Round the Bend Page 17
For a period, beginning with the booted Escort in about 1992, Ford completely lost the plot. Its cars were ugly, unforgivably from a company that had given us lookers such as the RS 2000, the Mk 3 Escort, the Mk 1 Cortina and even the Zodiac. But worse, they were terrible to drive. It was almost as though the boys from the blue oval had given up.
Then along came a man called Richard Parry-Jones. He is Welsh. But he was in charge of how the original Ford Focus should drive, and it was he who insisted it was given expensive independent rear suspension. The result was amazing. Focuses were just … better.
Then, shortly afterwards, they employed someone who isn’t Welsh to work on the way Fords look. We saw the fruits of their Biro with the current Mondeo, which is let down only by its familiarity. And we have seen it again with the Fiesta.
I say again. It is a cracker. And, like the original Focus, it is a cracker to drive as well. Demonstrably better than anything else for the same sort of money.
Part of that is down to a fine chassis but some of it is also down to the engine. I tried a 1.6, which has twin independent cam shaft timing. The result is a smoothness you simply don’t expect in a car of this type, and 118bhp. That’s eight more than you got from the original Golf GTI.
Of course, other engines are available, one of which produces such a small amount of carbon dioxide, it’ll kill every plant in your garden. But you won’t pay any road tax. I should also say the range begins at just £8,700, although the model you get for this has the luxuries of a cave.
My car, on the other hand, had air-conditioning, cruise control, iPod connectivity, leather seats, blue teeth, parking assistance, a heated front windscreen, a trip computer, traction control and privacy glass. In short, everything you would find on a mid-range Mercedes. And yet it cost only £14,970. It’s mind-blowing value.
It’s a mind-blowing car. Yes, you can get a roomier Far East box for less, and you would do just that if you lived in a house made from bamboo. But you don’t. And because none of your children has ever been eaten by a crocodile, believe me, this is one of those cars that tick and tickle every one of your western boxes.
It’s sensible. It’s well priced. It’s much more comfortable and quiet than you have any right to hope for in this part of the marketplace, and because it’s made by Germans, it’s well bolted together too. But most important of all, it’s so much more than a tool. So much more than a white good. It’s fun. And as a result, I shall do an unusual thing and award it five stars.
30 November 2008
An adequate way to drive to hell
Vauxhall Insignia 2.8 V6 4x4 Elite Nav
I was in Dublin last weekend, and had a very real sense I’d been invited to the last days of the Roman Empire. As far as I could work out, everyone had a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a coat made from something that’s now extinct. And then there were the women. Wow. Not that long ago every girl on the Emerald Isle had a face the colour of straw and orange hair. Now it’s the other way around.
Everyone appeared to be drunk on naked hedonism. I’ve never seen so much jus being drizzled onto so many improbable things, none of which was potted herring. It was like Barcelona but with beer. And as I careered from bar to bar all I could think was, ‘Jesus. Can’t they see what’s coming?’
Ireland is tiny. Its population is smaller than New Zealand’s, so how could the Irish ever have generated the cash for so many trips to the hairdressers, so many lobsters and so many Rollers? And how, now, as they become the first country in Europe to go officially into recession, can they not see the financial meteorite coming? Why are they not all at home, singing mournful songs?
It’s the same story on this side of the Irish Sea, of course. We’re all still plunging hither and thither, guzzling wine and wondering what preposterously expensive electronic toys the children will want to smash on Christmas morning this year. We can’t see the meteorite coming either.
I think mainly this is because the government is not telling us the truth. It’s painting Gordon Brown as a global economic messiah and fiddling about with VAT, pretending that the coming recession will be bad. But that it can deal with it.
I don’t think it can. I have spoken to a couple of pretty senior bankers in the past couple of weeks and their story is rather different. They don’t refer to the looming problems as being like 1992 or even 1929. They talk about a total financial meltdown. They talk about the End of Days.
Already we are seeing household names disappearing from the high street and with them will go the suppliers whose names have only ever been visible behind the grime on motorway vans. The job losses will mount. And mount. And mount. And as they climb, the bad debt will put even more pressure on the banks until every single one of them stutters and fails.
The European banks took one hell of a battering when things went wrong in America. Imagine, then, how life will be when the crisis arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Small wonder one City figure of my acquaintance ordered three safes for his London house just last week.
Of course, you may imagine the government will simply step in and nationalize everything, but to do that, it will have to borrow. And when every government is doing the same thing, there simply won’t be enough cash in the global pot. You can forget Iceland. From what I gather, Spain has had it. Along with Italy, Ireland and, very possibly, the UK.
It is impossible for someone who scored a U in his economics A-level to grapple with the consequences of all this but I’m told that in simple terms money will cease to function as a meaningful commodity. The binary dots and dashes that fuel the entire system will flicker and die. And without money there will be no business. No means of selling goods. No means of transporting them. No means of making them in the first place even. That’s why another friend of mine has recently sold his London house and bought somewhere in the country … with a kitchen garden.
These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80 per cent of their wealth. And that’s going to be a problem if you were living on the breadline beforehand.
Eventually, of course, the system will reboot itself, but for a while there will be absolute chaos: riots, lynchings, starvation. It’ll be a world without power or fuel, and with no fuel there’s no way the modern agricultural system can be maintained. Which means there will be no food either. You might like to stop and think about that for a while.
I have, and as a result I can see the day when I will have to shoot some of my neighbours – maybe even David Cameron – as we fight for the last bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight in the smoking ruin that was Chipping Norton’s post office.
I believe the government knows this is a distinct possibility and that it might happen next year, and there is absolutely nothing it can do to stop Cameron getting both barrels from my Beretta. But instead of telling us straight, it calls the crisis the ‘credit crunch’ to make it sound like a breakfast cereal and asks Alistair Darling to smile and big up Gordon when he’s being interviewed.
I can’t say I blame it, really. If an enormous meteorite was heading our way and the authorities knew it couldn’t be stopped or diverted, why bother telling anyone? Best to let us soldier on in the dark until it all goes dark for real.
On a more cheery note, Vauxhall has stopped making the Vectra, that dreary, designed-in-a-coffee-break Eurobox that no one wanted. In its place stands the new Insignia, which has been voted European Car of the Year for 2009.
This award is made by motoring journalists across Europe, and, with the best will in the world, the Swedes do not want the same thing from a car as the Greeks. That’s why they almost always get it wrong. Past winners have been the Talbot Horizon and the Renault 9.
They’ve got the Insignia even more wrong than usual because the absolutely last thing anyone wants right now, and I’m including in the list consumption, a severed artery and a massive shark bite, is a four-door saloon car with a bargain-basement badge.
In the past, none of this would have mattered. Fleet managers would have bought 100 of whichever was the cheapest, and Jenkins from Pots, Pans and Pyrex would have had no say in the matter. Those days, however, are gone. The travelling salesman is now an internet address, and the mini MPV has bopped the traditional saloon on the head. I cannot think of the question in today’s climate to which the answer is ‘A Vauxhall Insignia’. And I’m surprised my colleagues on the car of the year jury didn’t notice this as well.
Then I keep remembering the Renault 9 and I’m not surprised at all.
I feel, I really do, for the bosses at GM who’ve laboured so hard to make this car. It’s way better than the Vectra. It looks as though they were bothered. But asking their dealerships to sell such a thing in today’s world is a bit like asking men in the First-World-War trenches to charge the enemy’s machine-gun nests with spears.
Right now, there are two paths you can go down. You can either adopt the Irish attitude to the impending catastrophe and party like it’s 1999. In which case, you are better off ignoring the Vauxhall and buying a 24-foot Donzi speedboat instead.
Or you can actually start to make some sensible preparations for the complete breakdown in society. In which case you don’t want a Vauxhall either. Better to spend the money on a pair of shotguns and an allotment.
7 December 2008
Safety first, then rough and tumble
Volvo XC60 T6 SE Lux
In the past, cars were extremely safe, provided you didn’t crash into anything. Sadly, however, my father used to crash into absolutely everything, which meant he’d go to work of a morning and come home in a plaster cast. Over the years he had so many bones removed that he actually became a human blancmange and we all accepted this as normal.
For millions of years, the top speed a human could achieve was 40mph and even then only if he had a very good horse. And then, all of a sudden, we found ourselves travelling at sixty. And we all decided the advantages of this – you could go to see your mother-in-law but you didn’t have to stay the night – far outweighed the consequences of hitting something while travelling at a mile a minute.
The idea that a car could be safe was laughable. Of course it wasn’t safe. It was useful and glamorous and many other things besides, but we were none of us in any doubt: if you were to crash it into a tree, or a bush, or even a bag of fish and chips, your head would come off.
What’s more, your right kneecap would be slammed into the ignition key, which would smash it, the engine would be dislodged from its mountings and come careering into the passenger compartment, severing your stomach, the wooden steering column would splinter and send shards of timber into your spleen and the fire crews would be unable to cut your screaming, dislocated body from the wreckage because the car would be so badly mangled. And probably on fire as well.
Then along came Volvo with a simple message. You could have a crash in one of its cars and chances are you’d be all right. My dad was amazed by this and immediately bought an enormous 265, which was fitted with a bumper like the bottom lip of Forrest Gump’s mate Bubba.
He loved that car because it meant he could crash into houses, brewery wagons, lamp posts, dogs and anything else that took his fancy, safe in the knowledge that the only bone left in his body – the small one in his right ear – would emerge from the accident undamaged.
Volvo was the first to fit three-point seatbelts, head restraints, childproof locks, seatbelt reminder buzzers, daytime-running lights and anti-submarining seats. Volvo also employed a team of researchers to visit the site of every car accident within a hundred miles of the factory so it could collate information on what had hurt the occupants and what might be done to stop it happening again.
For many years, the Swedes had this corner of the market all to themselves. If you wanted a ‘reliable’ car you bought a Volkswagen. If you wanted a ‘good-quality’ car, you bought a Mercedes. If you wanted a ‘sporty’ car, you bought a BMW. And if you wanted a ‘safe’ car you bought a Volvo.
But then, every other car maker cottoned on to the idea of safety, so that now even a small Renault has a five-star rating from the Euro NCAP safety testing people. And as a result, to stay ahead of the game, Volvo is now using electronics. And that’s why the windscreen on the new XC60 looks like the guidance system on a Hellfire missile.
In other cars, electronics are used to provide better sound quality, more accurate satellite navigation systems and chilled glove boxes. On the XC60 the computers are used to ensure you cannot crash.
The system is called City Safety, it’s fitted as standard to all XC60s and it works like this. A radar ‘sees’ the road ahead and if it senses that you are about to have a rear-end shunt it will apply the brakes for you.
Of course, I had to try this out and that means I must apologize profusely to the driver of the BMW 3-series whose car I thwacked while he was waiting at a roundabout on the Oxford ring road.
I don’t know what went wrong. But plainly, you really should read the handbook before saying to your friends in the car, ‘Watch this. I’m not going to brake but we won’t hit the car in front.’ Because, as I proved, you will.
I know the system is supposed to work only in city traffic at speeds less than 20mph, but so far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem to work at all. Mind you, I am a man who claims everything I ever buy doesn’t work. The Association of British Insurers thinks differently, as it is apparently considering a 25 per cent discount because the system is so effective.
And City Safety is just the start. The XC60 I drove also had lights in the door mirrors that flash orange when another car is in your blind spot, as well as a system that alerts a driver if they stray out of their lane on a motorway.
Citroën, which pioneered this idea, warns the driver by vibrating the seats, but Volvo has obviously realized that women may deliberately drive on the hard shoulder to create this effect, and alerts you with an irritating bong. As a result, I drove with it turned off.
It sounds as though I have a downer on the systems in this car, and to an extent that’s true. I understand mechanical safety, crumple zones, energy-absorbing beams and laminated windscreens. But I don’t trust electronics. Think how many times your laptop crashes and you’ll understand what I mean.
That said, Volvo must be congratulated for continuing to advance the cause of safety and it must be congratulated, too, for the XC60 as a whole because this is the first soft-roader I’ve driven that doesn’t feel like one.
Now, if you don’t like five-seat soft-roaders – and I don’t either – then you may think that what Volvo has actually done is solve a problem that needn’t have existed in the first place. I mean, why do you need a tall four-wheel-drive car just for doing the school run? It’s madness. But at least with the XC60 the ride is car-like, the handling is car-like and if you go for the T6 petrol version the performance is car-like as well. Of course, you could simply buy a car …
If, however, you really do want a tall four-wheel-driver, then this is better than the Nissan X-Trail and better even than the Ford Kuga. The interior is Bang & Olufsen cool, the knobs can be operated while you are wearing gloves and everything is intuitive, except of course for the Volvo sat nav system, which only ever takes you to somewhere you went three years ago.
The best thing about this car is how it makes you feel. And how it makes you feel is middle class. Really middle class. Stepping inside this car is like stepping into Johnny Boden’s boxer shorts while cheering on your daughter at a gymkhana. This is a car for extremely pretty women, who will use it in the morning for going to the gym, in the evening for doing the school run and in the a
fternoon for having an affair. I can hear them now. ‘Would you like to come for a ride in my Vulva?’
That’s probably what the anti-crash system is for. So that Arabella doesn’t have to explain to her husband why the nose on her car is all smashed in and what on earth she was doing on the wrong side of town with her tennis coach at three in the afternoon.
On that basis, not only is this car jolly good, but it might save a few marriages as well.
14 December 2008
Fritz forgot the little things
BMW 330d M Sport
You know the score. Your computer wakes up one morning and thinks it’s a cauliflower so you spend two hours on the phone to a man in Mumbai who has a set list of possible remedies, none of which makes the slightest bit of difference. You beg and beg for a technician to come round but the internet provider doesn’t have any technicians; only a room full of parrot men in India, who think a wireless connection can be fixed by endlessly typing numbers into a laptop, even though the reason your ‘black box’ isn’t working is because it’s in the dog.
That night, the fury in your heart is so vibrant that it has become an all-consuming entity. A big jaggedy spike in your head. Sleep is impossible.
All you can think about is what you would do to the boss of the internet service provider were you to encounter him in the street one day. Last night, in my mind, I spent two hours poking him in the chest, asking how in the name of all that’s holy he ever thought a broken box in Notting Hill could possibly be fixed by an uninterested parrot man in India. And then I think I might have set him alight and thrown him on the fire I started by burning the boss who thought flimsy ring pulls on tins of soup are a good idea.
Of course, we have this rage and frustration in so many other areas of our everyday lives as well. Bought a new toothbrush recently? Tried to get it out of the packaging? I have and there is nothing I would like more than for the chief executive of Mouths R Us to come round to my house and show me how it is possible without cutting all his fingers off.