Round the Bend Page 24

  Because the Honda has two motors, one that runs on petrol and one that runs on batteries, it is more expensive to make than a car that has one. But, since the whole point of this car is that it could be sold for less than Toyota’s Smugmobile, the engineers have plainly peeled the suspension components to the bone. The result is a ride that beggars belief.

  There’s more. Normally, Hondas feel as though they have been screwed together by eye surgeons. This one, however, feels as if it’s been made from steel so thin, you could read through it. And the seats, finished in pleblon, are designed specifically, it seems, to ruin your skeleton. This is hairy-shirted eco-ism at its very worst.

  However, as a result of all this, prices start at £15,490 – that’s £3,000 or so less than the cost of the Prius. But at least with the Toyota there is no indication that you’re driving a car with two motors. In the Insight you are constantly reminded, not only by the idiotic dashboard, which shows leaves growing on a tree when you ease off the throttle (pass the sick bucket), but by the noise and the ride and the seats. And also by the hybrid system Honda has fitted.

  In a Prius the electric motor can, though almost never does, power the car on its own. In the Honda the electric motor is designed to ‘assist’ the petrol engine, providing more get-up-and-go when the need arises. The net result is this: in a Prius the transformation from electricity to petrol is subtle. In the Honda there are all sorts of jerks and clunks.

  And for what? For sure, you could get 60 or more mpg if you were careful. And that’s not bad for a spacious five-door hatchback. But for the same money you could have a Golf diesel, which will be even more economical. And hasn’t been built out of rice paper to keep costs down.

  Of course, I am well aware that there are a great many people in the world who believe that the burning of fossil fuels will one day kill all the Dutch and that something must be done.

  They will see the poor ride, the woeful performance, the awful noise and the spine-bending seats as a price worth paying. But what about the eco-cost of building the car in the first place?

  Honda has produced a graph that seems to suggest that making the Insight is only marginally more energy-hungry than making a normal car. And that the slight difference is more than negated by the resultant fuel savings.

  Hmmm. I would not accuse Honda of telling porkies. That would be foolish. But I cannot see how making a car with two motors costs the same in terms of resources as making a car with one.

  The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.

  Why doesn’t he just buy a Range Rover, which is made from local components, just down the road? No, really – weird-beards buy locally produced meat and vegetables for eco-reasons. So why not apply the same logic to cars?

  At this point you will probably dismiss what I’m saying as the rantings of a petrolhead, and think that I have my head in the sand.

  That’s not true. While I have yet to be convinced that man’s 3 per cent contribution to the planet’s greenhouse gases affects the climate, I do recognize that oil is a finite resource and that as it becomes more scarce, the political ramifications could well be dire. I therefore absolutely accept the urgent need for alternative fuels.

  But let me be clear that hybrid cars are designed solely to milk the guilt genes of the smug and the foolish. And that pure electric cars, such as the G-Wiz and the Tesla, don’t work at all because they are just too inconvenient.

  Since about 1917 the car industry has not had a technological revolution – unlike, say, the world of communications or film. There has never been a 3G moment at Peugeot, nor a need to embrace DVD at Nissan. There has been no VHS/Betamax battle between Fiat and Renault.

  Car makers, then, have had nearly a century to develop and hone the principles of suck, squeeze, bang, blow. And they have become very good at it.

  But now comes the need to throw away the heart of the beast, the internal combustion engine, and start again. And, critically, the first of the new cars with their new power systems must be better than the last of the old ones. Or no one will buy them. That’s a tall order. That’s like dragging Didier Drogba onto a cricket pitch and expecting him to be better than Ian Botham.

  And here’s the kicker. That’s exactly what Honda has done with its other eco-car, the Clarity. Instead of using a petrol engine to charge up the electric motor’s batteries, as happens on the Insight, the Clarity uses hydrogen: the most abundant gas in the universe.

  The only waste product is water. The car feels like a car. And, best of all, the power it produces is so enormous, it can be used by day to get you to 120mph and by night to run all the electrical appliances in your house. This is not science fiction. There is a fleet of Claritys running around California right now.

  There are problems to be overcome. Making hydrogen is a fuel-hungry process, and there is no infrastructure. But Alexander Fleming didn’t look at his mould and think, ‘Oh dear, no one will put that in their mouth,’ and give up.

  I would have hoped, therefore, that Honda had diverted every penny it had into making hydrogen work, rather than stopping off on the way to make a half-arsed halfway house for fools and madmen.

  The only hope I have is that there are enough fools and madmen out there who will buy an Insight to look sanctimonious outside the school gates. And that the cash this generates can be used to develop something a bit more constructive.

  17 May 2009

  Enough power to restart a planet

  Audi Q7 V12 TDI Quattro

  I bring news of a worrying development. People have begun to drive much more slowly. Some will argue that this is because speed cameras are doing their job. And they probably have a point. When you have nine points on your licence you quickly discover a terror of ever going faster than 14mph. And these days almost everyone I know has nine points on their licence. And those who don’t will have by Wednesday morning.

  There is, however, another reason people are slowing down. It began last year when we thought we were giving all our money to the oil companies. But it’s really caught on now it’s turned out we were actually giving it all to the banks.

  When you are frightened that you will lose your job, you need to look after the pennies. And driving around at forty, rather than seventy, is a good idea. Driving economically – or hypermiling as the Americans call it – will cost you a little time but save you a lot of money. Seriously. If I drive normally, it costs around £50 in fuel to get my Mercedes to London and back. If I drive carefully, it’s around £35.

  Of course, if you have someone who is on nine points, and is also frightened of losing their job, you end up with a car that is travelling so slowly you would need at least seven fixed points in space to determine that it is moving at all.

  And if they happen to have a Hyundai, or a Kia or one of those Rextons, which is made by a company you’ve never heard of in a country you couldn’t place on a map, then their speed will not be measurable at all.

  This is because cars made by companies that earn most of their profits from shipping and cutting down forests, and have an automotive division only because it’s good for the local economy, are almost always rubbish.

  No, really. A car made for someone who just yesterday was going to work on an ox will be of no use to people who were brought up on a diet of Ford Mustangs. Cars made for southeast Asia and Africa are tools. And so are the people in this country who buy them.

  Whatever, the nationwide slowdown has met with a great deal of cheering from many quarters. The quarters you wouldn’t want to have round for dinner. Indeed, the comedian David Mitche
ll, writing recently in a newspaper you don’t take, said he welcomed it and that soon the petrolheads would just have to get used to the fact.

  He’s quite wrong. The petrolheads will not get used to it. They will swear and curse and overtake the slowcoaches in dangerous places and there will be many more accidents and the only people who will benefit are transplant surgeons.

  The only way you will get everyone to stick to the speed limits is by forcing them to do it. Physically, with satellite guidance. The technology is with us now. It’s operational. So all that’s missing is a government mad enough to impose the legislation. Which is why we can thank God this lot have only months to run.

  I do not believe cars should be slowed down by Westminster’s expenses department. Because what’s next? Foodies being forced to become vegetarians to stop the climate changing? The Archbishop of Canterbury being forced to switch to Muslimism to stop the bloodshed? Come off it.

  The eco-worms really do seem to think that if they ban smoking, force everyone to wear a high-visibility jacket and impose a blanket 40mph speed limit, no one will ever die. But we all will, of something, one day. If you get up in a morning, you must accept that your head may come off in an accident and there’s absolutely nothing you, or anyone else, can do about it.

  I’m not suggesting that we all have a God-given right to drive as fast as we like. I’m not suggesting we all tear through villages, blowing the horn at peasants and running them down if they don’t move out of the way quickly enough. I am not a Toad. But I am suggesting that when you lead a busy life, it is important to get journeys over with as quickly as possible.

  Eco-weeds argue that the busy life must be banned, too. They think the world will be a better place if we all get up, have lunch, drive our electric Hyundai very slowly back to the office for a snooze and then go home to make wooden puzzles with our children.

  Well, if they want to live like that, fine. But I don’t. I like spur-of-the-moment decisions to see friends in London and squeezing in a meeting in Pontefract at three before picking up the kids in Oxford at four. I like the buzz. I like the action. I like to think I have only one life but I’m getting three out of it. And that’s why I drive a 500 horsepower Mercedes.

  And because I drive it quickly, I pay attention, and because I pay attention, I see speed cameras. And because I see them, I have time to slow down, and because of that I have a clean driving licence. And the people in eco-Hyundais, dawdling about in a dream, don’t.

  There. That’s fate tempted, and now we shall move on to this morning’s car. The Audi Q7 V12 diesel.

  I am no fan of the Audi Q7. It is bread-bin ugly and despite its enormous size it’s so small inside that you are faced with a simple choice. Leave the dogs at home. Or the kids. Unlike a Volvo XC90, it cannot do both. However, to worry about tedious practical issues in this particular model is like worrying about what sort of golf clubs Alan Shepard used when teeing off on the moon.

  That’s because this is the first road car ever to be fitted with a V12 diesel. It produces 493 horsepowers – more than any other diesel – and 738 torques. That’s about 160 more than you get from a McLaren SLR: 738 torques is enough to restart a dead planet.

  You would imagine that with such an engine lurking under the bonnet it would be impossible to drive. Nope. The herculean torque is sent quietly and with no fuss to each of the four wheels. All is consequently docile and benign. And you begin to wonder why anyone might spend more than £94,000 on such a thing when for around half as much they could have the V8 petrol version instead. It’s not like the diesel is going to elicit any thank-you letters from Johnny Polar Bear. And it’s not notably more economical either.

  And then …

  It had been a busy morning. I’d written a newspaper column, dropped in at a friend’s house to shoot some magpies and then I had to get to the Top Gear test track, ninety miles away in Surrey, to shoot a Ford Focus.

  Several miles out, I hooked onto the back of a motorbike. It was a Suzuki Hayabusa GSX1300R and it had such a hideous rear end that I decided I should overtake it as soon as possible. But the rider was having none of that. So off he went.

  Except he didn’t. No matter what the poor chap did on that twisting, turning road, he simply could not pull out any notable lead on the big, 2½-ton diesel-powered monster. You might be thinking, if you are a motorcyclist, that the rider must have been useless – and you may have a point since it turned out to be Richard Hammond – but you are missing the point.

  Even a fast bike, and few are faster than this ghastly Suzuki when ridden by a normal person or that mad-eyed Italian, cannot pull away from the Q7 diesel. And there is something deeply, gooily satisfying about that.

  It is a hysterical car, this. Mad. Bonkers. Stupid. It sits on the road network like a Class-1 powerboat would sit at the Henley regatta. Of course, it is also utterly pointless. No one is going to buy a lumbering Q7 for outright speed.

  However, let us not dwell on such things. Let us instead rejoice at the fact that it exists. It’s crap. But it’s brilliant, too. I don’t want one. But I don’t want to live in a world where I never had the choice in the first place.

  24 May 2009

  Ghastly but lovable, the Vauxhall VXR8 Bathurst S is vulgar, terrible but ridiculously exciting

  Vauxhall VXR8 Bathurst S

  It was late, dark, cold and pouring down. But even though I was soaking wet, I simply couldn’t get into the car you see photographed this morning. My wife was screaming at me, saying the rain was ruining her hair and making her dress see-through and would I please stop being so stupid and just unlock the damn doors. But I couldn’t because it would have been just too embarrassing.

  Had I been at the annual general meeting of the Ray Winstone Appreciation Society, then things would have been fine. I would have been proud of the car’s gigantism, and its black bonnet stripes and its flared wheel arches and its own-brand badge. But I was outside the New Theatre in Oxford, and Oxford theatre crowds, with their mad hair and their cycling helmets and their hairy sports jackets, really don’t take kindly to cars like this. Or the people who drive them. Especially as it sported the numberplate DE51RED.

  Frankly, ATW4T would have been less blushingly awful. So I stood there pretending it wasn’t mine until they’d all wobbled off on their stupid foldaway bicycles.

  Things were a bit quiet on the way home, and they remained that way until, with just two miles to go, the engine coughed. I thought at first I’d fluffed a gearchange. But then it coughed again. And then it ran out of fuel. And it didn’t matter how much I pointed defensively at the gauge, which showed I had a quarter of a tank left; the facts were these. It was the middle of the night. It was the middle of nowhere. And the raindrops were now as big as rabbits.

  So the Vauxhall VXR8 Bathurst S did not get off to a good start. It had made me very wet, then it had made me very angry and now it was in the process of making me very divorced. So what is it, then, this tattooed bouncer with a neck like a birthday cake and, you suspect, a pickaxe handle down its trousers?

  Well, in short, it’s the result of an Australian civil war. In Oz, everyone is either a supporter of Holden, part of General Motors, or a supporter of Ford. Oh sure, there are solicitors and accountants who will claim they are above such nonsense, but when pressed they will say, ‘Of course, I’m a GM man by birth and I would never allow a Ford onto my drive because …’ – and at this point they start to get a bit red in the face – ‘they are all raving poofters and …’ – by this stage they will be banging the table – ‘I hate them. I would gladly lay down my life and the lives of my children for Holden and I will kill anyone with a hammer if they disagree.’

  At the Bathurst race from which this limited-edition Vauxhall takes its name, there are pitched battles between gangs of Ford and GM fans. Proper bike-chains-and-flamethrower, Hell’s Angel-type stuff. And the only time they ever came together was when a chap called Jim Richards won in a Nissan Skyline. Such was the to
rrent of catcalls as he climbed onto the podium, he leant into the microphone and called the entire crowd ‘a pack of arseholes’.

  That’s the background from which this big Vauxhall comes. A rough, partisan sink estate, where there are no women and even the spiders are frightened. It’s a car deliberately built to be uncouth. To stick its face into anything Ford might do by way of response. It’s designed to keep those bike chains whirling.

  Strangely, however, it’s not actually Australian. It’s built there but it was engineered by a Scotchman called Tom Walkinshaw. So since he’s a neighbour I thought I’d go to see how on earth such a quiet, reserved chap could possibly have come up with something so … wilfully ocker.

  It’s easy to find his house. You go left at Alex James’s agreeable cheesery, straight on past David Cameron’s delightful wisteria, right by Ben Kingsley’s lovely gable ends and through the dry-stone walls that mark the entrance. But I didn’t want to go past all those places – and people – in a car with stripes and DE51RED written on the back. So I stayed at home.

  The next day I was due for lunch at a friend’s house. And I decided that since he lives down a long private drive, it would be okay to turn up in what was essentially a bull-necked version of Crocodile Dundee. But, for no reason, the battery was flat and it wouldn’t start. So I went in a Range Rover. As did everyone else.

  Eventually, though, when it was dark and the nation was asleep, I did sneak out to see what on earth this car was like. And I found after a very short space of time it was like being in 1978. There is no refinement at all. When you dip the clutch pedal to change gear, you can feel and hear the entire driveline moving around. Something I haven’t felt to anything like this degree since the Chevette HS went west.