Round the Bend Page 18

  Likewise, I should very much enjoy for George Clooney to drop by one day and explain why each spoonful of the Nespresso coffee he advertises so suavely needs to be wrapped in an individual container. I am no environmentalist, but he is, and I would love to hear his views on why such an enormous amount of packaging is a good idea when a patio heater is not.

  Then, you have those extremely expensive corkscrews that you buy at Christmas time because it’s 5.25pm and the shops are about to shut and you haven’t got anything for your dad. The managing director of the company must know that after three days the action will become so stiff your wrist will snap before the Rioja gives up its cork. He must. But he does nothing about it. So I’d like to see him on fire as well.

  I want to see all of them on fire until they learn to say to their design and development teams, ‘No. This is not right. You are all blithering idiots, so go away and do it again.’

  And hello, banks. Why do you not fit your hole-in-the-wall cash machines with red flashing lights so that we discover they are out of service when we drive by? Not after we have gone to the trouble of parking our cars half a mile away.

  Then we get to the airport, where I have another question. Why subject someone to a humiliating strip search when they are a blue-eyed nine-year-old girl, or Paul McCartney. It’s a waste of time for you and a waste of time for everyone in the queue that results. If you know someone to be Paul McCartney, then you know he is an elderly singer and not a crazed suicide bomber. So he can be waved through immediately, leaving you time to concentrate on the sweating Afghan with wires poking out of his backpack.

  Governments, of course, are fantastically uninterested in the people they are supposed to serve. Which is why you have Gordon Brown committing us all to a target of cutting CO2 emissions by 80 per cent, which will cost about 2 per cent of the nation’s GDP. And not work. While at the same time deciding that the navy’s new aircraft carriers will be powered by carbon-rich diesel, and not nuclear reactors, to save £3.50.

  I don’t mind mistakes; the chap who accidentally forgets to close the doors on the ferry, for instance. These are errors. These are evidence of human fallibility. What I cannot abide is the wilful lack of interest in customers that ruins everything we buy and everything we do these days.

  Except smoking. Over the years, I have worked my way through perhaps a million cigarettes and not one of them has ever come out of the packet shaped like a penis, or covered in mud. Not one has ever refused to light, or exploded while I am driving along. You sometimes get a beetle in your chocolate bar or an earwig in your curry. But cigarettes? Every single one is just as you would expect. A perfectly tailored nicotine delivery service.

  It would, of course, be unreasonable to expect such consistency from cars. They are made up of 15,000 parts and some of them are made by people who are French. So, naturally, there will be mistakes from time to time.

  But these days, for the most part, cars are staggeringly reliable. Tyres are able to run over broken bottles without detonating. Onboard computers get shaken, boiled and rattled around and still continue to function. Honda, for example, has made fifteen million VTEC units over the years and has never had a single warranty claim on any of them. That’s a Marlboro-like consistency.

  But despite the car makers’ ability to build products to a fantastically high standard, I’m always amazed by some of the design faults that make it through the testing and development phase. The seatbelts in my Mercedes, for instance, are almost impossible to fasten. Did the boss not notice this, in which case he is an idiot? Or did he think, like an internet service provider, that not quite good enough will do?

  Even if we take the Range Rover V8 diesel, which can do more things to a higher standard than just about any other car on the road, we find a wiper system that collects dirt from the car in front and smears it all over the windscreen so you can’t see where you’re going.

  And now we arrive at the BMW 330d. In many ways, this is a perfect car. Anonymously styled for maximum anti-cock inoffensiveness, it’s the right size and it’s fitted with a diesel engine of unparalleled smoothness. You can find more power elsewhere, and more economy. But for a combination, with almost none of the tingling you normally get from a coal burner, this big six is the tip of the arrowhead.

  And now that our friends with the Oakley sunglasses and the big Breitlings are all in Audis, BMWs are generally driven by enthusiastic drivers who like the balance of a rear-wheel-drive set-up, and the steering feel; people who understand that the stopping distance at 80mph is not 4 inches and drop back from your rear end accordingly.

  The best bit of the 330d, though, is not the engine or the way it drives; it’s the suspension, which manages to be firm and comfortable at the same time. No other car maker can do this.

  And yet, here in this wonderful package we find a sat nav screen made up of blues and greys. It’s all very tasteful but you can’t read it. Ever. And then there’s the headlamp dip switch, which works like the lever in a railway signal box.

  But worst of all is the torque. Put your foot down to pull smartly out of a side turning and all you get is an ear-splitting screech as the tyres leave big black lines down the road. On gravel, you just dig a big hole, no matter how delicate you are with the throttle, and go nowhere.

  It’s the little things, then, that spoil the BMW. It’s the little things that spoil everything. Like my iPhone, which was brilliant except that it didn’t work in the rain. Or the Sony Ericsson I replaced it with, which doesn’t work at all. Nothing does really. It’s annoying.

  21 December 2008

  Out of nowhere, my car of the year

  Chevrolet Corvette ZR1

  It’s been a quiet year for the world’s motor industry. There have been no wrecks, nobody drowning; in fact, nothing to laugh at at all. But, hidden in the sea of normality and business as usual, were a couple of gems.

  We start with the BMW X6, which must receive my inaugural What Were They Thinking Of award. Have you seen one? No, and I doubt you ever will because in a world that’s plagued with recession and run by people who believe the world’s polar bears are up at the North Pole sipping pina coladas and slapping on the factor five, it is surely the most inappropriate piece of corporate thinking since Sir Clive Sinclair said, ‘Yes. The electric slipper. That’s what people want …’

  However, I cannot say the BMW X6 is the worst car of the year, partly because I have not yet driven it and partly because it cannot possibly be worse than the Chrysler Sebring Convertible. Unless it smells of slurry and the radio is jammed on Rap FM.

  The Sebring is an extraordinary car. Ugly to behold and hateful to drive, it is not cheap, elegant, comfortable, practical, prestigious, clever, economical, luxurious, well designed, well thought out or, if the rental car I drove in America this year is anything to go by, especially well made either. Perhaps this is why the boss of Chrysler chose to go to Washington in his private jet. He knew that if he used a Sebring, it would break down on the way. Or worse, it would get there and he’d be a laughing stock among his business-mates from Ford and General Motors.

  Strangely, however, the Chrysler is not the worst car I drove all year. That accolade rests with the diesel-powered Kia Sedona people carrier.

  With the Sebring, you get the impression that the designers and engineers couldn’t be bothered to make a good car. With the Sedona you are left with the distinct impression they simply didn’t know how.

  I cannot conceive of how empty, pointless and lacking in ambition or style your life must be for the Sedona to be a solution. It is like alcohol-free beer, a pointless car-free facsimile of the real thing and, as a result, it can have no place in the life of a sentient being.

  The biggest disappointment of the year is a closely fought contest between any number of cars, but the winner is Audi’s RS6. It promises much and on a racetrack it delivers a great deal. But to buy a five-seat estate car simply because it’s so fluent through Becketts is like going out to buy a pet
goldfish and coming home with a horse ‘because it’s so good over the Chair’.

  The drawbacks you will encounter in real life are too endless. The uncomfortable seating, the weird steering and a very real sense that in a car like this, 572bhp is a lot more than you will ever need. It’s said you can’t be too beautiful or too rich but you can have too much power. Because one minute you’ll be overtaking a lorry and the next you’ll go mad and want to invade Poland.

  Other disappointments are mostly centred on cars which aren’t really as good as others that do broadly the same thing. The Ford Kuga, for instance, is not as good as the Volvo XC60 and the Renault Twingo Renaultsport is not as good as a Fiat 500 Abarth. And then there’s the Vauxhall Insignia, which is massively better than the Vectra it replaces. But not quite as good as the Ford Mondeo. And who says, ‘Right. What I want to buy is the second-best four-door saloon with no badge prestige’? Actually, come to think of it; who wants to buy the best?

  My main gripe of the year, though, rests with seat designers who have got it into their heads that we only like leather – there’s really nothing wrong with pleblon, especially on a day that’s hot or cold, and doubly especially if there are any corners between your house and your place of work.

  Worse, though, they seem to think that what we really want are seats in our cars that are less comfortable than those in our kitchens. I know that cod liver oil is good for you. I also know you will go to heaven if you only eat weeds and you spend your evenings embroidering kneelers for the local church. But we are not all vegi-vicars. That is why we don’t wear hair shirts and it’s why we want the seats in our cars to have a bit of give. Are you listening, Vauxhall? Are you listening, Ford? Go and find yourself an old Renault Fuego Turbo. Check out the bean bags it came with and you’ll know what I’m on about.

  And now we shall move on to the good stuff from the past twelve months. On television, recently, I said the best car from the year was the Caterham R500, but it’s important to remember that the criterion we were looking for was very specific. The winner had to do more than you could reasonably expect for the money.

  The Nissan GT-R was a contender because it costs almost half as much as a Porsche 911 Turbo and yet around the Nürburgring – and such things do matter with cars like this – it is faster. Then you have the VW Scirocco, which costs, as near as makes no difference, the same as the Golf GTI on which it is based. And yet it’s so much more desirable. But the winner had to be the little Caterham, which is faster round the Top Gear track than the Bugatti Veyron … even though it costs about thirty times less.

  However, if you broaden the search engine and look simply for the best car of the year, the Caterham isn’t in with a shout because it’s ugly and geeky and I wouldn’t have one even if the option was the loss of my right testicle.

  Best car, then? Hmmm. You cannot discount the Rolls-Royce Phantom drophead, because it is exquisite in almost every way. Nor can we ignore the Fiat 500 Abarth, because it’s just so bouncy and wonderful and so full of enthusiasm. I don’t think it would be possible to be in a bad mood while driving this car. And soon there will be a 200bhp version with a spoiler the size of Middlesex on the roof. That’ll make the Mini Cooper look like a brogue.

  However, the car I’ve selected wins because it’s just such a surprise.

  Over the years there have been a great many Corvettes, and none of them, if we’re honest, have been any good. Oh, there have been some fast ones and some with great charisma. Mostly, they have been pretty as well. But to drive? No. They were the automotive equivalent of Big Macs. Cheap, plastic and at the right time, and in the right place, sort of just what you want. But like I said. Just no.

  And then out of nowhere came the ZR1, which has a supercharged V8 that manages to be both docile and extraordinarily savage, all at the same time. I’ve been trying to think of a dog that pulls off a similar trick, but there isn’t one. And anyway, this car is not a dog.

  Oh, it’s not built very well. After just three days in my care, the boot lock disintegrated and the keyless go system refused to acknowledge the keys were in the car, but I didn’t mind because there is simply no other car that looks this good, goes this fast – in a straight line and around corners – and that most of the time bumbles about like a forgetful uncle. And when you throw in the price tag of just £106,690 – lots for a Corvette but modest next to a similarly powerful Ferrari – the case for the defence can sit down and put up its feet, knowing that the prosecutor simply has nowhere to go.

  It is an epic car and I’m only sad that unless the healthcare and pensions company that makes it can be turned around, it will be the last of the breed.

  Indeed, I worry that the next twelve months will bring us many wrecks, many drownings and absolutely nothing to laugh at at all. I shall therefore stop short of wishing you a prosperous new year. Instead, I shall hope that in our new-found poverty, we can still all be happy.

  28 December 2008

  What bright spark thought of this?

  Tesla Roadster

  Mostly, the world’s car makers realize that I’m a harmless piece of navel fluff whose opinions make absolutely no difference to their hopes and dreams. But occasionally, threatening noises are made if they think I’ve been unfair.

  Once, many years ago, Renault in France told the people who run its operation in Britain to pull all its advertising from the BBC. ‘Zis will show zem,’ said a red-in-the-face Jean-Claude, unaware presumably that the BBC carried no advertising.

  And then there was Toyota, which, after I compared its 1990s Corolla, unfavourably, with a fridge-freezer, refused to lend me any more demonstrators until I accepted it was, in fact, the best car in the world and as important as the second coming.

  Vauxhall was similarly argumentative about its then new Vectra, and SSangYong in effect banned me from driving its cars in the first place. When I asked its PR man if I could borrow a Rexton recently, he said, ‘No. We have other priorities.’

  If he’d been on fire at the time he took the call, I could understand this. Because, yes, finding a pool into which he could jump to put himself out would be a higher priority than talking to me. But other than this, I cannot think what might be a higher priority for a car-company PR man than fixing up a date when a motoring journalist could try out a new product.

  Oh, and I can never forget a letter sent by the public relations man at BMW to the Sunday Times saying that my dislike of BMWs had nothing to do with their drivers’ pushy attitude, their silly sunglasses, their awful short-sleeved shirts, their hair gel, their orange wives, their awful houses, their fondness for golf and their membership of the Freemasons, and everything to do with the fact I had a garage full of free Jaguars.

  Mostly, though, all is calm. I don’t talk to the car makers. They don’t talk to me. I simply borrow their cars. I write about them. They go back whence they came and, whether I’ve been kind, indifferent or wrong, the world continues to turn.

  All of which brings me on to the curious case of the battery-powered Tesla sports car that I reviewed recently on Top Gear. Things didn’t go well. The company claimed it could run, even if driven briskly, for 200 miles, but after just a morning the battery power was down to 20 per cent and we realized that it would not have enough juice for all the shots we needed.

  Happily, the company had brought a second car along, so we switched to that. But after a while its motor began to overheat. And so, even though the first was not fully charged, we unplugged it – only to find that its brakes weren’t working properly. So then we had no cars.

  Inevitably, the film we had shot was a bit of a mess. There was a handful of shots of a silver car. Some of a grey car. And only half the usual gaggle of nonsense from me shouting ‘Power’ and making silly metaphors. And to make matters worse, we had the BBC’s new compliance directive hanging over us like an enormous suffocating blanket. We had to be sure that what we said and what we showed was more than right, more than fair and more than accurate.
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  Phone calls were made. Editorial policy wallahs were consulted. Experts were called in. No ‘i’ was left undotted. No ‘t’ was left uncrossed. No stone remained unturned in our quest for truth and decency.

  Tesla could not complain about what was shown because it was there. And here’s the strange thing. It didn’t. But someone did. Loudly and to every newspaper in the world. The Daily Telegraph said we’d been caught up in a new fakery row. The Guardian accused us of being ‘underhanded’. The New York Times wondered if we’d been ‘misleading’. The Daily Mail said I could give you breast cancer.

  This was weird. Tesla, when contacted by reporters, gave its account of what happened and it was exactly the same as ours. It explained that the brakes had stopped working because of a blown fuse and didn’t question at all our claim that the car would have run out of electricity after fifty-five miles.

  So who was driving this onslaught? Nobody in the big wide world ever minds when I say a BMW 1-series is crap or that a Kia Rio is the worst piece of machinery since the landmine. And yet everyone went mad when I said the Tesla, the red-blooded sports car and great white hope for the world’s green movement, ‘absolutely does not work’.

  I fear that what we are seeing here is much the same thing professors see when they claim there is no such thing as man-made global warming. Immediately, they are drowned out by an unseen mob, and then their funding dries up. It’s actually quite frightening.

  The problem is, though, that really and honestly, the US-made Tesla works only at dinner parties. Tell someone you have one and in minutes you will be having sex. But as a device for moving you and your things around, it is about as much use as a bag of muddy spinach.