Round the Bend Page 30
And then there’s the hire car. This isn’t a problem in Europe, where, at best, you’ll get a diesel-powered Renault Scénic that won’t have enough power to get up the drive to your villa and will smell of sick.
No one ever harbours a desire to buy a version of what they rented in Spain or France. But America’s different. I once rented a Corvette in Vegas and spent the whole time wondering why I didn’t have such a thing at home. Then you have the Mustang. I know it has a live rear axle and that its massive 5-litre V8 has less power than Luxembourg’s milk marketing board. But that doesn’t stop me coming home and pressing my nose every night against the plate-glass windows of that American car dealership in Barnes.
This year, though, I didn’t rent a Mustang. On my recent trip to Canada, I got myself a Ford Flex, and it’s got me thinking.
As is usual for an American car, it came with a half-timbered steering wheel so that drivers are made to feel like they are in Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Americans like it in Anne Hathaway’s cottage. It gives them a sense of being. There was also some wood – well, I say wood but it was more like Fablon – on the dash. And the seats were quilted. By someone who has ten thumbs. And is blind.
Then you have the doors. They are huge, and they open right down to a point below the sills. That means they won’t open at all if you park alongside any sort of kerb.
There’s a similar problem with the four-wheel-drive system. The Flex is designed to be a bit of a low rider so that Obama Barrack doesn’t find it threatening. Good. That’s fine. But it means the undersides drag along the ground if you attempt to drive down a rutted track.
Furthermore, the dials are awful. Like the dials on nearly all American cars, they look like they came as a job lot for £2.50. All in all, then, it’s a terrible place to be, furnished and equipped with all the care you’d find in a North Dakota motel. And while you can connect an iPod, you can’t control what tracks or playlists it selects.
However, you tend to overlook all this because of the headrests, which, like the headrests in a 1990s Aston Martin Vantage, are just that. Not some safety device to keep your hair on in a crash. But a place where you can actually rest your head as the miles glide by.
They do glide, too. Apparently, the Flex I drove has firmed-up sporty suspension. You wouldn’t know it as you cruise along in great comfort, napping occasionally. The only time you can tell that Ford of America’s ham-fisted chassis men have been getting all racy is when you drive over a small pothole. Then, it feels like the Flex has snapped. It always woke me up, and that was annoying.
Technically, then, the Flex is completely backward, and don’t be fooled by the badge on the back that says ‘Eco-Boost’. That suggests it’s a hybrid of some kind or that it runs on soil. But no. What it signifies is that instead of the V8 iron lung you might expect, it’s propelled by a 3.5-litre twin-turbocharged V6 that produces 355bhp and will get you and your passengers from rest to 60mph in 7 seconds. ‘EcoBoost’, then, is a badge on the back. Nothing more.
So why, then, did I think, albeit fleetingly, that such a car might be exactly what you and I would need for the school run here in England?
Simple. Because this is a car that can accommodate seven people and their luggage and some dogs, even if the dogs in question have just won the 2009 Biggest Wolfhounds in the World competition. And all the shopping a family of forty-three could conceivably need for a century.
It doesn’t look big from the outside and it doesn’t feel big when you get behind the wheel, but there is no car made with quite so much room for seven to lounge. This is extremely good news if you have children who fight when they are forced within 6 inches of one another. Or, to put it another way, if you have children.
The Flex looks like a Mini. It has the same cheeky stance, the same white roof and the same plethora of styling details that sit in the mix like a nice watch sits on Uma Thurman. And yet, inside, it can swallow everything you own.
It’s hard to understand how this is possible. But I’ve worked it out. America, and I’m including Canada in this, messes with perspective. The roads appear to be the same width as they are here but they’re not. They’re wider. And it’s the same story with parking spaces at Wal-Mart.
You can put your Flex, easily, between the white lines, and so you imagine it will fit between the white lines back home at the Co-op. You imagine that because supermarkets are global and standardized, the parking spaces are too. But they’re not. Parking a Flex in Chipping Norton, I suspect, would be like parking a Nimitz class aircraft carrier in Buckler’s Hard. The fact is this: it can accommodate more than a Volvo XC90 because it is more than a foot longer.
This would drive you mad. There is nothing – nothing, d’you hear – that is quite so annoying as finding a parking space and then having to hand it over to some smug git in a G-Wiz because your car is too big to fit.
So I won’t be importing a Flex any time soon. In much the same way that girls shouldn’t think too seriously about importing the Tunisian waiter they slept with while on holiday this year, either.
20 September 2009
We have ways of being a killjoy
BMW 135i M Sport convertible
You may have noticed that all actors smile constantly while driving in a car commercial. This is ridiculous. No one smiles while driving, unless Clement Freud is on the radio, and he isn’t any more, because he died.
I urge you all to look next time you’re on the road. Anyone driving alone is pulling exactly the same face. It’s a zombie face. The face of someone who’s medically alive but is actually dead. It’s a face I imagine prisoners pull when in solitary confinement.
Out of a car, Stephen Fry appears to be interested, intelligent and alert. In a car, he looks as gormless as a scolded dog. We all do. You never see this in commercials, though. Because in a commercial the actor’s whole being is 90 per cent teeth, and his eyes are sparkling like a rippled sea at sunset. He is delirious with pleasure, not because he’s just thought of something funny or seen a hippopotamus in dungarees going the other way. No. Rather preposterously, he’s delirious because he is enjoying the act of driving so much.
There’s a lot of smiling in the new BMW advert. It’s all sunny skies and wind in the hair and happy shiny people going round corners. It’s absurd in every way. Except one. The final words that accompany this uplifting festival of happiness, spoken by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, sum up exactly what motoring is all about.
Here’s what he says: ‘We realized a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important as what you make.’
Bang on. You can buy a cheap car that takes you to work economically and you may be pleased with the savings you’ve made. But saving money is never joyful. It is mean-spirited and demonstrates that you have a heart of coal. If you wish to lead a joyous life, you should always spend 10 per cent more than you earn.
Joy in a car can come from many quarters. It can come from the ‘feel’ of a button on the dashboard. It can come, such as it does in a Porsche Boxster, from that spine-tingling noise the exhaust makes at precisely 5200rpm. It can come from the way a car turns into a corner or, as you will find in a Nissan 370Z, from the way the engine blips on down changes. Joy can come from a nicely flared wheel arch, from good graphics on a sat nav screen, from the surge you feel when you accelerate. Sometimes, as is the case with the Aston Martin DBS, it can come from so many places, all at once, you are left feeling a little bit light-headed. Even the stitching on the seats made my heart feel all gooey and warm.
I’ve never been able to put my finger on quite why I don’t like cars made by Proton, and so on. But now I do. They are not joyous. They are built purely to shore up an emerging nation’s balance of trade, and you will never find any joy in anything where every single part has come from the lowest bidder.
Joy, contrary to what BMW would have us believe, does not make us smile. Even in the aforementioned DBS, I do not gurn like a mad person as I drive along. But joy does mak
e us happy and content and satisfied. In a car, joy is more important than an airbag.
Strangely, however, the one car company that rarely gives me any joy is BMW. It’s why I would never buy one of its cars.
That’s not to say its cars are no good. The new Z4 is marvellous and the M3 is one of the most perfectly balanced machines ever created by man. It makes an F-16 fighter jet look ungainly and lumpen.
However, you always get the sense with a BMW that science has ruled the roost throughout the entire design process; that anything with a bit of flair or panache has been ditched to make way for another equation. And as for the line, ‘We realized a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important as what you make’?
Hmmm. What BMW made people feel in its early days was not ‘joyous’, but ‘frightened’, as those Munich-engined warplanes swooped out of the sky, machine guns blazing.
It’s much the same story with the Beethoven/Schiller ‘Ode to Joy’. It isn’t. It’s a stirring piece of music, for sure, but even before the European Union got hold of it, it was never quite as happy-making as, say, the Carpenters’ ‘Please Mr Postman’.
Joy’s not really a German thing, I suppose. We do joy. The Americans do joy. The Italians do joy, even though they never laugh. Germans, though? They’re rather better at precision and accuracy and following orders. Which is why I can’t quite understand what went wrong with the new convertible version of the 135i.
It is featured right at the start of the ‘joy’ commercial. The driver is an old man in a hat who is smiling enormously, presumably because he’s just caught a glimpse in the rear-view mirror of his comedy moustache. Certainly, it’s not because of the car.
I like the hard-top 135 very much. In a road test on these pages, I said it harked back to the big engine/small car philosophy that crystalized the BMW range back in the early eighties. I even gave it five stars, and so I was looking forward to driving its convertible sister.
The 3-litre engine’s unchanged and it’s still great. You have one little turbo that gets you going and then another enormous turbo that kicks in if you really need some clout to overtake. The result is better economy allied to a seamless, relentless, muscular stream of power that’s never exciting or zingy, but always there, ready to arm wrestle its way into your consciousness.
However, the convertible is 254lb heavier than the coupé and that iron lard makes its presence felt every time you put your foot down. This car is as zesty as Stonehenge.
Of course, you’d imagine that with 254lb of strengthening material, it would at least be rigid and strong. But no. All the time the steering wheel is wobbling and vibrating, and sometimes, you can actually feel the flex that is sort of inevitable when the front and the back are joined together by only the floor and a bit of Millets canvas.
I don’t doubt that, in extremis, the 135 will handle nicely. And we know it’s quite fast. But there is no excitement here. Not even a crumb of joy.
As a practical proposition, it’s not much cop, either. The boot is tiny and the rear seats are suitable only for people with no legs. I should also mention that with the electric roof up, you cannot see what’s coming at oblique road junctions and that getting it down takes a yawning 22 seconds.
In theory, this car should be very good; a modern-day incarnation of the old 2002 or the 323i. I like the manually adjustable seats and the lack of styling. I like the fact the roof is canvas rather than metal. It feels like the sort of car in which the need for driving pleasure has been put above the need for gimmicks and gadgets. But what results is neither an ode to joy, nor a very good car.
27 September 2009
Love is blind, thunder thighs
Audi TT RS Coupé
About a hundred years ago I used to spend a very great deal of time with my nose pressed against the plate-glass window of an exotic car dealership in Chiswick, wondering if there was anything in life quite so perfect as a Lancia Montecarlo.
So, when I drove one this week, I couldn’t quite believe there was one rather notable feature that I had somehow overlooked. I had spent days taking in every last detail of this twin-cam mid-engined sports car that in effect bridged the gap between the frankly rather weedy Fiat X1/9 and the frankly rather expensive Ferrari 308. You would imagine, then, that I might have noticed it was about as big as my left shoe.
I suspect the reason is simple. Back then, all cars were tiny, even big ones. That’s just how it was. So, the Montecarlo is 5½ inches shorter than the current Ford Fiesta and narrower, too. Technically, that makes it a motorcycle.
There are more examples, too. The BMW 1-series is wider and taller than the 3-series you had in the 1980s. And today’s Range Rover is nearly 20 inches longer than the 1970s original.
All of this raises a question. Why?
If you have been fortunate enough to look around the SS Great Britain, which is now a museum piece in Bristol, you will undoubtedly have been shocked by the size of the beds. They are tiny, more like cots, and there’s a good reason for that. Back in the nineteenth century, when the ship was built, people were little.
But we have not become that much bigger in the past twenty to thirty years. So why the sudden need for vast cars?
Some would cite safety, suggesting that the crash protection needed to get a car onto the market these days means the car itself must be enormous. But that’s not true. A Renault Twingo is not big and that’s very safe. A Renault Formula One car is unbelievably tiny and that’s safe enough, we’re told, to be rammed, on purpose, into a wall.
I think market researchers are to blame. They go out onto the street with their clipboards and their winning smiles and they say, ‘Would you like your next car to be bigger?’ And since everyone associates a big car with success and prosperity, everyone says, ‘Yes.’ The car companies are simply responding to that.
The fact is, though, it’s nonsense, and it’s about time the trend was reversed, because I drove that Montecarlo through a Welsh town with a name I can neither remember nor spell, and it was a joy. Gaps that would have thwarted even a Mini could be dealt with without a problem. Parking spaces that would have beaten a Citroën driver were a doddle. And, most important, small cars are not seen as threatening by pedestrians. They smile at you and that makes the world a happier place.
I can think of no reason cars need be any bigger than that little Lancia. There is room inside for two people, an engine, some wheels and, unless you are Nicholas Soames, the weekly shop. Everything else in your car is just wasted air.
It’s much the same story with the little Austin Healey Sprite I drove around Mallorca on Top Gear recently. Among modern sports cars it looks as preposterous as a ballet shoe on a building site. But, actually, it’s the other way around. It’s the modern sports cars that are too big.
And that causes problems because their big, heavy bodies have to be suspended in such a way that they don’t roll and wallow in the corners. That means the suspension has to be firm. So firm that it will break your spine every time you run over a catseye. They will also break the bank every time you fill up. And your mind when you can’t find a big enough parking space without going to Lincolnshire.
There’s another thing I’ve noticed, too, about cars from not that long ago. The pillars that supported the roof were elegant, spidery little things. This meant there was a bigger glass area, and that made life inside better, especially if you were a tomato. It meant visibility was good, too. Inside a Lancia Fulvia or an old BMW CSL, you really could see all four corners of the car from the driver’s seat.
Not any more. I saw a Seat yesterday with such thick A-pillars, they came with their own windows. It’s ridiculous and ungainly and demonstrates that we are going backwards. But it does bring me nicely onto the Audi TT RS.
Naturally, this suffers from the problems that affect all modern cars, insomuch as it’s supposed to be a small, sleek, agile two-door sports car but is, in fact, about the size of Wales. Or is it the Albert Hall? Or a jumbo
jet?
Whatever, it’s much bigger than it should be and it comes with pillars big enough to make its blind spots so massive, you might as well actually be blind. Sitting in a TT is like sitting in a postbox. And I banged my head every single time I climbed inside.
There are other issues, too. There is no conventional button to open the boot, so you must either get into the car, where there is a release catch. Or use a remote opener on the key fob, which doesn’t work. Worse, though, it has a little read-out on the dash that orders you to change gear as you drive along.
‘You should be in sixth,’ it says, Germanically. But how does it know? Sure, I should be in sixth if I was interested in achieving better fuel economy. But I wasn’t. I was interested in pouncing past the car in front, which is why I was in second. If I’d tried to do this, as instructed, in sixth, I would have been killed.
Then there’s the biggest problem of them all – the problem of being in an Audi TT when you are not called Angela. I do not know why it can be driven by only people named Angela, but that’s a fact and there’s nothing we can do about it. If you have a TT and you aren’t called Angela, you have the wrong car.
The news from here on in, however, is good, because the new version – the RS – is an absolute star.
On the surface it looks like a normal TT, except for an optional rear spoiler, a more chiselled chin and brushed-aluminium door mirrors. Which look like silver ears.
Underneath, it has a 2.5-litre turbo engine, which, because it has five cylinders, harks back to the glory days of the original Quattro. It’s a corker of an engine. Muscular and zingy in equal measure, it endows the car with a grown-up turn of speed while sipping the fuel. And on top of all this, there’s that marvellously offbeat, though surprisingly muted, five-cylinder backdrop.
The rest of the car is either just as good or a bit better. The seats are wonderful, the ride is much more supple than you might imagine, the grip from the four-wheel-drive system is magnificent, the handling is a delight, the stereo is a joy and the boot is huge.