Round the Bend Read online

  Drawbacks? Well, the Scirocco is 97mm lower than the Golf, a point that becomes blindingly obvious every time you try to get inside. You really do have to pull your head into your ribcage if you don’t want to bang it on the roof. To get in the back, it’s best to cut yourself in half.

  And that’s it, really. I suppose I could mention the boot sill, which is a bit high, but then I’d sound like those old motoring hacks who drove me into this business all those years ago.

  To make me sound nothing like those guys: the new car is like an old girlfriend you meet after hooking up on Friends Reunited. To everyone else she’s just an ordinary middle-aged woman, but to you she’s a bit more than that …

  That’s the new Scirocco. To most people it’s just another car. But for those of us who had the old one, it arrives on the scene, after a fifteen-year period of nothing but grey skies and drizzle, like the warm, fast wind from which it takes its name.

  21 September 2008

  A one-armed man with a twitch can go fast in a Gallardo

  Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4

  In the current economic conditions, the number of people who might want to buy the car you see photographed this morning – a new, even more powerful Lamborghini Gallardo – is about six. In fact, I don’t know why I’m bothering to fill the rest of the page. It’d be easier and cheaper to send them a letter.

  Then we could ignore the snarling, fuel-sucking, speed-busting supercar and look instead at how the streets of Britain might be when everything has gone bust, no one has a job and the government has decided to build a huge dam in the Cheddar Gorge just to keep everyone busy.

  I do not believe there will be significantly more buses. The fact is that once you have been exposed to the freedom of personal transportation, it is impossible to retreat to the misery of veal-style collectivism. Buses are a safety net, a device civilization uses to move around the poor and the weak. Nothing more.

  Nor do I believe there will be that many electric cars. They enjoyed their rise in popularity when times were good and we could all afford to have guilt about ecoism. But when you are forced to eat your dog to stay alive, it is very difficult to spare a thought for the polar bears and the cedar trees of Lebanon. And anyway, they don’t work.

  For guidance on the future, it’s tempting to look at France. Many years ago, when my head was full of hair and sixth-form politics, I argued that, in Paris, a car is not used to show off the wealth of its driver, only his level of interest in all things motoring. It is quite normal, I said, for a rich man who has no interest in cars to drive a beaten-up Clio, while his secretary, who loves to drive fast, has a big BMW.

  It was a lovely theory, but it was wrong. Because, if we exclude the Côte d’Azur, which is now Moscow-on-Sea, we find that in fact no one in France has a nice car, no matter how interested they may be in motoring. This is because France is essentially Communist and anyone who displays outward signs of wealth is fearful that soon a mob will come and his head will be in a basket.

  Here, there has never been a successful revolution. Oh, we’ve cut a king’s bonce off but it only lasted a couple of days before the Paddy Basher was gone and Mr King’s offspring was sitting in the hot seat. Today, the country is full of people who dislike the rich but they stick to vandalizing Range Rovers rather than beheading the Queen. And anyway, it’s equally full of Essex and Cheshire; places where people will sleep on bare floorboards before they stop driving into town in the Bentley.

  Britain is fundamentally middle-class. There are no walnut-faced sons of the soil with hate in their hearts. Basically, we all want a plasma television. We’re all show-offs. We strive to be tall poppies. And, as a result of this, the car, whatever form it may take in the future, will always be mired here in mammonish k rather than cornering g.

  So, in order to decide what sort of car Britain will be using in the near future, we must examine exactly what we require it to do. It must be considerably cheaper and less expensive to run than the cars we have now. Power will not matter due to the government’s latest moronic wheeze to put average-speed cameras on all motorways. It must be available in a range of versions so that Chelmsford can continue to demonstrate its superiority over Wakefield. And with half of Africa and eastern Europe living here, it needs to be small to deal with the congestion.

  Japan is already there. Yes, there are big Lexuses and yakuza Mercs prowling the streets, but most people drive what they call kei cars: extremely small, extremely light, extremely fuel-efficient personal modules. Some have Rolls-Royce radiator grilles. Some have ladders on the roof. Anyone who sets up a business importing these cars to Britain right now will do very well. Frankly, I’m amazed Honda, Toyota and Subaru haven’t cottoned on already.

  Perhaps they know what I know: that actually Japan is ahead of us but still some way behind Vietnam, where everyone has a small motor-bike. They are used as family saloons, lorries, pose-mobiles and taxis. And the system works, even when it rains, which it does, hard, and often for nine months of the year. I really can see a day when London looks much the same as Hanoi does today.

  Funny, isn’t it? Vietnam never quite caught up to the West but now it’s accidentally overtaken us. Even as we speak, I have a small Vespa in my garage. Soon, I may be forced to go out there and see how the damn things works.

  In the meantime, let’s get back to the Lamborghini Gallardo that may be bought by only half a dozen people in the next century. Look at it this way: very few people will ever take a holiday on the international space station. But that wouldn’t stop me reading about what it’s like up there …

  There’s a very good reason why the baby Lambo is always seen as a poor relation to Ferrari’s F430. It’s because the Ferrari is a better car. Drive them back-to-back around a racetrack and the difference is immediately obvious. The red car feels tight, sharp, pointy and modern. The orange car with the lime-green seats, feels, in comparison, like a canal boat. It rolls more in the corners, pitches more under braking, is less immediate in the way it accelerates and less responsive through the steering.

  However, here’s why I love the Lambo. To get the best out of a 430, you need to have testes like globes. Whereas a one-armed man with a twitch can go just as fast in a Gallardo while eating a sandwich and having a spasm attack.

  And now he can go faster still because Lamborghini has upped the size of the V10 from 5 to 5.2 litres. That means you now get 552bhp, and that, coupled with a weight saving of 44lb, means you arrive everywhere in a cacophony of barking, wailing exhaust noises slightly before you set off. It is ridiculously quick. Mad quick. Eyes-on-stalks bonkers. Way, way faster than a standard Ferrari 430, massively louder, too, and because of the squidge-matic suspension and four-wheel-drive system, just as easy to drive as its predecessor.

  Some have said in the past that the Gallardo’s sister car, the cheaper Audi R8, was very similar. Not any more it isn’t. It is David Miliband in the face of Russian aggression.

  There’s more. The Gallardo has always been a lovely-looking car, much more striking and desirable than the Ferrari. And the new model, with its new Reventón-style nose, is even better. The fact is that curves on a car never look as good as straight lines. The old Ford Scorpio proved that and the sharp, super-creased Lambo hammers the point home. We see the same thing with women. A fat girl’s curvy round face does not have the same appeal as the straight lines found on Keira Knightley or Kristin Scott Thomas.

  Pointlessly, I shall now run you through the costs. They are very high. But at least the fuel consumption has been improved by 18 per cent. Oh, and don’t bother with the manual version. If you want a Gallardo, get the one with the flappy paddles.

  If, then, you like to dream as you commute to the dole office on your Yamaha FS1E, dream about the Lambo. Lamborghinis have always been the heart and soul of the supercar scene and this is the most Lamborghinish model that has ever been made.

  28 September 2008

  Oh no, this is the world’s worst car

>   Chrysler Sebring Cabriolet 2.7 V6

  Many people imagine when they rent a convertible in America that they’ll be thumping down Highway 1 under a blazing sky in a throbbing Corvette or an evocative Mustang. Yum yum, they think. Freedom. Sunshine. A V8 bass line. Engineer boots, leather jackets and tight blue jeans. The American dream.

  Sadly, however, most tourists end up with a Chrysler Sebring convertible, which is almost certainly the worst car in the entire world.

  My journey in this automotive horror story began in Wendover. Famous for being a base used by the Enola Gay back in 1945, it lies on the border between Utah and Nevada. So, half the town is full of man mountains emptying what’s left of their savings into MGM’s shiny and very noisy slots. And the other half is full of Donny Osmond. As you can imagine, I was in a hurry to leave and so I piled, along with my Top Gear colleagues, into the rented Sebring and set off for Denver.

  Immediately, I was annoyed by a non-stop whining sound from the back. This turned out to be Richard Hammond, who, despite being 8 inches tall, claimed that he had never been so uncomfortable in his life, apart from when he was being born. ‘Only that,’ he said, ‘was more spacious.’

  After several hours of continuous moaning, he changed his tack. I’d selected a ‘classic vinyl’ station on the car’s satellite radio and this did not meet with his approval. As a fan of Westlife and Girls Aloud, he didn’t see why James May and I were air-drumming our way across the salt flats to a non-stop selection of brilliance from Supertramp, Yes and the Allman Brothers. Eventually, ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus drove him into such a frenzy of whingeing, we could take no more and drowned him out by turning up Steve Miller to the max.

  I can only presume that when Steve went from Phoenix, Arizona, all the way to Tacoma, he was not at the wheel of a Sebring, or the song would have been rather different. ‘I went from Phoenix, Arizona, to the other side of the city and then I went home again.’

  Certainly, we only got as far as Salt Lake City in our rented car before we ditched it and resorted to the services offered by Delta. It had been 120 miles of abject misery, and not only because of the unswervingly pissed-off Richard Hammond.

  Let us look, first of all, at the car’s only good point. The boot is bigger than the hangar deck of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. However, the drawback of driving a car with an aircraft carrier on the back is that it doesn’t look very good. No. That doesn’t cover it. It looks terrible. Hysterically awful. Anyone thinking of drawing up a list of the ugliest cars ever made will be forced to put this one at the top. I have seen more attractive boils.

  And disappointingly, if you push the button that lowers the roof – and then push it again because it isn’t working properly – you will find that a) all of the carrying capacity is lost, and that b) with no roof in place, everyone can see you at the wheel. This is very bad. Some, for sure, give you pitying looks. Mostly, though, they point and laugh.

  So how much do you have to pay for the privilege of being a laughing stock? Well, in the US, it’s around $29,000 (£16,400). You could buy a clown suit for less and achieve much the same effect. Here, however, a 2.7-litre drop-top Sebring is £25,100 and at that price, I simply don’t know how the salesman keeps a straight face.

  Power? There isn’t any. Spec sheets show that in Britain, a 2.7-litre V6 will do 121mph and 0 to 62mph in 10.8.

  But 10.8 what? Years? Let me put it this way. It develops 185bhp, which is pretty much what Volvo can get these days from a 2.4-litre diesel.

  I’m afraid I have no idea which engine was fitted to my rental but I can tell you that all it did was convert fuel into noise. Put your foot down hard and after a while of nothing happening, the gearbox would lurch down a cog and the volume would increase. That was it.

  Sadly, there’s more bad news. Turning petrol into motion, as we know, is an expensive business, but turning it into sound is even worse. We managed just 18mpg. Quite why anyone would buy this rather than, say, a Volkswagen Eos, I simply do not know. You’d have to be so window-lickingly insane that you’d be banned from handling anything other than crayons.

  A Sebring can do nothing well. It was hopeless in crosswinds and the only option you need on a twisty road is sick bags. Interestingly, however, while the ride is very soft, the suspension still manages to crash about like a drawer full of cutlery when it is asked to deal with a small pothole.

  And of course, being an American rental car, it came with a warped disc brake and steering that was so out of whack it kept making a beeline for Wyoming. But the worst thing was the overwhelming sense from everything you touched that it had been built by someone who was being deliberately stupid or who was four years old. Life inside that bag of crap plastic gave me some idea of what it might be like to be a boiled sweet.

  We see this with so many American cars. Dynamically, some of them are pretty good these days. One or two are even a match for what the Chinese are doing. And by and large they are still extremely cheap. But there’s a very good reason for this. They are simply not built to last.

  I spent most of my time in America this time in a new Corvette ZR1. It is a fabulous car. Mesmerizingly fast, good looking and amazing value. But after three days the damn thing was beginning to disintegrate. It made me growl with annoyance and despair.

  But I think I know the problem. Because America is a new country, the people who live there have no sense of history. And if you have no concept of ‘the past’, it is extremely difficult to grapple with the idea of ‘the future’.

  If you think a bar established in 1956 is ‘old’ then you will not understand the idea of next week. So why bother building for it?

  We see this short-termism in everything from the average American house, which falls over whenever the wind gets up, to the way chief executives are treated. In Japan, you are given twenty-five years before you are judged on whether you’ve turned the company around. In America, bosses are given two months. And if there’s been no financial about-turn, they are fired.

  AIG and Lehman Brothers got caught out because they were being run by people who live only in the here and now. They couldn’t see that it would all come crashing down in the future because there’s no such thing.

  I suppose eco-mentalists would use this argument as a stick to beat the pickup-driving masses. But how can Hank and Billy-Bob think about the world ending in a thousand years when everything they know, everything they are, began a week ago last Tuesday?

  And this brings me on to the war in Iraq. They went in there, knowing that pretty quickly they could depose Saddam Hussein. But nobody in power stopped for a moment to think about what might happen next. And there you have it. The insurgency problem in Baghdad and the wonky gearlever on the Chrysler Sebring. They are both caused by exactly the same thing.

  And the only cure, frankly, is time. Give them 2,000 years and they might just start to understand what I’m on about. Until then, do not buy a Sebring. Do not rent one either. Close your eyes, hum and, hopefully, we can make it go away.

  5 October 2008

  A Wilmslow pimp with class

  Cadillac CTS-V

  The Stig’s car has blown up. It’s not surprising, really, given the way he drives, but whatever, he now needs a new one. His requirements are very simple: it must have a ‘loose back end’, several hundred horsepower, almost no suspension, extraordinary acceleration, a vivid top speed and a traction control system that can be turned off, completely and for ever.

  Lewis Hamilton’s tail-happy McLaren would be ideal except for one minor, but important, detail.

  The Stig also insists that his new car must be capable of at least thirty-five miles to the gallon.

  Yes, even Top Gear’s peculiar racing driver, a man who eats raw mince and fills his spare time by chasing sheep, has noticed that the economy has gone wrong and that he must have an everyday car that is economical.

  You may think he has a point. Buying fuel is surely the most painful experience known to man, partly because p
etrol pumps deliver it so unbearably slowly, and garages are such unpleasant places, with their horrible pies and silly country and western CDs on special offer, and partly because the cost is just so enormous.

  It costs nearly £100 to fill my car, and 210 miles later I have to spend another £100 to fill it up again. And for why? It’s not like spending £100 on a delicious supper, which would be memorable and pleasant. We only use fuel to get us to work, which is boring, or to the shops at weekends, which is hateful.

  Fuel is like washing-up liquid: something you must have in your daily life but that is extremely boring. And that’s why all of us want to go as far as possible between fill-ups. And that’s why most people think it makes sense to make fuel economy a central pillar of their new-car-buying decision.

  Don’t be so sure. The figures put out by governments and car manufacturers are theoretical, which is a Greek way of saying ‘wrong’.

  You are therefore basing your buying decision on nothing but hot air and probabilities. And this can lead to much disappointment.

  Making the situation worse are the bores you bump into occasionally at the local Harvester. They always tell you that they manage to get 80mpg from their old Vectra. This is not true. They are making it up in a desperate bid to appear clever – which they aren’t, or they wouldn’t have a Vectra.

  Whenever someone, and they always have a branded bomber jacket, says they achieve more than 70mpg from a family saloon, stick your fingers in your ears and hum. Because all they are doing is trying to make themselves feel better about the awful hand God has dealt them.