Round the Bend Read online

  Yes, it is extremely fast. It’s all out of ideas at 125mph, but the speed it gets there is quite literally electrifying. For instance, 0 to 60 takes 3.9 seconds. This is because a characteristic of the electric motor, apart from the fact it’s the size of a grapefruit and has only one moving part, is massive torque.

  And quietness. At speed, there’s a deal of tyre roar and plenty of wind noise from the ill-fitting soft top, but at a town-centre crawl it’s silent. Eerily so. Especially as you are behind a rev counter showing numbers that have no right to be there – 15,000, for example.

  Through the corners things are less rosy. To minimize rolling resistance and therefore increase range, the wheels have no toe-in or camber. This affects the handling. So, too, does the sheer weight of the 6,831 laptop batteries, all of which have to be constantly cooled.

  But slightly wonky handling is nothing compared with this car’s big problems. First of all, it costs £90,000. This means it is three times more than the Lotus Elise, on which it is loosely based, and 90,000 times more than it is actually worth.

  Yes, that cost will come down when the Hollywood elite have all bought one and the factory can get into its stride. But paying £90,000 for such a thing now indicates that you believe in goblins and fairy stories about the end of the world.

  Of course, it will not be expensive to run. Filling a normal Elise with petrol costs £40. Filling a Tesla with cheap-rate electricity costs just £3.50. And that’s enough to take you – let’s be fair – somewhere between 55 and 200 miles, depending on how you drive.

  But if it’s running costs you are worried about, consider this. The £60,000 or so you save by buying an Elise would buy 15,000 gallons of fuel. Enough to take you round the world twenty times.

  And there’s more. Filling an Elise takes two minutes. Filling a Tesla from a normal 13-amp plug takes about sixteen hours. Fit a beefier three-phase supply to your house and you could complete the process in four (Tesla now says three and a half). But do not, whatever you do, imagine that you could charge your car from a domestic wind turbine. That would take about twenty-five days.

  You see what I mean. Even if we ignore the argument that the so-called green power that propels this car comes from a dirty great power station, and that it is therefore not as green as you might hope, we are left with the simple fact that it takes a long time to charge it up and the charge doesn’t take you very far. We must also remember that both the cars I tried went wrong.

  In the fullness of time, I have no doubt that the Tesla can be honed and chiselled and developed to a point where the problems are gone. But time is one thing a car such as this does not have.

  Because while Tesla fiddles about with batteries, Honda and Ford are surging onwards with hydrogen cars, which don’t need charging, can be fuelled normally and are completely green. The biggest problem, then, with the Tesla is not that it doesn’t work. It’s that even if it did, it would be driving down the wrong road.

  11 January 2009

  This is by far the best of all the school-run-mobiles. There really is room for seven people, fourteen legs and two dogs in the boot as well

  Volvo XC90 D5 SE R-Design

  As I’m sure you’ve heard, the green-eyed madmen of Richmond upon Thames in London have elected a bunch of über-loonies to run the borough’s services and now, predictably, everything is falling apart.

  Instead of organizing war memorials and better rubbish collection, the super-loons have announced that if you fail to send the council an e-mail before you go shopping, they will assume your car produces a great deal of carbon dioxide and, as a result, will charge you 40p an hour more for parking than someone who has sent an e-mail.

  Quite what difference 40p will make to someone who has a £30,000 car, I have absolutely no idea. It will really hurt only the poor. But this is the way with the world’s mega-loons. They leap from bandwagon to bandwagon, simply not understanding that bandwagons are transient because they’re silly and the tune they’re playing always goes out of fashion.

  Of course, I quite agree that something must be done to unclog the nation’s town centres. And I’m not certain the banks have got the right idea either. By running out of money they are now ensuring that every restaurant, pub, building society, estate agent and shop is closing, so that soon there will be no reason for popping into the local conurbation.

  This will definitely ease congestion but the side effects are even more profound than the ideas being implemented in Richmond by the giga-loons.

  Happily, however, I have been giving the matter some serious thought and I have devised a plan of my own that might just work.

  As we know, Monte Carlo is a fairly horrible place full of prostitutes, wedding cake architecture and greasy little men who’ve learnt their English from baddies in James Bond films and who meet in bars at night to sell one another machine guns. It rains more than you might think, too.

  And yet it is perceived to be a glamorous place simply because of the cars that prowl round Casino Square. Big is good. Low is better still. Red is best. And, plainly, if Simon Cowell lived here, they’d put him on income support.

  The cars are what makes Monaco look so good and it’s the same story in Tokyo. Mostly, this is an all-grey fifty-mile Lego set with concrete telegraph poles and a wiring system that seems to have resulted from a massive primary school game of cat’s cradle.

  But, once again, we find ourselves amused and impressed, partly because you are encouraged to smoke indoors but mostly because of all the funny little Postman Pat cars that hop about the place, with their cheeky smiles and their lilac paint jobs.

  And then there are the taxis with their antimacassars and their electric-opening rear doors. We know, as soon as we climb into such a thing at the airport and are overtaken by a Mazda Bongo in teenage lip-gloss pink, that we have arrived in a funky go-ahead place and that we shall be happy there.

  Exactly the opposite applies in San Francisco. Make no mistake, this is my second favourite city in America – after Detroit – with its hills and its sharp, clear afternoon skies. I adore the hills and the patisseries, but the whole place is let down by the cars. Because the people who live there like to sit around pretending to be French, they all drive crappy Hondas.

  You may imagine as you cross California Street that you will be mown down by Steve McQueen in a Mustang or Nicolas Cage in a faux Ferrari 355, but it’s more likely you will be killed by some bespectacled librarian in a VW Beetle who’s not looking where he’s going because he’s too busy trying to be Jean-Paul Sartre.

  And that brings me, naturally, on to Huddersfield. Without a doubt, this is one of Britain’s most impressive towns. The square in the centre stands as four-square testimony to the fact that money does not necessarily equal a here-today, gone-tomorrow excursion into the shag-pile world of bad taste.

  It’s gorgeous, especially because your eye is drawn down each of the streets that lead off it to those dark satanic hills that lie beyond.

  But you’re not looking, because all the streets are lined with such a terrible collection of rubbish. It’s hard to understand why. The council would insist you got planning permission before painting the roof of your house beige, and yet it does nothing to prevent people from buying a Nissan Bluebird and leaving it on the drive, or in the road, where it can be seen by passers-by.

  So how’s this for an idea? Each council should allow free parking for people who have a nice car, while those with unpleasant eyesores such as the Bluebird should be made to pay around £1m a minute.

  It is much simpler to implement than the gas-based system being used by Richmond because just one person is needed to decide what’s okay and what’s not. You don’t need a computer and an army of traffic wardens with degrees in upper-atmosphere dynamics.

  Don’t, for a minute, imagine that I’m looking for Ferraris here. Far from it. Anyone who has a Mondial, for example, or a 308 GTB, would be made to pay a great deal because these are terrible cars and nobody wants t
o see one on their street.

  There would be similar penalties for people in disgusting Hummers but anyone with an interesting older car, such as a Rover 90 or a Hillman Hunter GT, would be allowed to park wherever they pleased.

  Not only would the system improve the look of a town centre but it would ease congestion, too, because people with Kias and Hyundais would simply be priced out of the market. And here’s the brilliant bit. They won’t mind.

  Because anyone with a Kia is plainly not interested in cars it’s no hardship being made to go shopping on the bus. That’s the fatal flaw with the system in Richmond. It penalizes cars with big engines, which tend to be driven by enthusiastic drivers who would mind very much being made to go on public transport.

  It also penalizes people who drive large school-run 4x4s and that really is idiotic. I’ve just bought my third Volvo XC90 in a row and the simple fact is this: it takes six children to school in the morning.

  If I were forced to swap it for something smaller, we would need to do the run in two cars. And I’m sorry but two Minis produce 256 grams of CO2 per kilometre. A single Volvo diesel produces just 219. This means the XC90 is actually good for the environment and we should all have one immediately.

  Just don’t do what I’ve just done and buy the ‘sport’ version. Because fitting an XC90 with hard suspension and chunky alloy wheels may make it look good but it will ruin the ride. I’ve been in more comfortable jet fighters.

  I don’t know what I was thinking of, really, because I know the Volvo is not sporty in any way. The diesel engine, though better than it was in the early days, is still desperately agricultural. The handling is straight from the playpen and the speed is woeful. Sticking four exhausts on a car like this is a bit like sticking four exhausts on Eamonn Holmes and attempting to sell the end result as a sport model.

  Other versions, though, are just epic. People think this car has become such a common sight on the road because it is part of the private school uniform. That may be so. But there’s another, bigger reason. It is by far the best of all the school-run-mobiles because there really is room for seven people, fourteen legs and two dogs in the boot as well. No other car maker – and this is strange – has managed to pull off a similar trick without ending up with a bus.

  And if it’s a bus you’re after … well, why not get out of my way and use one from the council.

  18 January 2009

  I’m scared of the dark in this doom buggy

  Ford Ka Zetec 1.2

  Unlike most motoring journalists, I do not attend ritzy, champagne-drenched, Michelin-starred, club-class car launches at exotic hotels in sun-kissed, faraway places. I’m not being holier than thou here. I’d love to eat a swan at Mazda’s expense and spend my life licking the goose fat from the hand that feeds me, but I simply don’t have the time.

  This means I never get the chance to meet the people who design the cars I drive or the people who are charged with selling them. In one important way, this is a good thing. When I review a car, I am unable to visualize the man who sweated into the night to make it possible. So I can be as rude as I like, because I don’t have to worry about upsetting him.

  However, there is a downside. Because I don’t meet the engineers or sit through the two-hour-long technical press conferences, I am less well informed than my colleagues. And less well fed, for that matter.

  And so, because I approached the new Ford Ka in a state of blissful ignorance, I was expecting a very great deal. I assumed it would be a funky, small and cheap alternative to the new Ford Fiesta, a car that does everything very well whether you’re on the road, at the shopping centre or taking part in a beach assault with the Royal Marines.

  Almost immediately, however, I began to dislike the Ka very much. First of all, the styling’s not quite right. The door – and I apologize to the faceless man who made it – doesn’t seem to sit very happily with the lines of the profile. And the wheel arches look as though they were going to be flared but someone dropped the original clay model from a fork-lift truck and they got squashed.

  Inside, there are problems, too, including ridiculously hard seats that someone – whom I’ve never met – at Ford thinks are a good idea. Worst of all, though, is the driving position. The steering wheel, which adjusts for height but not reach, is too far away and, even on its highest setting, too low down.

  And the clutch pedal is far too close to the centre console. A small foot rest has been provided inside the aforementioned console but the only way you can actually get your foot in there properly is if you saw it off.

  Then I began the test drive and things got worse. Because the old Ka looked like a teapot, you didn’t expect it to be very fast. And it’s the same story with the Toyota iQ. That looks like an urban runaround, but the new Ka does not. It looks like a normal car; a Fiesta that’s shrunk slightly in the wash. Which is why I was expecting it to be able to get up a hill. Which in fifth it often could not. Sometimes, I had a problem in fourth.

  Even on level ground things are far from rosy because at anything above fifty the whole car really does start to feel loose and disconnected, a problem that was amplified by a graunching front nearside brake disc. Often I found myself doing forty, at which speed following drivers became impatient and started to overtake in silly places.

  Then it went dark and as a result I discovered the new Ka’s biggest problem. It’s a whopper. A proper full-sized elephant in the wardrobe. A genuine, bona fide reason all on its own for buying something else. The headlights are absolutely useless. For seeing where you are going, a Hallowe’en pumpkin would be better.

  I did a test. I drove at the speed at which I could safely stop in the distance visible in the light from those miserable candles in jam jars. And it was 18mph. Any faster and I was having to rely on crossed fingers that there was nothing out there in the gloom.

  The only solution was to drive on full beam, which was a) little better and b) just bright enough for oncoming motorists to retaliate, making me even more blind than if I’d stayed on dipped.

  Of course, not having been at the press launch, I didn’t understand any of this. So I tiptoed along, with my heart beating like broken plumbing, wondering how on earth Ford could possibly have got it all so wrong. Vauxhall? Yes. Kia? For sure. But Ford? No way. Ford makes good cars these days. Some of them border on greatness. So, finding that it’s got one this wrong is like going out for dinner at a Marco Pierre White restaurant and being served a plate of sick.

  Here’s the thing, though. Subsequent investigation revealed that Ford hasn’t got the Ka wrong at all because, despite the Ford badge, despite the Ford styling and despite the Ford fixtures and fittings, this car, actually, is a Fiat 500. It has the same basic structure and the same engine. It’s even built in the same factory, in Poland.

  The fact that it’s come out of the joint venture so wrong demonstrates two things. First, that the Fiat 500 must be a fairly bad car as well, but neither I nor anyone else has noticed because it’s so lovely to look at and so delightful to own. And, second, that we’re all doomed.

  Obviously, Ford would have wanted to develop its own small car. Asking its engineers to reclothe a Fiat rather than asking them to design their own baby from the ground up is like asking Stella McCartney to sew some new buttons on an Ozwald Boateng suit. No one becomes an engineer in a car company so they can spend their life sanding the word ‘Fiat’ off components and writing ‘Ford’ on them instead.

  The only reason a company would do this is to save money. It gets a new car for a fraction of the cost of designing one itself. The problem is, the new car we are asked to buy simply isn’t as good as it could have been. Or good-looking enough to mask the faults.

  Worse, because every car company must now save money – great, big, fat lumps of it – almost all automotive development is going to stop. We’re already seeing this with new propulsion ideas. Most people accept that in the fullness of time, cars will have to be powered with hydrogen, but developin
g the fuel cells necessary to make the technology work is fantastically complicated, and this, in an accountant’s mind, means ruinously expensive.

  As a result, car makers are simply launching much simpler, much cheaper and almost completely useless conventional battery-powered cars instead. Or idiotic hybrids that make owners feel smug and organic but move the human race about three feet in completely the wrong direction.

  The upshot is that when the oil does start to run out, we as a species will be completely unprepared.

  And that’s what’s given me an idea. At present, most governments in the world seem to agree that the only way out of the financial hole is to print money and throw this at various state projects. Unfortunately, because we in Britain are governed by fools and madmen, the projects they have in mind are street football outreach co-ordinators and ethnic watchdogs who will ensure the dole queues accurately reflect the nation’s ethnic diversity.

  You can see this is idiotic. We all can. So why not give the money instead to British engineering firms, which would use it, under close supervision, to make sure they didn’t employ any health-and-safety people or ethnicity czars, to get the hydrogen fuel cell working on a practical everyday level?

  Maybe we could team up with Iceland, partly because – heaven knows – we owe the Icelanders a favour and partly because they have enough geothermal power to make hydrogen cheaply. I can see no flaws with my idea at all. It pleases the global-warmingists because it spells an end for carbon-based fossil fuels; it pleases me because I get a whole new range of extremely powerful cars to play with; and, best of all, it puts Britain back where it belongs – on the prow of HMS Progress.

  If we don’t do this, we will emerge from the financial crisis only to discover that because of a lack of oil all the lights have gone out. And this is going to be a big problem if you have a Ka. Because you simply won’t be able to see where you’re going.