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  This is what makes the Reliant Robin such a joy. My Volkswagen Golf is a car. The Porsche Cayenne I used over Christmas and will review next week is a car. You drive a car. But the Reliant Robin is not a car. It’s not even three-quarters of a car. It’s more than that.

  It’s sitting in its parking space outside the office now, in the rain. And I’m worried about it. I hope it’s OK and isn’t missing me. Owning a Reliant Robin is like having a family pet. Yes, it’s a nuisance sometimes, and, yes, it can be stubborn and unreliable, but it scampers when you go out together and, if you play with its differential, it will even roll over so you can tickle its tummy.

  10 January 2016

  The turbocharged mammoth stampedes away from extinction

  Porsche Cayenne Turbo S

  I have driven a Bentley Continental many times, and at no point have I ever thought, ‘Hmm, I like the opulence and the strange sensations of cultured thuggery but I wish I could buy a version of this car that has a slightly lower top speed and is a lot less wieldy and considerably more expensive.’

  Bentley has recently launched a large SUV that covers all those bases. It’s called the Bentayga and, in essence, it is a Continental that’s been ruined. It’s also a little bit ugly, and yet I guarantee that it will sell by the bucketload. In the Christian Louboutin and Chanel part of town you won’t be able to move for the damn things.

  Lamborghini, too, is said to be working on a jacked-up supercar. It will, I understand, look like an Aventador on stilts, which means it’ll be like an Aventador, only slower, less economical and worse round the corners. That’ll sell as well.

  The demand for leather-lined SUVs has gone berserk. I was at the Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire last weekend and the car park was hysterical. Everyone looked at me arriving in my Volkswagen Golf with open-mouthed wonderment. ‘How did you get here in that?’ they exclaimed.

  Almost everyone else had turned up in a black Range Rover. Indeed the Range Rover is now so popular that Land Rover’s sister company, Jaguar, has a rival – the F-Pace – arriving on forecourts this spring. It’ll be ideal, I should imagine, for all those who choose not to buy the Maserati Levante, another SUV, which will make its debut at the Geneva motor show in March.

  It’s easy to see why all these car-makers are so keen to make SUVs. The profit margins are huge, because you’re selling farmyard technology at farm-shop prices. And when I say ‘farm shop’, I mean Daylesford.

  A saloon car has to be fast and comfortable and refined, and all of this stuff costs millions of pounds to develop. An SUV just needs to be big and full of buttons. That costs 8p. For an extreme example of this in action, peer underneath America’s offerings. They’re just pick-ups with tinted windows. Rationally, then, SUVs make no sense. And yet …

  I know that driving along in an SUV is like inviting all the poor people in your village to watch you build a bonfire out of tenners. I know SUVs are ridiculous and that they simply arm those who want us to go to work in a Google Igloo. But I must admit that my inner nine-year-old rather enjoys being at the wheel of a massive and turbocharged Tonka toy.

  Which is why I was pleased when Porsche said I could use a Cayenne Turbo S over the Christmas holidays.

  The Cayenne is an old car now. There is a city named after it in French Guiana. And a pepper. They’ve even found prehistoric cave drawings of it in various parts of the world.

  In 2014 there was a small facelift that included the fitting of LED daytime running lights, but as soon as you step inside you know it’s old. The satnav screen, for instance, in most modern cars, is 16 feet across, whereas in the Cayenne it’s the size of a stamp. And get this: to start the engine you have to put a key in a slot and then turn it. That’s as quaint as Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

  The other thing that hasn’t really changed over the years is the styling, and that’s a bad thing. This is not a looker, and age has not improved matters one bit. It still appears as though the stylists were consumed by the idea of making the front look like a 911 and then had a tantrum and gave up completely with the rest of the car when their efforts failed.

  However, there is no getting away from the fact that in one important respect the Porsche feels bang up to date. It is extremely fast. Bonkers. Insane. Eye-swivelling.

  Under the bonnet is a 4.8-litre twin-turbo V8 that produces 562bhp. And that makes it – since the 918 Spyder is sold out – just about the most powerful car Porsche builds. It’s so powerful, it holds the SUV lap record at the Nürburgring, having smashed the Range Rover Sport SVR’s time by almost fifteen seconds.

  It’s not just fast for an SUV, either. In a straight line to 62mph it’ll embarrass the driver of an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. Flat out, it’ll be doing as near as makes no difference 180mph.

  My test car was fitted with the optional sports exhaust system, which produces the sort of deep, crackling rumble that frightens dogs. And it also helps to mask the sound of the fuel pumps, which, I presume, are a bit like a bank of firemen’s hoses.

  To try to keep all this weight and all this power in some kind of check there are many buttons, all of which when pressed make the experience a bit less comfortable. I went for the softest setting, and – I’ll be honest – it wasn’t bad. Of course, even in sporty mode, it’s no 911 – it’s too high up for that – but then at least you aren’t sitting there thinking, ‘Oh no. I’m going to crash at any moment.’ And that’s the best you can hope for, really, in a car such as this.

  Bigger stopping distances. Lower cornering speeds. Thirst. These are the prices you pay for all the extra … um … er … height? Ground clearance? Off-road traction?

  Well, yes, you get all that and a lot of clever electronic trickery, but the truth of the matter is that a car this big and this heavy is going to get stuck on a wet, grassy hill. The only way round that is to fit it with off-road tyres and, if you do that, it’ll be a noisy, wayward nightmare on the way home.

  Which brings us right back to the beginning. Why spend almost £120,000 on a Cayenne Turbo S – and that much again if you want it to have doors and a steering wheel and a radio – when it won’t work in the sort of off-road conditions that we get in Britain? Why not buy a Panamera instead? Or a BMW 530d? Or a Golf R or a Toyota Hilux?

  Admit it. You want a big SUV because it’s part of today’s uniform. It tells people that you have a second home in the country and that you shoot. It says that money’s not a worry. All of this is human nature. It’s silly, but it’s how we are.

  The question is, however: having made the decision to buy a large SUV, should you buy a Cayenne Turbo S, with its quaint key slot and stamp-sized satnav screen?

  Well, yes, if you want the fastest SUV on the road. But bear in mind that, within a year or so, once Bentley and Lamborghini are offering rivals, it won’t be.

  17 January 2016

  Oh, you’re good, Audi, but I bet you can’t give it vertical take-off

  Audi A4 Quattro

  Towards the end of the eighteenth century a chef in the Italian city of Naples decided that he’d like to invent an easy way for the locals to eat their food when there was no cutlery to hand. Presumably, he had encountered a haggis and decided that, while the idea was sound, the execution wasn’t.

  So then he looked at the pasty, which, he’d heard, could be eaten even by people with sooty hands in a mine. But there was a problem with that too. A meat pie would work in a country where there was rain and flabby people who would be happy later on to drive around in a Morris Marina. But it would not work, he reckoned, in a country that had given the world Rome and the Renaissance and would go on to provide it with Ferrari and Alfa Romeo.

  Having looked at a burger and decided it was far too American, he came up with the pizza. And I presume that, having created the base, he experimented for several years before deciding that the topping should be made from cheese and tomatoes. In the next 200 years every chef would refine and hone our Neapolitan friend’s original design until, one day, someone
came up with the American Hot, and that was that. The pizza was finished. Perfect. Unimprovable. Move on.

  But people didn’t move on. They kept coming up with new designs and new toppings. Adding leaves and weeds and lumps of buffalo garnished with guillemot. They went for cheeses that have no place outside the fridge of Blur’s bassist and cooked them in ovens that filled the restaurant with the pungent smell of a forest fire.

  They invented the pizza-delivery man, who would go on to star in a million low-rent porn films. They added sultanas and lentils and beans. And the customers came and their shoulders sagged because all they wanted was an American Hot. Because that’s what a pizza is.

  The American Hot is pretty much where we’ve got to in the world of cars with the new Audi A4. The idea of personalized mobility using internal combustion was dreamt up by Karl Benz, and for the past 130 years everyone’s been fiddling around with his original concept until we’ve arrived at the point where there’s nothing left to do. Except think of a new concept.

  It’s almost impossible to review the A4, because there’s almost nothing to say. The boot is big enough for your suitcases, the doors don’t fall off when you go over a bump, the dashboard is laid out to look like a dashboard and the 3-litre turbodiesel engine in my test car hummed like a contented monk. You may think that the engines in all modern saloon cars hum like contented monks, but the humming in this Audi seems to be coming from very far away. It is remarkably refined. Astonishingly so, in fact.

  Audi had obviously been paying attention to the weather forecast and supplied the car on skinny and knobbly winter tyres that until recently would have sat in the mix in the same way as a large turd would have sat on your American Hot. But not any more. They were quiet and grippy, even when the weather was nowhere near as frosty as the overexcitable Met Office had predicted.

  Because the snow terror and the ice chaos never arrived, I had a good whizz about in the Audi and can report that, even though it is whisper quiet, it’s startlingly fast. Not that long ago BMW M5s had such performance figures. And it’s a diesel.

  It handles nicely too. The Quattro badge may have begun in the forests and on the icy tracks of the world rally calendar, but it quickly became nothing more than a marketing tool, a handle that sounded cool and interesting but actually gave your car handling that was woollier than a Swede’s jumper. Not any more. Thanks to all sorts of clever-clever electronics, the Quattro now feels how a Quattro should feel. And never has.

  It’s the same story with the comfort. As recently as five or six years ago Audis didn’t ride properly. They jiggled and pittered and pattered. A road that in most cars was billiard-table smooth was a ploughed field in an Audi. But not any more. Now, you glide.

  This car is so magic-carpetish that you may nod off, but that’s OK because up to 37mph in a city there is an option that lets it drive itself. Outside the city it can steer itself down the motorway and stop if the car in front stops, and all while you’re sending a text. It also knows where it’s going and, because the monk up front runs on diesel, you’ll be able to get from London to Scotland and back without stopping for fuel.

  Niggles? It’s as hard, really, as niggling about your Pizza Express American Hot. Only people who write on TripAdvisor could do that. And that lot are so mean and bitter, they’d even find fault, publicly, with their wife’s breasts.

  I could tell you the satnav graphics are a bit Mothercare and I don’t need a warning buzzer to tell me that the door is open. I know it’s open because I just opened it. And, er, that really is pretty much all.

  The only genuine gripe is the price. A base-level 3-litre TDI A4 Quattro is knocking on the door of £36,000, which is a lot for a car that, let’s not forget, started out in life – in the form of the 80 – as a rival for the Ford Cortina. I can’t say for sure because life’s too short to work it out, but I reckon the car I drove, which was fitted with quite a few choice extras, would cost in excess of £50,000.

  This may cause you to wonder if perhaps you would be better off with a BMW or a Mercedes or a Jaguar instead. Well, that’s up to you. Because the truth is that their mid-sized saloon cars are all pretty good as well. The Jaguar XE especially. It’s surprisingly excellent, that thing.

  Or maybe you want to wait and see what Alfa Romeo’s Giulia will be like. That’s the car I’m most looking forward to driving this year. Mostly because I just know there will be loads to say about it.

  And that really is the Audi’s biggest problem. There isn’t. It’s a car, filtered and refined and honed so that every last little foible and idiosyncrasy is gone. It’s everything a car can be and should be and, as a result, it’s a little bit dull. There’s no flair, no pizzazz, no wow factor. It’s as characterful as a toaster.

  What we need now, then, is no more development of the original idea. We’ve done that. We’ve achieved peak pizza. What we need now is new thinking, new means of propulsion.

  Our man in Naples didn’t look at the pasty and think: ‘Oh, well, that’s that, then. It’s been done.’ He started a new idea from scratch. It’s time for the car-makers to do the same thing.

  24 January 2016

  It could swallow a horse and forty-seven other things. Anyone with forty-eight must get a lorry

  Volkswagen Touran 2.0 TDI

  After a long and dreary drive down the M1 last weekend, the satnav said I had just 6 miles to go. And even though it would be 6 miles across London, I figured that in half an hour I would be kicking off my shoes and sitting back to spend the rest of the day watching television and eating chocolate.

  So would you like to guess how long it actually took to cover those 6 miles? No, I’m sorry, but you’re not even close. It was two hours and thirty-five minutes.

  I have never seen so many roadworks and cones and temporary traffic lights and buses on diversion. And in every single one of the endless snarl-ups there’d be an Uber driver in his infernal Toyota Prius making everything worse. Or a senior citizen in a Peugeot. And every single rat run I took was festooned with speed humps and width restrictions and dead ends and more Uber drivers pootling about while under the influence of God knows what. Not speed, though, that’s for sure.

  It’s a fairly typical story these days. Everywhere you go, the roads are being turned into cycle ways and bus lanes and pedestrian zones. Which means you are being inconvenienced while the council builds something to inconvenience you for ever. And last week that made me stare with barely concealed contempt at the gear lever in my Volkswagen Touran test car.

  ‘Why,’ I wailed inwardly, ‘would anyone ever buy a car with a manual gearbox these days?’ It’s like saying: ‘I don’t need a television with a remote control. I’m perfectly capable of walking over to it and changing the channel myself.’

  Yes, on a racetrack or a deserted switchback road in the Atlas Mountains, a manual gearbox is sublime. Snapping it up a cog when you reach the red line and double declutching on the way back down … ooh, it makes me go all tingly.

  But we don’t drive on racetracks or in the Atlas Mountains. We drive on the Oxford ring road, where there are narrow lanes and signs saying you are not allowed to overtake cyclists. And here, a car with a manual gearbox is just annoying.

  I had it in my mind as I sat in the Touran, fuming, that these days – with flappy-paddle gearboxes and automatics being fairly cheap and easy – the only people who would buy an old-fashioned gearstick manual are the sort who choose not to have a washing machine because they prefer to clean their clothes in the local river.

  It seems, however, that I’m wrong. Yes, automatics in whatever form are becoming more popular but, even so, more than 70 per cent of all cars sold in Britain have manual gearboxes. That means more than 70 per cent of Britain’s car drivers are mad.

  There was a time when automatics chewed fuel, weighed a ton and cost about the same as a house. And there was a time, too, when the halfway-house arrangement – usually a manual gearbox operated without a clutch pedal via flappy paddles
on the steering column – was jerky and complicated and completely incapable of setting off without making more smoke than a First World War battleship. Those days are gone. Flappy-paddle gearboxes now are sublime. Fast. Easy. Rewarding. Nice.

  But there I was in the Touran, pumping away at the clutch and manually moving the sort of lever that would be familiar to any Victorian signalman. And I felt like one of those people who won’t have a mobile phone because they’ve a perfectly good Bakelite landline device at home.

  Before we get on to a road test of the actual car, I should make one point. If you pass your driving test in a vehicle with a flappy-paddle set-up, which is technically a manual, you are only permitted to drive automatics on the road. Which means, of course, you can drive a car with flappy paddles. Even though – as I just said – it’s technically a manual. Odd, eh?

  Anyway, the car. Well, it may be called a Touran and it may be billed as a people carrier – it comes with three rows of seats – but when all is said and done it’s a Golf. So you get all the Golf features, including eco-tips that flash up on the dash asking you to maybe think about driving more ecologically, to which you can now reply: ‘If I wanted to drive ecologically, I wouldn’t have bought an effing Volkswagen diesel, would I?’

  You also get a satnav system that sometimes turns itself off. A quick check on Google says this is a common fault and the cure is to stop the car, get out, lock it, unlock it, get back in and start the engine again. In other words, it’s the same as your Sky box and your phone and your laptop. You turn it off and on again.