Round the Bend Page 31

  Yes, the car should be smaller, but, accepting that enormousness is the norm these days, I have to say the RS is epic. If you can live with the stupid boot-release arrangement and a sat nav system that accepts only the first piece of a postcode, it’s worth changing your name to Angela and getting one.

  4 October 2009

  Comfort for all the family in a …

  Skoda Octavia Scout 1.8 TSI

  It’s hard to identify one single thing that finished Rover. Some say it was the Phoenix Four who bought the company for some beads, grew amazing moustaches and waltzed off into the half-timbered world of Warwickshire with their lumps of cash.

  Others suggest that the problems started way before Rover boss Kevin Howe and his mustachioed mates rolled into town. They blame Lord Stokes, who was possibly the nicest man in the whole world. He was so nice, in fact, that he actually believed all the promises made by various trade union officials.

  And then, of course, there was Red Robbo, who arranged for various bits of the workforce to come out on strike more than 350 times in a single year. And Michael Edwardes, appointed as boss by Jim Callaghan at a time when production levels had fallen to four cars per man per year.

  Others, of course, point their fingers at the cars themselves; the woeful Morris Marina and its bastard son, the Ital, the Austin All Aggro, which was usually supplied to customers with bits of the workers’ sandwiches still in the doors, the hideous Triumph TR7 and the Austin Landcrab, a car that had to be driven from one side of the Longbridge works to the other, outside, in all weathers … before it was painted. Most were rusty before they were blue or, more usually, beige.

  For me, though, I reckon the end of Rover came about early in 2003 when it launched a car called the Streetwise.

  Based on the Rover 25, which was already rubbish, it was jacked up on stilts and came with ostentatious rubber bumpers and side strips that were supposed to make it look tough and rugged but actually made it look like a pensioner in Doc Martens. And they called this engineered-on-a-shoestring mishmash an ‘urban on-roader’. Which, when translated, means ‘a car that you can drive on the road in a town’. Like every other car in the world, then. But it wasn’t. It was worse.

  Of course, this sort of thing had been tried before, by a French company called Matra with the Rancho. It was a front-wheel-drive but it was made from polyester and it sported chunky panels on the side, roof bars and various other accoutrements to make it look like it had just driven off the set of Daktari. Was it a success? Er, no.

  A car needs to look like what it does. A Ferrari needs to be low and sleek. A Volvo has to fit outside an antiques shop. A Rolls-Royce has to look right with Suralan Sugar in the back. It’s no good making a car look like a Lamborghini if the engine is made by Atco. And I’m sorry, but a normal two-wheel-drive car, such as the Streetwise or the Rancho, dressed up in off-road gear, looks as stupid as those massive watches that dissolve if they fall in the sink.

  Which brings me on to the Skoda Roomster Scout. What were they thinking of? I like the normal Roomster. I think that if you avoid the three-cylinder diesel version, which doesn’t move unless you blow it up, it is a brilliant little car. But now Skoda has launched a version that has more ground clearance and various Streetwise styling cues … but no four-wheel-drive system. This means that if you take it into a field, it will remain there until June.

  I decided, therefore, to not bother reviewing what would be a stupid car and take a look instead at its bigger brother – the Octavia Scout.

  Like the Rancho and the Rover and the Roomster, this is also front-wheel drive. But when you go into a field, some of the engine’s power is automatically sent aft, making it four-wheel drive.

  I went for a drive in the countryside this morning and was very impressed with its ability to make progress over the sort of terrain that would cause the driver of a Range Rover to think seriously about turning round. It may be the same four-wheel-drive system that’s fitted to a sporty Audi TT but it really does work. What’s more, in a stubble field, the vicious little stalks were prevented from scratching the paint by those chunky plastic skirts, and the raised ride height meant the sump guard was only needed twice.

  Of course, you might think you have no need for all this. But you do, because on the road, the taller suspension makes the Scout waterbed comfortable. It’s as relaxing as being asleep. On the M40 between junctions eight and nine, the road surface is bad enough to reduce even a Rolls-Royce to its component parts. But the Scout just glides.

  Of course, there is a downside. The Scout will not handle quite as well on a racetrack as its standard front-wheel-drive, low-riding sister. But this doesn’t matter because it is a Skoda and not since the fifties has any such thing been asked to go round Stowe corner as though it were being chased by the Borg.

  Truth be told, it handles and steers perfectly well, and it’s much the same story with the performance. I tried the new 1.8-litre petrol version – the only other option is a diesel – and when I pressed the accelerator, it produced the sort of shove that was neither too slow nor alarmingly fast. At motorway cruising speeds it was quiet and entirely fuss-free, but on steeper inclines, you do perhaps need to drop down into fifth. Flat out, it will do 131mph.

  It’s much the same story on the inside. There was no satellite navigation and no buttons on the steering wheel. There was no hand stitching, nor any kind of frivolity. It was absolutely straightforward. Spacious, too, and as well made as you’d expect from what is, in effect, a Volkswagen.

  I have argued in the past that if we all bought cars using nothing but our heads, we’d all have VW Golfs. You are a family man with two children? You need a Golf. You are a wealthy young playboy from Dubai? You need a Golf. You are a school-run mum? You need a Golf. A student? A second-hand Golf. You are a gamekeeper? An astronaut? A golfer? It’s the same answer.

  But the Skoda Octavia Scout is even more rounded and capable, especially when you look at the price. Volvo will sell you a normal estate car that can be used off-road. And Audi too. But the cheapest A4 allroad is just shy of £30,000. Then you have the Subaru Outback, which, providing you avoid the hopeless diesel, is a fantastic car; one of my favourites. But the cheapest version of this is £26,295. The Scout I drove was priced at just £18,750. You can’t even buy a 2-litre Golf GT diesel for that. Just £18,750 for a comfortable, spacious, well made four-wheel-drive estate car is truly extraordinary value for money.

  There is no feature of the Octavia Scout that makes your heart melt with desire and lust. You will never fall in love with it and you will, of course, be subjected to much derision from badge snobs who still think Berlin is split in two. But if you apply the cold steel of logic to your choice of car, it is absolutely impossible to come up with anything better.

  11 October 2009

  A car even its mother couldn’t love

  Porsche Panamera 4.8 V8 Turbo

  As we know, walking is stupid. It is dirty, difficult, tiring and fraught with many dangers. You could have a heart attack, you could be struck by lightning, you could be run over or, and this happens a lot, you could be attacked by a cow.

  Look at it this way. No motorist has ever had to be rescued by a helicopter, but from now till the spring we will be bombarded with an endless stream of news stories about walkists who’ve had to be snatched from the jaws of death by the RAF after they fell over or got lost in a cloud.

  I understand, of course, that we need the ability to walk, so that we can get to the fridge. But the idea of ‘going for a walk’ seems completely ridiculous. Because one of two things will happen. You will either end up back at home again – and what’s the point of going out in the first place if that’s your goal? – or you will be killed.

  Some pooh-pooh this, saying that when you are walking in the British countryside you will see all sorts of animals and plants that you would not see if you simply stayed at home playing Call of Duty 4 on the PlayStation.

  Really? The last time I looked,
Britain was not even remotely like Botswana. There are no brown hyenas, for instance, in Welwyn Garden City. Nor are there lions in Scotland. As we know from Kate Humble’s charming Autumnwatch series on the BBC, you need to be extremely patient if you want to see anything at all. And even if you are extremely patient, all you’ll ever see is a field mouse. Or maybe a barnacle goose. These are dull. Indeed, the total number of interesting animals in Britain is none.

  However, if you are in a car, things are very different. Last weekend, I woke on Sunday morning with a catastrophic hangover, which my wife said would be cured with some fresh air. I tried explaining that the air in the sitting room near the PlayStation machine was just as fresh as the air in the garden but she was having none of it.

  So children were roused, horses were tacked and arrangements were made to meet with the friends we’d been drinking with the night before … for a morning in the countryside.

  Some were in the saddle, some were on foot and a girlfriend and I were in a Range Rover, trying not to be sick. ‘This is walking, isn’t it?’ she said, as we bumped over the field and down a precipitous slope into a wood.

  She was wrong. It was better than walking. The noise of the diesel V8 was startling all sorts of animals that would have remained hidden and unseen to the tiptoeing rambler. Deer shot out of every bush, badgers scampered out of their holes and, with eyes blinking, rushed off to alert their mates. Hares leapt, rabbits snouted and foxes looked on slyly, wondering if there was perhaps a baby in the back of the car they could eat.

  This is the thing about wildlife. As beaters know, a pheasant will simply sit still when a man walks by. But if the man starts making a noise, it will take off. The same goes for everything. Present an animal with a bearded biped in a cagoule and it will remain in situ, holding its breath until the fool has gone away. Present it with a twin-turbocharged Range Rover and it’ll leap out of its burrow, or nest, or sett, to reveal itself in what passes in Britain for full glory.

  A blast of the horn roused, even managed to scare, a family of barn owls, and normally you’d need a night-vision lens, a night without sleep and several months in hospital recovering from hypothermia to see one of those. I love barn owls, and seeing a whole herd of them, during the day, from the leather-lined, air-conditioned comfort of a Range Rover was sensational.

  Later, we met up with the riders, who looked terrified and drained, and the walkers, who were covered in mud. Neither group had seen a single thing of any interest. And, what’s more, their hangovers were still just as bad as ours.

  This, then, is my message to the producers of Autumnwatch. Instead of showing us Kate Humble sitting still for two days in the hope we get to see a stoat, and finding geese with satellites and building elaborate traps to catch shrews, simply drive about as fast as possible in a wood and there’ll be such a blizzard of fur and feathers, the viewers will get coochy-coo overload.

  This is the joy of the motor car. It has so many uses. A commuter device, a means whereby others can assess your wealth, a crow-scarer, a thrill machine, a beater, a tool, a thing of exquisite beauty, a stereo, an air-conditioned respite from the sun and shelter in the rain. It is something you can love, cherish, abuse, polish and, if you are Stephen Ireland, that Manchester City player with the blinged-up Bentley, ruin.

  And this brings me on to the Porsche Panacea, which sits in the mix like an apple core on a birthday cake. It seems to have no purpose at all.

  I understand, of course, why Porsche chose to build a four-door saloon. It’s the same reason Lamborghini started work on such a thing, and Aston Martin too. These are small companies and it makes economic sense to squeeze as many models as possible from every component. You have the engine. You have the chassis. And you have a lot of people who won’t buy anything you make because they want four doors.

  The trouble is, while Lamborghini and Aston Martin clearly employ talented stylists to ensure an elongated, widened four-seat variation on a two-seater theme does not end up looking like a supermodel who’s gone to fat, Porsche plainly gave the job to a janitor.

  I actually wonder sometimes whether Porsche employs a stylist at all. Plainly, it had some bloke back in the thirties, when Hitler created the ancestor of the 911, and it had someone else in the seventies and eighties, when it was making the wondrous 928 (the 944 wasn’t bad either), but today, God knows who’s in charge. Someone who, I suspect, has never been to art school.

  The original design for the Boxster was exquisite, but then someone obviously said, ‘Instead of making this, why don’t we make the actual car we sell look like that pushmi-pullyu thing from Doctor Dolittle?’

  Then there’s the Gayman, which is simply hideous, and don’t even get me started on the Cayenne. No, do get me started. What were they thinking of? I understand the reasoning behind that 911-style nose, but did no one stop and think, ‘Hang on. Putting a 911’s face on the front of a truck is the same as putting Keira Knightley’s phizog on the front of Brian Blessed. The end result is going to look absurd’? And it does.

  The Cayenne is one of the few cars that look better when a footballer has added 39-inch wheels, spoilers and wings. Because the bling detracts from the hopeless starting point.

  The Panamera, though, is worse. People have tried to be kind, saying that it’s challenging and that it’s unusual. But the simple fact of the matter is this: it’s as ugly as an inside-out monkey. It’s dreadful. Part-Austin Maxi, it looks like someone with no talent at all was trying to describe what they wanted to a blind person, over the phone.

  I tried one on a recent trip to Romania and I thought it was a very good car. But that’s like saying Ann Widdecombe has a heart of gold. It’s possibly true but it’s completely irrelevant. You still wouldn’t.

  18 October 2009

  Turnip boy has softened its black heart

  Mercedes-Benz CLK Black

  I was driving home the other night in great pain. Some fool had gaffer-taped my arms to a chair, and in the course of struggling free I had removed several hairs and a great deal of skin, which had been badly burnt just two days earlier, on a volcano in Chile. Mine is not really a conventional job.

  Anyway, I was in a bit of a hurry. Not only did I desperately need some cream to soothe the impromptu Brazilian on my arms, but also it was the first night in about a hundred years when my entire family would be all together under the same roof at the same time.

  I wanted to hear about my eldest daughter’s school trip to Auschwitz and how my son had got on in his rugby match. As a result, I decided I wasn’t really very interested in Mr Brown’s speed limits. The man’s a fool anyway. On the one hand, he tells us about the importance of family values, but on the other he insists that we drive home so slowly that our family will be fast asleep in bed by the time we get there.

  However, because the half-term traffic would be light, and because I was driving my own very fast Mercedes CLK Black limited edition, I was confident I’d do the journey from Guildford to Chipping Norton in no more than seventy-five minutes. But alas, it was not to be.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen the snarl-up symbols on my satellite navigation screen look quite so colourful. Every single road was either closed or jammed. And the Chris Evans radio show was nothing more than an endless stream of misery from Sally Traffic.

  Roadworks on the M25 forced me onto the M4. The A404 past Marlow was solid, so I took a lane through villages that haven’t appeared on any map since Dick Turpin was knocking about. Even the road from Oxford to my house was a non-stop stream of temporary traffic lights, because some idiot at the council had decided that a pavement should be constructed.

  A pavement? In the middle of nowhere? In the Cotswolds? Have you ever heard of anything so stupid in your entire life? Ramblers are entitled by law to come and sit by your fire and have sex with your wife whenever the mood takes them. They are allowed to walk wherever they please without let or hindrance, and now I am denied the chance to get home and see my family because someone
with a beard and a warped mind has decided they should be allowed to walk in the road as well.

  We are talking about a madman, someone who cannot pass a shop window without being overcome by a need to lick it. Someone who may well be extremely dangerous. I think it is important we find him and kill him as soon as possible.

  Because of him, and the traffic, and the roadworks on the M25, which are due to end after I’m dead, and the average-speed cameras and the Highway Wombles pretending to be policemen, it was one of the longest and most miserable journeys of my life.

  But it could have been so much worse if my Mercedes hadn’t just come back from hospital in Norfolk.

  When I first tested the 6.2-litre CLK Black, only 300 of which were built, I was overawed by its massive range of abilities. It was not just the thunderous 507 horsepower or the insane wheel arch extensions, though these two things on their own were probably enough. It was the knife-edge handling, the constant sense that you were driving something that was actually designed to kill you. It was called the Black, I suspected, because that was the colour of its heart.

  I signed off my review by saying that no one’s life was complete without one, and shortly afterwards put my money where my pen was. Yup. I bought one.

  If I’m honest, it hasn’t been an entirely happy relationship. The seats are so hip-hugging that I am unable to offer lifts to fat girls. To make matters worse, I am also unable to explain why. ‘Because your arse is too big to fit in the seat’ tends to make women cry.

  It is also extremely difficult to fasten the seatbelts and impossible if you are wearing a coat. And then there’s the question of range. Like the standard CLK it has a 62-litre (13½-gallon) fuel tank, which is fine if the engine up front is a parsimonious diesel. But when it’s a massive V8, 62 litres does not get you to the end of the road.