Really? Page 15

  And that’s about it so far as faults are concerned. Even the styling is right, chiefly because there isn’t any. It’s modelled, from what I can see, on the box in which chest freezers are delivered, and that’s exactly how it should be, because anyone who needs three rows of seats has plainly done the children thing and no longer has any need for sleek curves and a barking, snarling exhaust. Or they are a taxi driver. In which case, the same thing applies.

  Inside, the seats can be moved about so easily that even I managed it without swearing once. And when they are folded away, the boot is more than 700 litres bigger than the boot in a Golf. It’s so big, in fact, that you could transport a medium-sized horse, no problem at all.

  And get this: there are forty-seven cubbyholes. Which means it’s no use at all for someone who needs forty-eight places to store stuff. But for everyone else it’s great. My test car also had a glass roof. Which was nice, for no reason that I can think of.

  Other touches include an optional system with an app called Cam-Connect that, when used in conjunction with a GoPro Hero4 camcorder, feeds an image or – if you’re stationary or driving slowly – footage of what’s happening in the back to the screen on the dash. I thought at first this might be some kind of porn-based feature, but it’s so you don’t have to turn round to see if the children are fighting.

  And you don’t have to shout at them either because your voice is picked up by the hands-free unit and fed via the speakers to the people in the back. VW really has thought this one through.

  To drive? Well, apart from the manual gearbox, it was pretty good. Perhaps it’s not quite as comfy over the bumps as a Renault Scénic, but the upside of this is that the people in the back are less likely to become vomity should you ever find yourself on a switchback road in the Atlas Mountains.

  I’ve said for many years that the only people carrier worth buying is Volvo’s XC90, but the new one is very big – and pricy. I also used to quite like the Vauxhall Zafira, which had a clever seating arrangement, but I see from the tabloid newspapers that these days Vauxhalls are even more likely to burst into flames than hoverboards.

  And so, if you’ve given up on life, you’ve got children and you just need a sensible family car to move you around while you wait to die, the Touran is probably your best bet.

  7 February 2016

  A sporty number … for Terry and June

  Suzuki Vitara S

  Back in the 1950s, when James May was an old man and everyone on the radio sounded like the Queen, Hillman launched a two-tone version of its Minx saloon called the Gay Look. Autocar magazine was very impressed and put it on the cover, under the headline ‘Go gay with Hillman’.

  I’m not sure why I’ve brought that up. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been thinking about the old Suzuki jeep. Actually, Jeep is a registered trademark, so we can’t call it that. And we can’t call it gay either. But you know the car I mean: the SJ410. That sit-up-and-beg run-about that was popular with hairdressers and airline stewards in Brighton in the 1980s. God, it was terrible. Putting the roof on was more complicated than building a circus marquee, and it never quite fitted properly, which meant that if you actually wanted the poppers – oo-er – to do up, you had to use your fingernails to stretch the fabric until they all came out.

  So then you’d have no fingernails and you’d think life couldn’t possibly be worse, but it was, because then you’d have to get inside and go for a drive. Except you didn’t drive a Suzuki SJ. You bounced. It was fitted with the same suspension – and I mean exactly the same – as you would find on a medieval ox cart.

  This meant that it was simply a system for suspending the body. And that’s all it did. It had less give than a dining-room table so, if you ran over a speed hump at anything more than 15mph, you took off. And then you bounced down the road with blood pouring from your ruined fingers until you hit the next speed hump. Or a manhole cover. Or a small piece of gravel. Which would cause you to bounce into a parked car, or a lamppost.

  On a motorway things were extremely scary, because in an accident the car could bounce and then land sideways, which would cause it to roll over. And because it was a convertible, your head would come off and then you’d be gouting blood from your severed neck as well.

  Happily, the top speed was very low. Or at least I think it was. It’s hard to say for sure because, once you got above about 40mph, the noise from the 1-litre engine was so enormous that your ears would start to bleed.

  And then we get to the steering. There was a wheel, which gave you hope, but any attempt to use it as some kind of directional control device was pointless. Because when you are bouncing, the wheels are mostly off the ground and, as a result, you have no real say in where you’re going. Once, I drove a Suzuki SJ and ended up at Spurn Point in East Yorkshire.

  And the prospect of driving back to London and possibly ending up by mistake in Paignton was so awful that I seriously considered staying there for ever. A lifetime in Hull? It’s better than three hours on a motorway in an SJ.

  Weirdly, however, on holiday I would often rent an SJ. It was a cheap way of putting some wind in my hair. And around town, on a sunny day, it was an unusual and rather endearing alternative to the hatchback norm. It was cheaper, too.

  If I’d had a farm, or a shoot, or some kind of agricultural job back then, I’d have had an SJ, because it had four-wheel drive and it was fitted with nothing other than four seats and a couple of windscreen wipers. So there was nothing to break. That car? It was horrid. But it was honest.

  Today, the spirit of the SJ lives on. The modern Suzuki Jimny is certainly safer. But it has a permanent roof, so the main appeal of the original is gone. Shame.

  There are glimmers of the spirit in the larger Vitara, too. But even in the apparently sporty 1.4 S model I drove, they are buried beneath a Terry-and-June suet pudding of bland, inoffensive, dreary, lacklustre, unimaginative pigswill. This car is wilfully boring. They’ve painted the wheels black and the air vents nail-varnish pink in a desperate, last-minute bid to give it some soul, but it hasn’t worked. Partly because the exterior of my test car was red. And red and pink work together only in the mind of the Queen’s interior designer.

  I pretty much hate all the small SUVs. The Nissan Juke. That Renault thing. The Ford with the sliding doors. There’s a Vauxhall, too. No idea what it’s called. I hate the fakery, the way they seem to suggest they are rugged and sensible four-wheel-drive off-roaders that will work at a gymkhana but, actually, they’re just expensive, ugly hatchbacks.

  The Vitara has another problem. It feels quite astonishingly flimsy and cheap. The rear doors couldn’t weigh less if they’d been made from tracing paper, and the dash has less of a robust feel than a supermarket carrier bag.

  However, there’s an upside to this. Because there’s no substance at all to any of the components in this car, it weighs a bit less than a mouse. And that means it is more fuel efficient, and faster, than it would be if it felt heavy and durable.

  And there’s more. My car came with a reasonably sophisticated four-wheel-drive system, so it actually could go into gymkhana car parks. And then come out again.

  A little more digging reveals that, for the money, you get quite a few toys as standard. There’s DAB radio, which cuts out if you’re near a building, and all sorts of ‘connectivity’, whatever that is. You even get a system that beeps if it thinks you are going to run into the car in front. That sounds tremendous, but it was plainly set up by the winner of last year’s butter-side-down award, because, ooh, it was pessimistic. ‘Beeeeep,’ it would shriek, as you joined the A1 in London. Because, in its mind, you were definitely on a collision course with Edinburgh Castle.

  Other issues. Well, getting in and out’s not easy, because the roof line is too low – it’s worse, apparently, if you have the panoramic sunroof. And putting just about all the controls on the central screen may have sounded a good idea in a meeting but, in practice, it doesn’t work at all. When a nasty song comes on
the radio, it takes you a long time to find your spectacles, and even longer then to find the volume graphic.

  There’s plenty, then, to not like in this car. It’s very boring to look at, it feels more flimsy than pretty much anything on the road and there are some practical annoyances. But hidden beneath all this is an honest little car, and one that is quite likeable. It drives well, zooms along and is made in Hungary, which is a byword for good quality.

  If you have a not-very-successful fencing-repair business, it might be just the job.

  14 February 2016

  The beancounters’ gift to box-haulers

  BMW X1 xDrive 25d xLine

  John Terry is the lion-hearted soul and backbone of Chelsea Football Club. If he leaves at the end of the season, as has been reported, and is carted off to a home for used footballers, he will be replaced by someone called Schmitt or Ng or Aspuertoli-Detomaso-Gorva-Didivichlaboueff. And then will Chelsea be Chelsea any more?

  What will give the team their character? How will they be different from Arsenal or Manchester United, or any of the other clubs that, behind the chanting, will be just businesses that employ the best people?

  At present, my son argues pretty much all the time with his mates about football. He loves Chelsea. His mates don’t. But how will they be able to stoke up that level of passion when their clubs become like Sainsbury’s and Tesco and Lidl? Because nobody gets into all-night debates about which of those does the best sandwiches.

  I worry about this sort of thing with car manufacturers, too, because all of them earned their reputations back at a time when their products were designed and engineered and built by people from a specific area. An Alfa Romeo felt Italian. An Austin really didn’t. That was important.

  But, today, car-makers have to keep that spirit and that heritage alive when it isn’t second nature to the people who work there. The Germans who run Rolls-Royce have to guess what a British engineer would do. The Italians who run Jeep have to think American. And the Indians who run Jaguar have to read in history books what a Jag should be like. (And sometimes I wish they’d pay more attention.)

  Look at Citroën. Its design offices will be more international than Arsenal’s Christmas party, but somehow it’s got to make a product that feels French and quirky and odd. You can see this in the products, this desperation. And you can feel it, too – a sense that it has built an ordinary, global car and then given it some silly design touches that it hopes will cause customers to imagine they are driving around in President Charles de Gaulle.

  That’s a bit like replacing John Terry with an Argentinian and then asking him to call everyone ‘geezer’ at post-match press conferences. We won’t be fooled.

  Amazingly, though, we are mostly fooled by cars. The Suzuki I reviewed last week is built in Hungary, but it still feels Japanese. A Bentley is built largely from Volkswagen components, but at no point when you are driving a Continental GT do you think: ‘Mmmm. It’s as if I’m in a bar in Baden-Baden.’

  And the Alfa Romeo 4C? Not once when you’re behind the wheel do you ever think: ‘I wonder. Is this Australian?’

  Then there’s BMW. Its cars are made from the same components that you find in any other vehicle, and I don’t doubt the design team is fully international, and yet they all feel as though they were conceived and built by a team that started the day with a few star jumps and then went to work wearing raspberry- or mustard-coloured jackets and extremely clean shoes. They feel utterly German.

  Except for the horrible old X1. You got the distinct impression that BMW’s engineers – quite rightly, in my view – didn’t want to build a so-called crossover. They felt such cars were all right for Renault and Chrysler and Terry and June, but not for a company that had spent fifty years building a reputation for finesse and driving pleasure. BMW making a hatchback on stilts? That’s like Rolls-Royce making a van.

  So they had it made in factories in India, China and Russia, and it felt like it. In fact, it felt like a cement mixer. It was rough, impractical, ugly and slow. No crossover car is particularly nice, but this one? Ooh, this one missed the bar by about 40 miles.

  Unfortunately for the BMW purists, it was a huge sales success, so the company had to make a newer version. And with this it has really thrown away not just the bathwater and the baby but the bath as well. It has a BMW badge, but it doesn’t feel, sound or drive like any Beemer I’ve been in.

  I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when the accountants met the engineers for the weekly catch-up. ‘Look, you lot. We are in business and, to survive, we must make this car. It’s what customers want these days, so stop cocking about and do it properly.’

  Well, they didn’t. They simply decided to mount the new car on the same platform as the Mini. Which means the engine is mounted sideways – that goes against the grain for BMW – and in some models it drives the front wheels, which is the devil’s work so far as they’re concerned. The styling? I think they did that with the lights off.

  They’ve even fitted the gear-lever surround with a shiny plastic that reflects everything you drive under. So when you go down a motorway you can see out of the corner of your eye the lampposts speeding by. After a few miles this will give you an epileptic fit.

  BMW says that, despite the way it looks and the people it’s aimed at – caravanists, basically – it’s still pretty fast. But the range-topping TwinPower 2-litre diesel that I drove didn’t feel speedy. In fact, it left the line about as enthusiastically as its designer got out of bed in the morning. With a plaintive cry of: ‘Must I?’

  My test car was fitted with four-wheel drive, so you might think it’d be able to deal with a bit of muddy ground. Nope. On a short piece of level grass it was skidding about all over the place.

  Comfort? Well, the suspension’s not bad, but the seats put me in mind of my old school desk. And while the boot is quite long, it’s not very wide. I suppose it’d be all right if you had to transport a coffin. Or me. The only other thing of note back there is how you open the boot. You wave your foot about as if you’re doing some kind of Riverdance routine and it pops up.

  I’d love to be able to say at this point that because the X1 is so meh – that’s the first time I’ve used this word – and because it’s based on the Mini, it is at least priced keenly. But compared with its rival from Nissan, it’s actually quite expensive.

  I suppose that, all things considered, it’s not a bad car. It doesn’t crash all the time, or explode. If it were a Kia or a car from one of those weird Chinese companies, you’d say it was quite nice. But because it says ‘BMW’ on the back, and because you know just how good BMW can be, you expect something better.

  21 February 2016

  I did not expect the wandering hands

  BMW 730Ld M Sport

  If you are the Austrian finance minister, or an African dictator, or the managing director of a successful carpet business in West Yorkshire, then you will have a chauffeur-driven S-class Mercedes. And it’s easy to see why.

  Mercedes tests every new invention to see if it really offers any benefit. And if it does, Mercedes fits it to the S-class. So this was the first car in the world to have airbags. The first with seatbelt pre-tensioners; the first with crumple zones. This means it’s always ahead of the pack. It’s always the yardstick.

  But BMW has come up with a cunning plan for its new 7-series. The company has looked at what you get in the S-class and then it’s added a bit more. Let me give you an example. Mercedes fits the S-class with a system that monitors the driver’s face. If it thinks he’s getting drowsy, it sounds a gentle bong and suggests he pull over for a cup of coffee.

  BMW has gone further, so that with its system the driver can choose what level of drowsiness he must achieve before the bong sounds. Seriously. You can tell the monitors to leave you alone if you are just having forty winks but wake you if you fall into deep REM sleep. Can you see why this would be useful? No? Me neither.

  Then you get an optional system tha
t means you can remotely park the car. I kid you not. You can pull up. Get out. And tell the car to park itself. That’s fantastic, but Mercedes would have said: ‘Why would someone want to be outside the car, in the rain, while it parks?’ And it’s a good question, if I’m honest.

  BMW has also reinvented the ignition key. It’s now a sort of mini iPad, and it will tell you how many miles your car can go before it needs refuelling and when it requires servicing. You can even use it to start the air-conditioning. Lovely. But the key is so big, it sits in your pocket like a brick.

  By far the worst feature of the car, however, is the rear seating, which is fitted with a massage facility. We’ve seen this before, of course, but BMW has gone berserk by offering a whole range of massages, none of which comes with a happy ending.

  There’s one that comes close, though. It gives you the sensation of someone fondling your buttocks. I found it vaguely horrifying. I needed to turn it off and reached for the central command screen, which is located in the armrest. I turned it on and it said it needed to receive a system update. Crying with the shame and humiliation, I waited until the update was complete, dived into the menu, found the seat controls and stabbed at the massage button, only to be told this feature needed a system update too.

  Eventually, I realized that you can turn the massaging off with an old-fashioned button but, when I did that, one of the little bags that inflate and deflate remained pumped up, so it felt as if I were sitting on a snooker ball.

  And even when I did manage to get the seat to be just a seat, it wasn’t very comfortable, and there was an annoying rattle, possibly from the rear privacy blind or possibly from the fridge.

  After that, I sat playing with the voice-activated system, which, it turns out, understands what you’re on about only if you impersonate Donald Sinden. You need to roll your ‘r’s and enunciate as if you’re the over-eager lead in an am-dram production of The Corn is Green.