstery, and my model came with a glass roof, so it felt airy and pleasant. The satnav was dead easy to use, the car had many toys and even possessed a Range Rover-style traction system. You tell it what sort of surface you’re driving on and it decides which wheel should get the power. The only slight niggle is that it’s not actually four-wheel drive. So, really, it’s just a knob for impressing your passenger. It doesn’t really do anything at all.

I suppose, grudgingly, I will admit that because of the taller, boxier body you do get more space everywhere than you do in the standard hatchback. There really is room in the back for
people, and the boot could handle three medium-sized dogs. Four, if you didn’t like them very much.

So as a tool it must be said that this car ticks many boxes and does a lot of important things extremely well. But I hated it. I loathed the way it makes no attempt at all to be exciting or exhilarating. And I felt embarrassed to be in a Peugeot, which has become a badge of honour for the terminally uninterested.

In short, this car does absolutely nothing for me, and I don’t blame my fellow disciples in the Westway shopping centre’s car park for treating me – and it – with such disdain and derision.

But for the vast majority of people – and I mean, 97.3 per cent of the population – it makes a deal of sense. If – and it’s a big if – it is reliable, then you really couldn’t ask for more. The only trouble is, the sort of people I’m talking to have used this bit of the newspaper to line the budgie cage. So they’ll never know.

10 August 2013

I bet there’d be a hint of regret as well – a sadness that my life hadn’t worked out quite as well as I’d hoped, and that the chap who’d just blasted by had more important things to do than sit behind my sorry arse all day long. That he was more important and more clever. And possibly fitted with a bigger gentleman sausage.

Well, last week I found out exactly what it is like to be passed by faster-moving traffic. I was driving the new Jaguar F-type; the one with the big engine. The V8 S. It can accelerate from 0 to 62 mph in less time than it takes someone with a mild stutter to say ‘62 mph’ and it has a top speed of close to 190 mph. It is a very, very, very fast car. But I was in Italy, so absolutely everything else was even faster.

I pulled out of a restaurant one night, roof down, stars twinkling and Lake Como stretching away into the moonlight shadow of that glorious Alpine hinterland. With something zesty on the stereo, I engaged Dynamic mode and roared off into the night.

It was an epic evening to be driving, and an epic road, but after a short while I began to notice that a pair of headlights that had been some distance back were gaining awfully quickly. And, of course, not wanting to inconvenience a local by getting in his way, I increased to flank speed.

Now the Jag was really bellowing. That big 5-litre supercharged V8 was flexing its muscles after each corner and hurling me into the xenon glow that lay ahead. But it was no good. The headlights were right behind me by this stage, so I did what any decent human being would do: I pulled over in the next lay-by to let him past.

And guess what. He was driving a 1.25-litre Ford Fiesta. The
old model with the Yamaha engine and the silly oval grille. That was not an inspiring car when it was new, and now, more than fifteen years later, I bet it’s even worse. But I can report that with an Italian at the wheel it is still faster than a hot Jag.

And there’s more. It is a fact that on a twisting mountain road a car is always going to be faster than even the fastest superbike. A bike simply doesn’t have enough grip to corner anywhere near as quickly as a car … unless there’s an Italian on board, in which case it somehow has all the grip in the world.

I love driving in Italy, I truly do, because there the car has nothing to do with environmentalism or politics. And to describe it as a means of transport is the same as describing a fresh sardine that’s been grilled in a bit of butter and flour as a means of staying alive. To an Italian the car is an expression of your soul, your zest for life. Speed is not dangerous. It’s necessary.

You may know the coastal motorway that heads from France towards Genoa. For an hour or so you are either in a tunnel or on a viaduct or going round a hairpin bend with a 1,000-foot drop on either side. If this were anywhere else in the world there would be a 30-mph speed limit, enforced by helicopter gunships. But it’s Italy so it has the same 130-kph (81-mph) limit as all the other motorways.

And that, I presume, is a 130-kph minimum, because everyone – mums, nuns and the conker-brown, walnut-faced peasantry in their ancient Fiats – was doing more like 150 kph. Round blind bends where you could not possibly see if the road ahead was blocked. It was madness, and I loved it.

Twice, over the years, I have been pulled over by the Italian police while driving a Lamborghini. And on both occasions I was told very sternly that I wasn’t driving fast enough. You have to love that. And on my most recent trip I was getting much the same sort of treatment from everyone. I really did get the distinct impression that many people were extremely annoyed with the lumpen, badly dressed Englishman in his enormous, slow-moving Jaguar.

I, meanwhile, was having a ball, because the F-type is one of those cars, and Italy is one of those places, where you stomp about all morning thinking up excuses to go for a drive.

It’s actually quite a childish car. It makes a range of extremely childish noises, especially if you engage the Sports Exhaust setting, which makes the back end snort like a hippo when you change up, and bang and crackle when you lift off. I did this a lot in the tunnels.

The styling is quite childish as well. It’s pretty in the same way as a child’s fridge-door drawing of a princess is pretty. It’s simple and clean, and I stand by my earlier claim that it is one of the best-looking cars yet made. Precisely because it isn’t trying to be all grown-up and German.

But there are a lot of things that are not childish at all. The gearbox stands out. There are flappy paddles behind the wheel, but it isn’t a boy-racer double-clutch affair that works well on a racetrack but falls to pieces in town. It’s a conventional eight-speed automatic and it’s a delight.

15 September 2013

The Sunday-evening crawl back into London is enough to make most sentient beings wonder if they should pull onto the hard shoulder and shoot themselves in the head. The weekend is over. There is nothing but drudgery ahead. The kids are tired and crotchety. And the traffic is dreadful.

It was always thus. But now, on the M1, the government has found a way to make everything much, much worse. Because every few hundred yards there is an overhead gantry that informs motorists the speed limit has been lowered to, say, 50 mph. And that speed cameras are on hand to catch those who think that’s stupid. This means that everyone drops down to the new limit. And there’s a word for this: communism.

I don’t doubt for a moment that many people with interesting hair and degrees in advanced mathematics have spent several weeks working with the principle of flow dynamics and have decided that when x number of cars are using the motorway, pi equals MC
²
and that the speed limit should be lowered to ensure a smooth passage for everyone. Certainly we know their arguments took in the former transport secretary, John Prescott, who announced that the slower you go, the faster you’ll get there.

Unfortunately, human beings are not molecules. We cannot be likened to water flowing down a hosepipe, because we’re all different. Some people are pushy and dynamic. Some are mice. It is a fact that if you gave everyone in the country £100 today, tomorrow some people would have £1,000 and some would have nothing. And that’s what the mathematicians don’t seem to understand.

When Russia experimented with the idea of making everyone the same, it wasn’t long before it needed a secret police force to keep the system going. Gatso. KGB. Same thing, really.

I came down the M1 last Sunday evening, and I think I’m right in saying that I have never been in a situation on any road anywhere in the world that was quite so dangerous. Because all of a sudden the pushy, dynamic people were stuck, and the car in front could neither speed up, because it was being driven by a mouse, nor pull over, because everyone was doing 50, so all three lanes were clogged.

This sort of thing makes the alpha male mad, so he starts to tailgate and undertake, using gaps that aren’t really there. And that causes the mice to panic-brake. Then you’re in a world of squealing tyres and tortured metal, and pretty soon you have the headline: ‘Dozens die in juggernaut dance of death’.

I suppose I should explain that by far the worst offender that night was me. This is because I was in a rage at the politicians who allowed this system to be implemented. I was in a rage at the lightly dented Ford Galaxy in front that would not pull over, even when its driver had the chance. I was in a rage at the mathematicians who were responsible for the 50-mph limit. But most of all I was in a rage because I was in an Audi. A big, twin-turbo RS 6 that was the colour of a dog’s lipstick.

We all know that Audi drivers are by far the most aggressive you encounter, and I’ve often wondered which comes first: the temper or the car.

Well, now I have the answer. Most of the time I’m pretty calm behind the wheel. I occasionally mutter the odd profanity at another motorist’s idiocy, but I don’t tailgate, I don’t shake my fist and I don’t arrive at my destination with a face the colour of a plum and armpits like Lake Superior. And yet in that Audi I did all those things. I think the company put testosterone in the air-conditioning system.

Or maybe it’s the small-man syndrome at work. We all know that people who can’t reach things on high shelves (no names
here, Richard) have a bad temper because they are not as tall as all their friends. Well, could it be that Audi drivers are in a permanent state of fury because they do not have a BMW or a Mercedes?

Either way, I was a menace that night, getting far too close to the car in front in a stupid and dangerous attempt to scare the f****** b****** into getting out of my f****** way.

And while engaging in this idiotic pursuit I noticed something strange. The Audi was fitted with a radar in its nose that warned you when you were travelling too close to the car in front. This is available in many cars these days, and normally it errs on the side of caution. Not in the Audi, it doesn’t. It issues a red alert only when you are precisely 1 inch from the car ahead. And even in my deranged state I thought that was a bit silly.

And I suppose while we’re looking at the negative points we should examine some of the other things that are wrong with the new RS 6.

No 1: it’s not that nice to drive. You have a four-wheel-drive system that uses a mechanical centre differential to apportion power between the front and the back. You have adaptive air suspension. Then you have more diffs that send the power from side to side. And you have a steering system developed after more than a century of trial and error. But most of the time it’s uninvolving, and then very occasionally, when you are really tanking along, it all gets overwhelmed by the torque and goes a bit wobbly. If you really do want a large estate car that feels like a Ferrari in wellies, an AMG Mercedes is better.

That said, the Audi’s engine is a peach. The last RS 6 was propelled by a big 5-litre V10, but for this one the company has fitted the twin-turbo 4-litre V8 that Bentley is now using in the Continental GT.

There’s less power than before but there is also less weight. A fifth of the car’s body is now made from aluminium. The wiring is as thin as possible. The soundproofing is chosen for its similarity to helium. And as a result the performance is still
somewhere between electric and mind-blowing. This is a car that will take two children back to boarding school after the summer holidays – and yet it will get you from 0 to 62 mph in less than four seconds. And it has a top speed of 155 mph.

It’s not just brute force and ignorance, either, because when you are just pootling along, four of the eight cylinders shut themselves down. And to make sure the car doesn’t shake itself to pieces as a result, the ‘active engine mounts’ are fitted with ‘electromagnetic oscillation coil actuators [that] induce phase-offset counter-oscillations which largely cancel engine vibration’. You can tell it’s German, can’t you?

But this is exactly the sort of engineering that is missing from the Jaguar F-type V8 S, which I wrote about last week. The sort of stuff that makes you go, ‘Huh?’ The entire RS 6 is riddled with it. Clever solutions to problems you simply didn’t know existed. Some of it has to do with weight. Some with delivering music from the entertainment system. You sense all the time that you are driving not so much a car as an engineer’s homework.

Maybe that’s why it feels a bit detached. A bit uninvolving. Because, unlike the Jag, it wasn’t built with passion; it was built with maths. And maths, as we know from the Stalinist cameras on the M1, doesn’t always work.

22 September 2013