Round the Bend Page 33

  Or a burger. Because McDonald’s and Burger King offer tasty snacks in every town in the world, anyone selling inferior burgers made from stale bread and dead horses will go out of business extremely quickly. So, even at three in the morning, on the outskirts of Leicester or Wakefield, you know for sure that the meal you’ve just bought will be delicious and nutritious.

  Of course, small retailers whine and complain when Tesco moves into the area, because Tesco will nick all their business. Yes, it will, if what you are selling is expensive and rubbish.

  That’s the core of capitalism. ‘Better’ will always win the day. And it doesn’t matter what form ‘better’ takes. Better can mean cheaper, more convenient, nicer, prettier, more tasty, more healthy. In some way, you have to be better than the other guy, or your kids will soon be presented with a bill for hosing you out of your sitting room.

  Because the bosses of the giant corporations know this, they strive constantly to make what they sell better, and that’s brilliant for you and me. It’s why we don’t get punctures any more – because the tyre makers are constantly striving to be the best. It’s why your car never overheats any more – because the people who make radiator hoses are no longer stuck in the seventies, believing they have a God-given right to keep on making radiator hoses, irrespective of how quickly they dissolve.

  When was the last time you had a faulty cigarette? When was the last time your plane crashed? When did you last take a strawberry back to the supermarket because it was all covered in slime? It’s not governments or best-before dates or health and safety that is doing this; it’s capitalism.

  And nowhere is the improvement seen more vividly than in the world of motoring.

  In the olden days, car makers thought local, and that was a disaster. They really did think at British Leyland that the sun was still shining brightly on the empire and that people in Britain would always buy Rovers and Austins because they were British. We saw the same thing going on in Italy with Fiat. So what if the workforce had left its sandwiches in one of the doors and wired up the horn to the starter motor by mistake? The customer would be back. And the government would hand over a fat cheque if he wasn’t. But then capitalism went global and, all of a sudden, Terry and June could buy a car from Japan that didn’t explode every time there was a ‘y’ in the day. So they did.

  Then it got better. BMW worked out that if it made the X5 in America, the car could be sold more cheaply. Volkswagen thought the same about Mexico, and as Britain slithered further into the mire, we started to benefit from this as well. Toyota, Honda and Nissan didn’t come here because their executives liked our weather or the golf courses. They came because they were drawn here by capitalism, the need to be cheaper.

  We’ve reached a point where there are only thirteen or so car firms left in the entire world. Nissan is part of Renault. Lamborghinis are Audis. Jags are Indian and a Lotus is a Proton. The competition is savage. Failure is not an option. One bad car can upset the apple cart. Everyone knows this.

  So how come the Audi A4 Allroad has slipped though the net?

  Audi has been offering a high-riding A6 for many years and it is popular with people who have double-barrelled surnames to match their double-barrelled Purdeys. I can see why. It’s as well made as a normal A6 and as luxurious, but you can raise it up on its air springs to reach your shooting peg and cross that tricky little ford at Fuddlecombe End.

  Think of it as a Range Rover for people who really don’t want a Range Rover.

  I was expecting more of the same from the A4. Yes, it sits on springs made from steel rather than air, so the ride height cannot be adjusted. But that’s okay, really, and in any case, it’s got lots of plastic padding on the underside and around the wheel arches to protect the paintwork if things get tricky.

  There is nothing agricultural about the interior, though. It’s all standard Audi and bombproof and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with the performance either. The car I drove had a 3-litre turbodiesel engine that could get it from rest to 62mph in 6.4 seconds. That’s properly fast for any car, leave alone one on stilts.

  But the A4 Allroad does have a couple of problems. First, it doesn’t ride well. I recently tried the excellent Skoda Octavia Scout, which also has a raised ride height, and that was smoother and better than its low-riding cousin.

  To make matters worse, the steering is diabolical. It feels digital rather than analogue or, to put it another way, sticky. Like the steering column is shaped like a 50p piece.

  It was so bad I lent the car to a fellow motoring hack so that he could have a go, and he confirmed it was dreadful. As he left, I noticed a Biro had burst in his back pocket, leaving an inky stain all over the light grey Valcona leather – a £1,605 option. There are other options, too, none of which you’d expect on a car that costs, as standard, a biggish £34,565. I mean, £540 for pearl paint and £735 for electric seats? Do me a favour.

  If you have your heart set on a four-wheel-drive Audi and you can’t run to a Q7 or an A6 Allroad, do not be tempted by the A4. The small Q5 is much better. But better still is the Skoda Scout. It’s hard to think of a single thing the Audi can do that the Scout cannot. And don’t worry about the Skoda badge, because this is a capitalistic world and Skoda belongs to Volkswagen these days. Just like Audi.

  29 November 2009

  It’s fresh, it’s funky – and it freaks my kids out

  Kia Soul 1.6 CRDi Shaker

  While we weren’t looking, someone with a Saab and a pair of extremely thin spectacles decided that modern houses should be white, made mostly from glass and heated by burning wood chippings or children or anything so they can be sold with that all-important eco tag.

  Of course, because most of the walls are glass, they are see-through, which means you must be very careful when walking around in the nude. Not that you will be walking round in the nude much because the modern house, with its lack of soft furnishings – including curtains – can feel rather cold, especially when you run out of children to put in the eco-boiler.

  Despite these small drawbacks, I must say that they do look rather good. I have a seaside property and I think often of asking someone with a Saab 9-5 to build a white-pillared, mostly glass extension so that I can sit and look right back at the ramblers and the endlessly shifting sea beyond. I think it would be peaceful.

  However, there is a problem. Although many of us deny it, we all think of our houses as investments and we all know that there are only a very few people out there who would wish to live in a see-through house that echoes even if you whisper. This makes the resale tricky.

  We also know that while these houses may look good now, they will probably look as out of date as a Randall and Hopkirk set by the time we are ready to move on. And that won’t make the resale tricky; it’ll make it impossible.

  As a result, we tend to shy away from being too adventurous. We stick with the bricks and the pitched roofs and the carpets because we know that when we start to dribble and the house has to be sold to pay for our lengthy stay in a home, it will be worth that bit more. In short, then, we’re building now pretty much what we’ve been building for the past hundred years or so.

  It’s a shame. It means that in years to come, historians will have very few examples of modern eco-houses to examine as they try to unravel the mysteries of why the human race suddenly decided that burning children to save the polar bear was somehow the right thing to do.

  There’s a similar problem with cars. Citroën recently unveiled its DS3, prompting many to wonder what happened to the DS2, and me to wonder why no one will buy such a thing.

  It looks fantastic – and that’s the problem. It looks fantastic because it looks fresh and exciting and modern, and nothing like anything that has gone before. And that means the nation’s dreary people will think, ‘Oooh, no. I’d better not buy one of those because it’ll be hard to sell and may look dated in a couple of years’ time.’

  Better to buy a Mini,
which harks back to the fifties, or a Fiat 500, which harks back to girls in short skirts and big glasses jumping up and down on Mick Jagger in Carnaby Street in the sixties. Old works. Traditional works. Fresh doesn’t. Fresh is scary.

  And that brings me very nicely to the door of the Kia Soul, which is extremely fresh and extremely modern and a little bit eco. And, as a result, my children refused to go to school in it. They said it looked ridiculous and I said it didn’t and there was a row and I won and now they are not speaking to me.

  I think it looks brilliant, especially if you order it in ivory white because then it looks like the eco-house I dream about building but never will.

  First things first, though. It appears in the pictures to be a small urban runaround but in fact it’s quite big. That’s why you may be disappointed when you open the tailgate and find a boot that is about the same size as a mouse’s matchbox. However, this is a boot with a massive basement into which you can put all your things, no matter what those things might be.

  Further forward, it’s like being in a big 4x4. There’s lots of space in the front and the back and you have a high driving position so that you can look down on other motorists in their dreary, wheeled Edwardian semis.

  Prices start at £10,775, which is exceptional value for a car this size, but you can spend upwards of £15,000, which is too much. And, anyway, you need to have some money left in the kitty to spend on some of the bewildering but often rather appealing options. Racing stripes. A red gearknob. Plastic wheel arch extensions. A chrome petrol filler cap. Honestly, everything you can think of and a million things you can’t are all available, and if I were buying a car like this, I’d have the lot. Except perhaps the 18-inch wheels. Yes, they look good – bigger wheels always do – but they do make the ride a bit choppy. And now we are straying to parts of the Kia Soul that are not so good.

  Underneath the funky exterior, you will find the running gear of a Hyundai i20. And that’s fine. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the i20. But, crucially, there is nothing fundamentally right either. It’s just some car. And I’m not sure that ‘some car’ is good enough when you have a red gearknob, racing stripes and a special-edition model called Tempest. Or Shaker. Or Burner. To paraphrase our friends in the ’hood: ‘The Soul is writing cheques its underpinnings can’t cash.’

  And this is especially true if you go for the diesel engine. It’s a 1.6 and on paper it all sounds fine. It sounds better than the petrol equivalent, in fact. But, in practice, it is woefully slow. It’s one of those cars that is doing only 50mph when you reach the very end of the motorway slip road, which means you have to take your life in your hands when joining the traffic flow.

  Worse, on a normal A road there is rarely a straight long enough to get past the lorry, bus or Peugeot that is holding you up. This means you drive along at the speed of the slowest. And that means you will arrive at school after lessons have begun. This made my daughter very happy because no one saw her getting out of it.

  It would also make your bank manager very happy because, by being forced to travel at Peugeot speeds, the engine is hardly using any fuel at all. After seventy-two miles, the needle was still reading ‘above full’. Only after a motorway run to Birmingham airport did it shift down to just ‘full’.

  And, sadly, that’s the end of my test. I flew to Newcastle and then drove home, which means the poor little Soul is still in the long-term car park at Birmingham, feeling rather unloved and unwanted.

  It isn’t. I miss it. And that is remarkable, because that makes it the first car from the Pacific rim that is more than 1.2 tons of metal, glass and plastic. The Soul is that as well, but it has a personality. It wormed its way into my heart.

  6 December 2009

  Just one trip and I was a mellow fellow

  Saab 9-3X 2.0 Turbo XWD

  As we know, there is a general trend in the echelons of power to push for lower urban speed limits. And, as a result, woolly-headed researchers are delivering all sorts of evidence – or tricks – to suggest that such a move would save 30,000 children’s lives, end the war in Afghanistan and cure the common cold.

  It is all nonsense. I have tried driving through urban areas at the suggested new limit of 20mph and it is impossible. Gradients, gear ratios and the need to look up from the speedo from time to time mean that often you look back down again to see you’ve crept up to a jailable twenty-six.

  It is, of course, a fact that if you hit a pedestrian while travelling at 20mph, they will be more likely to survive than if you hit them at forty. But what the woolly-headed fools don’t seem to realize is that you rarely hit a pedestrian while travelling at the posted limit because most cars have steel discs attached to the wheels: these are called brakes.

  You may well be doing forty when you first see the drunk weaving out from behind a bus. But because of these so-called ‘brakes’, by the time you actually hit him, you will be doing twenty. Which means he will emerge from the experience pretty much undamaged. Especially if he is really drunk and therefore all flobbery.

  The fact is that almost everyone who is old enough to drive a car is sufficiently intelligent to work out the best speed for the prevailing conditions. Of course, there are idiots who charge through town centres at ninety, but do you really think they’ll slow down just because the limit goes down a bit? I don’t.

  It’s much the same argument with the drink-drive limit. Cutting it by a few milligrams doesn’t make drunken drivers more sober. It just makes them more illegal. And that achieves nothing.

  As usual, then, my suggestion to those in power is to let people make up their own minds. But this will never happen. Governments cannot accept that we know anything at all. Which is why I’ve come up with another plan. Gordon Brown should buy Saab – the brand of choice for any Hollywood hero who wishes to look a bit alternative and interesting.

  The Swedish car maker is in a spot of bother. It was bought nine years ago by General Motors, which underwent a major restructuring this year because of bankruptcy. Saab, therefore, is very much for sale. Back in the summer it looked like Koenigsegg would be the knight in shining armour, but the deal went wrong. Perhaps because Koenigsegg makes just eighteen cars a year and employs forty-five people and is, therefore, not ideally placed to run a company that employs about 4,500 and makes 93,000 cars a year.

  Then Spyker, the Dutch supercar maker, showed a keen interest but that didn’t work out either. Now GM is set to begin an orderly shutdown of the plants, though if you buy a Saab from showroom stocks the company will still honour the warranty. After that, no more Saabs. And that could cause 93,000 more accidents every year.

  I am not a particularly aggressive driver, but on the way from London to the Top Gear test track in Surrey, a journey I make often, there are certain little manoeuvres that can shave valuable minutes off the journey. Hammersmith roundabout, for instance. It’s best to hog the inside, which usually moves better, and then cut across to the Barnes exit at the last moment.

  And then at the Guildford exit on the A3, I simply go down the empty right-hand side of the otherwise clogged slip road and turn left at the bottom, where it says ‘No left turn’. I’m amazed and delighted no one else does this. It saves a lot of time.

  In Guildford itself there are special lanes reserved for ‘goods vehicles’, but if you squint a bit you can convince yourself that what the sign actually says is ‘good vehicles’. Which means they can certainly be used by anyone in an AMG Mercedes – i.e., me.

  Last week, however, I made the journey in a Saab, and while it is a good vehicle, I decided against using the special lanes. I also queued with everyone else on the slip road. And for Hammersmith, I got into the correct lane before I’d even left Notting Hill.

  And when I was stuck behind a 35mph Peugeot, I didn’t dream, as I usually do, of putting its driver in an acid bath or beheading him on the internet; I just smiled the smile of a man at peace with himself.

  I am not making any of this up. The S
aab genuinely changed my whole attitude to driving. It made me calmer. Who knows – if I’d been in an Audi or a BMW that morning, I might have killed someone. It is, therefore, possible that the Saab saved a life, and that is why I urge the British government, if it is really serious about cutting the carnage on Britain’s roads, to step in and save the brand from extinction.*

  Of course, the strangest thing is that until recently Saab was still banging on about how its cars were based on jet fighters, but this was rubbish. The car I was driving – the 9-3X XWD – is actually based on a Vauxhall Vectra.

  Happily, however, the underpinnings are as lost in the mix as a rat in the bottom of a jalfrezi. It, therefore, doesn’t feel like a Vauxhall at all.

  XWD stands for cross-wheel drive (four-wheel drive to you and me) and that’s funny because it’s not that long ago that Saab was saying four-wheel drive was nonsense. It once took me to a frozen lake to prove that its front-wheel-drive cars were just as good as Audi’s ‘pointless’ new Quattro.

  But, then, this is not a performance-derived system. The 9-3X is a slightly raised estate car in the mould of the excellent Skoda Octavia Scout or the Audi A4 Allroad. This means it can be called upon to do light chores on the farm, which is why it’s fitted with an electronic limited-slip diff.

  What it can’t be called upon to do is provide any excitement, whatsoever. In the olden days, a 2-litre Saab turbo had a bit of pizzazz. This doesn’t. It is woefully slow. Amazingly slow. They say it does 0 to 60 in 8.2 seconds, and that’s probably true, but to achieve such a thing you’d have to wring its neck, and that flies in the face of what this car’s all about.

  Part of the problem is the complete lack of any low-down torque. You cruise up to a junction in second, see there’s nothing coming and pull out. Then you stall. At anything up to about 15mph, you need to be in first, or you will judder and die. In a normal car this would have driven me nuts. Because it was a Saab, though, I simply smiled and remembered to be in first all the time.