Really? Page 5

  15 March 2015

  We can’t go on like this. You’re beautiful but a control freak

  Mercedes S 63 AMG Coupé

  We have been told many times in recent months that driverless cars are now being developed, and we’re all dimly aware, if we are paying attention, that there are many issues to be addressed before they are allowed on to the roads. Quite apart from the technical hurdles, which are legion, there are ethical conundrums too. For example, what will a driverless car do when, in an emergency, it is presented with a choice of whom to kill? You, its owner? Or the bus queue into which it must plough if it is to save your life?

  And then there’s the biggest question of them all: what’s the point? You send your driverless car into town, it finds a parking space, slots in neatly without scraping itself against anything and … and … and then what? It can’t go into a shop and pick up some milk, can it?

  For a driverless car to be useful, it must, first and foremost, be a car. And if it’s going to be a car, which is a personal transportation device, you may as well do the driving. Because driving is not taxing or difficult. You just have to sit there and miss stuff.

  I had a taste of driverless-car motoring last week when I spent the week with a Mercedes S 63 AMG coupé. This car had the lot. It could steer down a road with no input from me. It could sense an impending accident and lock its brakes to activate the seatbelt pre-tensioners; it could also identify pedestrians on the pavement and anticipate what they would do next, and then take avoiding action to miss them. My job was simply to get out at the other end, looking as relaxed as that smug chap from the old Rothmans adverts.

  But I never did because, actually, the cleverest electronics are not as clever as even the stupidest human.

  Let us take the humble parking sensor as an example. In any city-centre parking manoeuvre, they start wailing and barking when they are 3 feet away from an obstacle. This is no use at all. You’re always 3 feet from something when you’re parking. You need a reminder when the gap’s down to 3 millimetres.

  This is the problem that blights the Mercedes. Yes, it’s very clever that it can ‘read’ the speed of the car in front and maintain a constant gap. But how does the driver of the car in front know you want to overtake when you are being stationed by electricity 3 miles off his rear end?

  And then there was the last-minute change of direction that I needed to make to avoid one of the nutty paps who remain on my tail. I had seen the car on my near side and I knew for sure I could nip in front, but the Mercedes decided it knew best and took control of the steering and the brakes.

  I blame the world’s lawyers for all of this. Mercedes knows that it could bring the tolerances down to reasonable levels but, if it did so, and there was a crash, any QC worth his considerable weight could summon a galactic bout of mock-incredulity in a courtroom. ‘Do you expect us to believe that this car could steer through a gap with just’ – snort – ‘3 millimetres to spare?’

  I’m afraid that after just a couple of days I turned off all of the drive-by-wire stuff and just used the Mercedes as a car.

  There has always been a coupé version of the S-class and it’s always been called the CL. But for reasons that are entirely unclear to everyone outside the Mercedes marketing department this is called the S-class coupé. That may be technically correct, but I can assure you it sure as hell neither looks nor feels like a two-door version of the big Berlin taxi.

  It looks wondrous. My test car had silly red brake callipers and optional Swarovski crystals in both its daytime running lights and its indicators but, these aside, it was a menacing blend of power bulges, skirts and the sort of brushed-zinc look that you find in those million-pounds-a-yard kitchen shops on Holland Park Avenue in west London.

  Inside, there was quilted leather and a sense that you were in the first-class cabin of a Far Eastern airline. It’s the sort of car in which you say, ‘Mmm,’ as you settle down and close the door. The seatbelt is even handed to you by a butler. He never brought any nuts, though. Black mark, that.

  Eventually, though, when you’ve stopped going, ‘Mmm,’ and turning all the electronic paranoia off, it’s time to go for a drive – and it’s exactly what you’d imagine. ‘Cadderberry luggzury’ (as the chocolate ads used to say) with a hint of chilli pepper.

  Of course, there are buttons to make the whole car uncomfortable – you even get one that makes it lean the wrong way in corners – but if you leave all this alone, you get a fast, comfy coupé that rumbles when you give it the beans and hums when you don’t. It’s nice.

  Apart from the steering. There’s nothing wrong with it, naturally. It doesn’t suddenly stop working and the wheel doesn’t abruptly become red hot. But just occasionally you do wonder if it’s connected up as well as it could be. I have a similar issue with the mildly hesitant throttle.

  But here’s the main problem I have. For quite a lot less you can have a BMW M6 Gran Coupé, which is even better-looking and comes with two more doors. It doesn’t have the driverless toys, but you don’t want them anyway. And it won’t cruise quite as well but, on the upside, it is much, much more exciting.

  If that’s not what you want, fair enough, but that’s where the Bentley Continental GT enters stage left. This has the Merc’s luggzury and the quilted leather and, if you go for the V8, the exhaust bark as well. Plus, it is a Bentley, and that counts for more than a Mercedes badge.

  All three cars are good-looking, fast two-seaters with space in the back for very small people on very short journeys. And all will depreciate like a chest of drawers falling out of a tower block.

  If you really do like driving – and if you’ve read this far into a motoring column, I have to suppose you do – then the BMW is the obvious choice. It is magnificent and snarly and balanced and all the things you crave. On a dirt road in Australia last year, with the sun going down after a long, hot, beautiful day, it provided me with what I think was the nicest drive of my life.

  As a driver’s car, the Bentley is not – quite – in the same league as the BMW, but what you lose in cornering and braking and acceleration, you gain in the ‘Ooh, that feels nice’ moment when you close the door.

  Which leaves us with the Merc. It is stuck between a rock and a soft place. And I’m not sure that’s a very sensible place to be.

  29 March 2015

  Cancel the Uber car – I’ll catch a Crazy Horse cab

  Mercedes-AMG GT S

  Have you ever tried to send a text from the back of a London cab? The suspension is so catastrophically hard that it’s just about impossible. And even if by some miracle you do manage to write vaguely what you had in mind, you will go over a speed bump as you’re sending it, which means it’ll go to completely the wrong person.

  Life is a lot more smooth in the new four-wheel-steer Mercedes Vito Taxi vans, but these too come with a drawback. The windows don’t go down, so after half a mile on a hot day you start to feel like Alec Guinness in that box.

  Of course, life is a lot more comfortable – and cheaper – if you use Uber, and yet somehow I just can’t bring myself to make the change. I don’t know why. I’m not the sort of person who won’t have a mobile phone because ‘there’s nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned red phone box’ and I’m not writing this on a typewriter. But there’s something about Uber that feels wrong.

  Maybe it’s the name. Nobody likes a word that begins with U. Or maybe it’s the way Uber cars are driven: I follow them sometimes and it’s as though the driver has just ingested a litre of pethidine. And then there’s the smell. It’s an aroma that comes with its own mass and just a hint of gravity. It’s revolting.

  There’s another thing too. I wonder what damage Uber is doing to the Mercedes-Benz brand. Because nobody is going to get out of an Uber E-class and think, ‘Mmmm, yes, I have got to get one of those.’ The suspension is invariably worn out, the upholstery always has at least one worrying stain and the dash is always festooned with wires to power the driver�
��s satnav, which, after you’ve made sixteen left turns on the trot, you notice is programmed to work only in Kampala.

  I know Mercs aren’t like that in real life. I know they are beautifully made and sensibly equipped and strong. But you don’t. To you, the Uber customer, Mercs are vomitous and horrid.

  Which brings me neatly on to the problem you have if you are in the market for a six-figure GT car. It’s a nice problem, the sort of thing you could sort out in your head while lying on your back on a summer’s day in a field full of wild flowers. It’s this: there are now many GT cars costing six figures – or thereabouts – and they’re all very, very good.

  There’s the Aston Martin Vantage, the Jaguar F-type, the Porsche 911 Carrera GTS, the Bentley Continental GT V8 S, the BMW M6 and, for rather less, the Nissan GT-R and the Chevrolet Corvette. Don’t laugh. The last model was excellent and the new one is even better.

  And now, to make the decision even harder, there’s the AMG GT S. Which is not billed as a Mercedes because this has nothing to do with the diesel E-class in which you came home last night. Can we be clear on that? Good. So let’s move on.

  In the beginning was the SLS AMG, a silly-money quasi-supercar that I completely loved. It was fast only in theory because, in practice, it simply spun its rear wheels and went sideways. Really, it should have had wipers on the side windows.

  What it had instead were gull-wing doors, and I’ll let you into a little secret. No one has ever watched anyone climbing from a car with up-and-over doors and thought, ‘Crikey. I bet that bloke is intelligent and blessed with a gigantic penis.’ Things that have never been said to someone climbing from under a gull-wing door include, ‘Thank you for coming, Your Holiness.’

  The SLS AMG, then, was a stupid car for stupid show-offs, which probably explains why I liked it so much. I certainly liked the noise. You may remember it was used as the Formula One safety car and, even when the racers didn’t sound like vacuum cleaners, you could still hear it – a thundering baritone to the wailing treble.

  Anyway, the new car sits on the same basic chassis as the SLS but costs, for reasons that are not entirely clear, almost £50,000 less. Sure, you don’t get gull-wing doors – which is a good thing – and you don’t get the old 6.2-litre V8. But that’s not the end of the world either, because what you do get is a wondrous 4-litre dry-sump V8 twin turbo.

  It’s clever too. The turbos sit in the middle of the V, which makes the engine incredibly small. And that means it can be located low down and behind the front axle, for a lower centre of gravity and better weight distribution.

  There’s more racy stuff, too, because the seven-speed insta-shift flappy-paddle gearbox sits at the back of the car, being fed by a carbon-fibre prop shaft.

  The GT S weighs just over 1.5 tons, which is light for a car of this size, and it feels it – it’s almost unnerving. Because from behind the wheel it feels as if you are sitting at the back of a supertanker. The bonnet is so vast that, if it arrives on time, you will be twenty minutes late. It’s not just long either. It’s so wide that someone could land a medium-sized helicopter on it and you wouldn’t even notice.

  It’s odd, then. Because here is a car with many track-oriented features and many buttons that will turn it from a cruiser into a Nürburgring barnstormer. And yet it has a bonnet that’s 7 miles longer than necessary.

  I think I know why. Behind all the racing paraphernalia and the Mercedes suede and silicone, this is a modern-day muscle car. It’s Merc’s Mustang. You sense this when you drive it. The GT S feels as though there’s very little rubber in the bushes and only the smallest amount of insulation between you and the oily bits. It feels raw. Much more raw than any other Mercedes and any of the other cars that you can buy for this sort of money. It feels – how can I put this? – extremely exciting.

  It looks extremely exciting as well. I’m not going to say it’s pretty, because it isn’t. The windscreen is wilfully upright and the back just sort of tapers away to a sea of nothingness. But, ooh, it has presence. You get one of these in your rear-view mirror and you will get out of the way.

  On a day-to-day basis, it’s swings and roundabouts. The hatchback at the rear is good and the boot’s big. But the width means it won’t fit in a standard London parking bay. And you should definitely avoid the optional carbon ceramic brakes, which work like a switch. One minute you’re going along and the next you have a broken nose.

  Inside? It’s close to faultless, really. Maybe the gear lever is too far back and maybe the satnav screen looks a bit of an afterthought, but it has everything you could want and a few things you don’t. Why, for instance, would you want to make the exhausts louder?

  In a silly car for silly show-offs, that sort of thing would work well. But this isn’t a silly car at all. Of all the vehicles in this bit of the market, it’d almost certainly be my choice.

  Because, as I said at the start, I don’t use Uber. So Mercs are still all right in my book. And this isn’t a Mercedes anyway.

  26 April 2015

  If you don’t buy one, at least watch the crashes on the Web

  Lamborghini Huracán LP 610-4

  In the olden days, when Raymond Baxter was on the television and you had to have two O-levels to be a policeman, a family saloon took about twenty seconds to reach 60 miles per hour, which then turned out to be its top speed. Whereas a supercar such as the Ferrari 308 GTB would get to 60mph in a dizzying 6.7 seconds and then keep on accelerating all the way to an almost unbelievable 155mph.

  Today, however, family saloon cars can do 155mph, and so, to keep ahead of the pack, supercars are now so fast that if you keep your foot hard down on the throttle in second, third or fourth gear for more than about three seconds you will lose control and crash into a tree. This is a fact. And if you don’t believe me, put ‘supercar crash’ into Google. You’ll get more than 1.3 million hits.

  It’s not simply the speed and the power that cause these crashes, either. It’s the fact that, today, supercars are no harder to operate than a knife and fork. In a seventies Lamborghini you really had to work for a living. The clutch pedal felt as if it was set in concrete, the interior was as hot as the middle of a star, the steering was heavier than dark matter and usually you died of heat exhaustion from reversing out of your garage.

  A modern supercar doesn’t feel like that at all. Even the Bugatti Veyron is no more dramatic to drive than a Volkswagen Golf. This lulls people into a false sense of security. They think they can handle the savagery that lives under the bonnet. So with a big grin they shout, ‘Watch this!’ to their passenger, and stamp on the throttle – which means three seconds later they are going through the Pearly Gates, backwards, in a cloud of fire and screaming.

  When I drove the McLaren P1 around the Spa-Francorchamps racetrack in Belgium recently, it was raining and I didn’t use full throttle once. But of course you know that, because I’m still here, writing this.

  It was much the same story with the Ferrari F12berlinetta that I drove over a Cairngorm in the snow a couple of years ago. I think I may have used full power once, for about a two-hundredth of a second. But I was in seventh gear at the time, doing 24mph. And still a bit of poo came out.

  I love that these idiotic cars exist. And I love that we live in a world where all you need to buy one is some money. The government doesn’t insist on any special training; it simply says, ‘Can you reverse round a corner?’ If you demonstrate that you can, then you are allowed to buy a car that can do 250mph. That’s fantastic when you think about it.

  However, while I will applaud the people who buy these vehicles, I wouldn’t – because what’s the point of buying a car so scary-fast you don’t dare use more than half of what’s available?

  Much better, if you want a snazzy mid-engined rocketship, is to come down a peg or two and buy something from the Little League. The new Ferrari 488 GTB looks as though it might be quite interesting, and there’s always the McLaren [insert whatever name it is using today] – th
at’s a good car as well.

  But come on: you aren’t really buying a supercar for the speed, are you? It’s because you like the way it looks. Yes it is. Be honest.

  And if that’s the case, then really the one-stop shop has always been Lamborghini, purveyor through history of motorcars that are demonstrably worse than the equivalent Ferrari but that look sen-bleeding-sational.

  Let us examine the case of the recently departed Gallardo. It was not as nice to drive as the Ferrari 458 Italia. And yet more than 14,000 people bought one. Me included. And Richard Hammond. Why? Because it was – and will remain – one of the best-looking cars ever made.

  All of which brings me on to the Gallardo’s replacement. The Huracán. Sounds good, yes? As though it’s named after the most cataclysmic weather event known to man? Yes, but it isn’t. Like almost all Lamborghinis, it’s named after a stabbed cow.

  And straight away there’s a problem. It is striking, for sure, but is it as striking as a Lamborghini should be? This is a descendant of the mad Countach and the bonkers Diablo. What you want from Lambo is a Game of Thrones assault on the senses, and, I dunno, the Huracán is a bit Wolf Hall. And, whisper this, I don’t even think it’s particularly good-looking. Look at it from directly behind and it has the exact same silhouette as a loaf of bread. This is not a good thing.

  Don’t be too disheartened, though, because beneath the Hovis styling you get four-wheel drive, a carbon-fibre and aluminium chassis that is light and easy to fix, a snappy flappy-paddle gearbox (manual isn’t available) and, joy of joys, a normally aspirated 5.2-litre V10.

  It’s fitted with a stop–start system for city driving, but don’t be fooled: a motor such as this runs on baby polar bears and causes extreme weather events. And it sounds completely wonderful.

  I have heard it said there’s too much understeer when you really open the taps, but I didn’t notice any of that. I thought it was a joyous car to drive. In Road (Strada) mode, it’s extremely comfortable, and if you go for Track (Corsa) or Sport on the Soul button on the steering wheel, it is fast. But not so fast you actually soil yourself. (Although there is a tremendous Huracán crash on the internet, during which both occupants almost certainly had a bit of a trouser accident.)