Round the Bend Read online

  The heart of the beast is a new 5-litre supercharged engine that develops 503bhp and enough torque to knock Dresden over again. There’s so much it’ll get from 50 to 70mph in a mind-blowing 1.9 seconds. Give this car an inch … and it’d get past an Aussie road train.

  There’s more. You get more bucking broncos for your bucks than in any other comparable car and yet, despite the tsunami of grunt, it produces just 292 carbon dioxides, which will put it in the new top tax band that starts next month but is nothing compared with, say, a Lamborghini Murciélago’s 495. It is, therefore, a brilliant engine. And it sounds good too. Like it’s made of meat.

  Underneath, you get an electronic limited-slip differential such as you find on a Ferrari 430, and a new type of adjustable suspension, neither of which will make any difference on a road. But should you be inclined to don a branded jumper and go to a track day, in your ludicrous watch, then you are in for a gay old time. The old XK was good. This one is sensational.

  There is, however, a fly in the ointment. Other journalists have glossed over the problem, but I won’t. In order to make the car work at track days, the ride, even in comfort mode, is too knobbly and hard. This might be acceptable if the Jag were a sports car, but it isn’t. It’s supposed to be a long-distance grand tourer. And over even a short distance you quickly tire of the constant pittering and pattering.

  In dynamic mode, as Jag calls it, the pittering and the pattering become so bad that you could not possibly hold your finger steady enough to operate the touchscreen interface thingy. You might even accidentally select Radio 1.

  The fact is this. If you want a sports car, an edge-of-the-knife, superhighway samurai sword, then you are better off with the Porsche 911 S, which is faster, smaller, lighter, tighter and more responsive. If, however, you want a car a little more tuned to the needs of everyday living, a car which has its boot, let’s say, at the back, then the Jag is the natural choice, although the ride is always going to cause your nib to hesitate over the order form.

  So, the conclusion then. Honestly. Absolutely honestly. Hand-on-heart, honestly. The XKR is not perfect. It’s not even close. The light switch is wrong. The back seats are stupid. Some of the new jewellery is awfully Cheshire and that ride is way, way too firm.

  But when I look at the opposition – the chintzy SL, the overly complicated M6, the vomitously ugly Maserati Coupé and the expensive Aston V8 – I know for sure, and for the first time, that if I were in the market for a car of this type, I would have the Jag.

  26 April 2009

  The car adds up

  Lotus Evora 2+2

  Honda announced recently that it’s to stop making the drophead, two-seater S2000. And since this has always been my favourite small sports car, I thought I’d borrow one and go for one last, tearful drive.

  God, it was horrible. There wasn’t enough room for even small parts of me to get comfortable. The digital instruments looked like they had come straight from a Nik Kershaw video. The plastics would have looked shoddy on an Ethiopian’s wheelie bin. It was as sparsely equipped as an Amish barn. And the noise. It was hip-hop horrendous. Conversation was impossible. Thought was impossible. It was the kind of relentless drone that, after a while, can drive a man mad.

  So how come I used to love this car so much? It’s not like I’m talking here about meeting up with an old girlfriend. The Honda has not become fat and frumpy. It isn’t pushing a pram or wearing tweed instead of miniskirts. It’s not now married to a golfer called Colin. It’s exactly the same now as it was in 2005. And 2005 is not that long ago.

  Except, of course, in automotive terms, 2005 is somewhere between the big bang and the Norman conquests. And what was acceptable then – heavy steering, no sat nav, religious persecution and dinosaurs – is not acceptable any more.

  Cars are not getting faster or more economical. But in terms of refinement and comfort, they are a country mile better than the cars you could buy as recently as a week ago last Tuesday. (Unless you have a Peugeot.)

  This is great for us, but it’s a big problem for Britain’s small car makers. Because in the olden days (1994), when all cars exploded every few minutes, you could have a Lotus or a TVR or a Morgan and it wasn’t that much different.

  Today, though, as the big car companies churn out cars that have no transmission whine and never break down – Peugeot excepted – the offerings from a small car company look as out of date as a ruff. This is because small car companies have no robots. There isn’t the money for relentless testing of every component in every corner of the world. The car must be designed on an Amstrad and put together by a man in a brown store-coat. And saying a car is hand-built is just another way of saying the glove box lid won’t shut properly.

  Take the Lotus Elise. It squeaks. It rattles. It drones. It vibrates. It’s hard to get into and impossible to get out of. It’s badly equipped and hard to operate. All of this might have been acceptable thirteen years ago when the Elise first came out and it might be acceptable today if it were the last word in zip and vigour.

  But it isn’t. Compared with even a Golf, it feels old and slow and understeery. It’s a twentieth-century car in a twenty-first-century world where last Friday is already last year. And the last new car Lotus made, the Europa, was even worse.

  That’s why I wasn’t looking forward to driving the new Evora. I knew it would smell of glue, give me cramp and fall to pieces, because Lotus, up there in the turnips, simply doesn’t have the sort of bang-on, bang-up-to-date production line that makes modern mass-produced cars such engineering marvels (except Peugeots, obviously).

  I was in for a bit of a shock. No. I was in for a lot of a shock. I was in for so much of a shock, in fact, I had to have a little lie down.

  First of all, the bad news. Because it was designed on an Amstrad in someone’s mum’s bedroom, there are mistakes. All you can see in the windscreen is a reflection of the dashboard and all you can see on the ancillary dials is a reflection of whatever weather happens to be prevailing at the time.

  What’s more, the buttons are all carefully placed to ensure you can neither see nor find them. And even if you do, they have plainly been labelled by someone who was mad, or four.

  Then you have the Alpine sat nav-cum-multimedia interface wotsit in the dash. Why didn’t Lotus develop its own box of tricks instead of fitting one that’s designed for youths in Citroën Saxos? Simple. It didn’t have the resources.

  And so, you get a system that speaks. And what it says is, ‘You are breaking the speed limit,’ every time you go near the throttle. This is very annoying, but happily there is a solution. Because it speaks only once, at the moment you stray over the limit, you should accelerate as quickly as possible to beyond the speed limit and then stay there all day.

  The other solution is to turn it off. Which is impossible. Because I’m forty-nine. And a man. So I won’t look things up in instruction books. Or listen to my wife, who said she knew how. Because I know best.

  As you can see, then, the Evora features many things to cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth. So the car would have to be very good or very cheap to make those problems worth tolerating. And here’s the thing. It’s both. The 3.5-litre Toyota V6 is not the most powerful engine in the world but it’s smooth – and refined – and the power it produces is delightfully seamless. There’s no sudden savagery. No ‘Oh my God, I’m going to crash now.’ It’s brilliant.

  So’s the packaging. Normally, a mid-engined four-seater car looks all wrong. The Ferrari Mondial springs to mind here. But the Evora is bang on. It really is a genuine surprise when you’ve studied the nicely proportioned exterior to find there are two seats in the back. And a dribble of legroom, too, provided the driver isn’t too tall.

  And speaking of tall, the front is a revelation. I could get in easily. I could get out without crawling. Inside, I didn’t even need to have the seat fully back. Anyone up to 6 feet 7 inches is going to fit in an Evora and that alone makes it special.

&nb
sp; Especially when I tell you the boot, which is at the back, where it should be, is big enough for two sets of golf clubs.

  So, the driving. Sadly, I didn’t have much chance to really push it – the weather was horrendous and time was tight – but I put in enough miles to know this car has great steering and handles well. Of course it does. It’s a Lotus. And because it’s a Lotus, it’ll crash and jar and lurch from pothole to speed bump.

  Wrong. It simply glided over absolutely everything a torrential rainstorm and Britain’s B roads could throw at it. There is no other mid-engined supercar that has ever been so compliant. Or refined. Or quiet. It’s amazing. It doesn’t feel like it was made in a shed in Norfolk. It feels like it was made yesterday, by a machine.

  The Evora, then, is not a car you buy because it’s a Lotus and you have always fancied one. It’s a car you buy because you want a comfortable, practical, mid-engined supercar and no one else makes such a thing. Not Ferrari. Not Lamborghini. Not anyone.

  As I wafted from corner to corner, gradually forgetting about the smell of the glue they used to hold the chassis together, and the reflections, and the silly sat nav, I started guessing how much this car might cost. I reckoned on somewhere around £60,000. I was wrong. It’s less than fifty.

  And that’s what makes this the most modern car of them all. It’s the first to come to the market with a deflationary price tag.

  3 May 2009

  No, fatty, you do not give me the horn

  Citroën C3 Picasso 1.6HDi 110 Exclusive

  In a car, lightness is everything. Too much fat blunts acceleration, ruins the handling, spoils the fuel economy, affects the composition of gases in the planet’s upper atmosphere and generally makes everyone miserable.

  Everyone from Lewis Hamilton to Jonathon Porritt wants lighter cars but every single year every single new car is a tiny bit heavier than the one it replaces. The family saloons from my youth weighed less than a ton. Today, most tip the scales at nearly twice that. And some cars are now so obese that if you attach a trailer and go a bit bonkers at the garden centre, you need an HGV licence to get them home again.

  Mostly, it’s your fault. You demand more equipment, which means the dash has to be laden down with stuff even Raymond Baxter failed to see on the horizon. Satellite navigation, parking sensors, rear-view cameras, and so on. You also demand better soundproofing, thicker carpets and more leathery seats.

  Then there’s the question of safety. In order to achieve the coveted Euro NCAP five-star rating, cars must be made from a latticework of high-tensile cross-members and fitted with airbags for your face, shoulders, knees, ears and in some cars even your testicles. Although, frankly, I’d rather have mine smashed off than have an explosive balloon wallop into them at 250mph.

  The upshot is simple. Even a plastic Lotus Elise that is built on the Colin Chapman principles of ‘simply add lightness’ weighs more than a 1973 Triumph Dolomite, which came at you with a wooden dashboard, squidgy seats, pig-iron wings, a vinyl roof and opening quarterlights.

  Obviously, this can’t go on. If we are to have cars that sip petrol like Jane Austen sipped tea and accelerate like a scalded cock, something has to be sacrificed.

  But what? Now that the government has made it crystal clear that no one should ever die of anything ever, we can’t go back to the old days when cars were made from spit, spikes and Kleenex.

  So, let us look at the fixtures and fittings. What are you prepared to lose? Air-conditioning? No chance. Nobody wants to go back to the days when you were suffocated by your own armpits. And anyway, on a warm day the only way of staying fresh without air-con is to drive with the window down, which completely negates the advantages of losing the cooling system.

  Sat nav? These systems get a lot of bad press but for every dimwit who follows the onboard instructions to drive over a cliff or into a pensioner’s bungalow, there are a million people arriving smoothly at their destinations. Lose the guidance and you end up lost, driving around for hours, using all the fuel that’s been saved by the hole in the dash. And then, when you sneak a look at the road map, you will crash and be killed.

  Yesterday, while negotiating the Oxford ring road, I was thinking quite hard about what could be lost from the modern car when – whoa – a Peugeot full of three overweight teenage girls lunged across all three lanes and I used a feature I’m pretty sure I have not used in the past twenty years of motoring. The horn.

  It was not a blast. It was a pip. But nevertheless, the reaction from the fatties was extraordinary. Instead of waving an apologetic hand, the driver and her enormous mates turned round as one and at the next set of lights unleashed a torrent of abuse so vitriolic and so profane that even my headlights blushed.

  This, I understand, is quite normal. Because if you blow your horn, what you are saying to the offending motorist is, ‘You are not a very good driver.’ Which is the same as saying, ‘You have an impossibly small penis and all your children are as ugly as they are stupid.’ As a result, you will unleash in even the most mild-mannered soul a stream of pure, unadulterated, naked bile. I bet a pip could cause even Ann Widdecombe to use the c-word.

  The horn, then, causes more civil unrest than a poll tax riot and, to make matters worse, as a device for avoiding accidents it is completely useless. No, really. When a car pulls out of a side turning into your path, you can do one of many things. You can scream. You can permit a bit of wee to come out. You can freeze. Or you can brake. Who thinks, ‘Oh no. A car has pulled out of that side turning and a collision is imminent so I must immediately find the horn button to signal some displeasure at my imminent death’? No one.

  The horn, therefore, is only fitted to signal your anger after the collision has been avoided. It is, therefore, a tool for retribution, and retribution, as we know, is the last refuge of the weak.

  In other countries a horn is much more than this, of course. I noticed on my recent trip to Barbados that it is used there to suggest you’ve recognized a driver going the other way. And since everyone on a small Caribbean island knows everyone else, it is a more prolific sound over there than the crickets.

  In Rome it is used in traffic jams to alleviate boredom. In large parts of Africa it is used to clear the road of peasants and ducks so that you can blast through the village at full speed. And in France it is used to drown out the awful noises coming from the radio.

  That, obviously, is why the Citroën C3 Picasso that I drove recently is fitted with such a thing. But then it’s also fitted with all sorts of other stuff that in Britain we don’t really need.

  Let us start at the front, where we find a bluff nose designed to make any impact with a pedestrian soft and comfortable. The problem with this is that if you have a tall nose the whole car is going to end up being bigger than necessary. Bigger. Heavier. Slower. More wasteful of fuel. And all because under new government regulations no pedestrian is allowed to die, even if they are drunk and stagger into the path of a speeding car.

  Whatever, the Picasso is a much bigger car than the C3 on which it is based, and that does mean you get bags of space on the inside. This is filled on expensive models with such things as airline-style seats in the back (think Easyjet rather than Cathay Pacific) and a huge and heavy glass roof that gives you some impression of what it might be like to be a goldfish.

  Then there’s the perfume dispenser. It’s fitted as standard to all models. I can think of nothing to say about this.

  Except that the Citroën is heavy. So heavy that the diesel model I drove takes nearly 13 seconds to get from 0 to 60, it uses more fuel than rivals from Nissan and Renault and it’s blessed with handling so questionable that the optional traction control can be disengaged only at less than 32mph.

  Of course, obesity is a problem that affects all cars, so now let’s move on to a problem that’s unique to the Citroën. The driving position. It may work if you are French, or an orang-utan, but for a human being the seat simply doesn’t go back far enough.

  F
rankly, this car is hammered by the Skoda Roomster, which offers more space, as much power and more speed for less money. To buy the Citroën, then, you’d have to be as much of a mentalist as the artist after which it’s named.

  10 May 2009

  It’s the eco-nut’s roughest, itchiest hair shirt

  Honda Insight 1.3 IMA SE Hybrid

  Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.

  So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.

  So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

  The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).

  It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.

  And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

  So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit.