Round the Bend Read online

  Of course, it’s not as much fun as a Mini, it’s not as practical as a Volvo and it won’t be as cheap as its sister car from Citroën … not if they do their usual trick of offering customers £1m cashback and the chance to sleep with the managing director’s wife every other Saturday.

  But as an overall package, it’s a good way of getting into a car-sharing scheme. Yes, you’ll be charged £75 by idiotic, blinkered councils, but look at it this way – you’ll save the planet, keep the polar bears alive, cut congestion and, best of all, on the mornings when it’s not your turn, have a lie-in.

  4 May 2008

  Press a button and pray it’s the right one

  Citroën C5 2.7 HDi V6 Exclusive

  My eyes don’t work any more. When I dial a number on my mobile, it’s only through sheer blind luck that I get through to the right person. And as for texts – forget it. Then there’s the bothersome business of going out to eat. Most restaurants provide mood lighting, which is wonderful if you are dining with a moose but not so wonderful if – as is normal – the menu is printed in the sort of typeface that’s usually seen on microdots. Mostly, I just point and hope that I’ve managed to miss the marzipan pie with grated butter beans.

  Of course, I should go to the opticians but I’m afraid this isn’t possible because, before giving me a pair of spectacles, they will look into my eyes with machinery … and here we hit on the problem.

  I’m not a squeamish man. I am never unduly troubled by scenes on the news that the BBC’s editorial policy unit has deemed worthy of a warning about ‘graphic violence and bloodshed’. I can kill a chicken. I could amputate a gangrenous leg. I can even graze the internet and not be constantly fearful that I’m going to be so revolted by something that pops onto the screen that I’ll vomit into the keyboard.

  But eyes? No. I can’t even think about them without going queasy. When my daughter needed an operation to correct a squint, the doctor explained the procedure to me, after which I had to be brought round with smelling salts. I have to fast-forward ‘that bit’ in Kill Bill 2, and I have never once used eyedrops. It would be impossible.

  As a result of all this, I buy my reading glasses from the only shops I ever visit, which are in airport departure lounges. This is not easy because the instructions you have to follow before deciding what sort of lens you need are printed in a typeface smaller than most bacteria.

  Consequently, I usually end up with a pair of specs that require me to position a book six seats in front of where I’m sitting on the plane. Or so close to my face that it actually squashes my nose.

  And here’s the really bad bit. The glasses you buy over the counter are a big joke – one that’s being played by the Chinese, I expect. They are held together with nuts and bolts so small that when they come undone – and they do, all the time – you need a carbon nanotube to do them up again. And, of course, you don’t have a carbon nanotube with you because you’re on a plane, and such things – along with shampoo and tennis rackets – aren’t allowed on planes. What’s more, you don’t even have your reading glasses because they’re in four pieces on your left knee.

  I wouldn’t mind, but even if you are not squeamish about eyes, and you make regular trips to the opticians and have a pair of lenses that are perfectly suited to your particular condition, you will look like an ocean-going idiot.

  Everyone chooses their specs to make a statement – to make them look interesting or sexy or wise – whereas in fact all spectacles do is tell the world that your body doesn’t work properly. Choosing purple frames merely highlights that fact. It’s like being diagnosed with erectile dysfunction and then buying trousers that have no fly.

  So, maybe the only solution is that we do without glasses and spend the rest of our lives with a headache from the strain, eating marzipan and butter beans. Or that the worlds of industry and catering accept that half of their customers struggle with anything smaller than 72-point bold type, and that they reprint their instructions and menus to suit.

  This brings me nicely to the dashboard of the new Citroën C5. My demonstrator had a 7-inch 16:9 television screen with a built-in GSM telephone, a radio, a CD player, iPod connectivity, a 10GB hard drive to store music and GPS navigation with traffic alerts and a bird’s-eye-view map.

  In addition, there was an electronic parking brake (complete with a system that prevents the car rolling back on hill starts), cruise control and an adjustable speed limiter. And then, in no particular order, I had parking sensors, electrically adjusted seats that vibrate if you stray out of your lane, directional headlamps, switchable suspension, ride-height adjustment, traction control, a dual-zone air-conditioning system, hazard warning lights that come on when you brake hard, an electronic stability program, an electrochrome rear-view mirror, rain-sensing wipers, dark-sensing headlamps, a trip computer, a tyre-pressure monitor …

  This car made a Mercedes S-class look like the back end of a Cornish cave, and while that’s wonderful, unfortunately all of these things have to be operated with buttons that are mostly the size of pinheads because that’s the only way they can get them all in. It is therefore impossible to find them and even more impossible to read what any of them do, at least not without reaching for your reading glasses, which is tricky when you’re on the move.

  Honestly, in a whole week I was unable to activate the sat nav, and any attempt to set the cruise control usually resulted in Ken Bruce being replaced by traction control. To operate the horn you ideally need a head torch and a cocktail stick.

  However, I could clearly see that the new C5 was a very handsome car. It sits among other four-door saloons – from BMW, Audi, Ford, Honda, and so on – looking much like Angelina Jolie would while sitting in a Wakefield bus queue.

  What’s more, we are told it’s no longer built by uninterested Algerians in a factory made from straw, and that as a result it is somehow German. Obviously, there’s no way of knowing at this stage whether any of this is true, but I doubt that it is. The French have never been able to make a car that lasts, any more than the Germans have been able to make a soufflé.

  What is certain is that the C5 is more comfortable than any German rival. My test car had hydropneumatic suspension, which really does isolate you from the pain of a badly made road. It also means it handles like a blancmange, although to get round that problem you can reach for the ‘sport’ button – which turns on the CD player.

  I liked driving this car. I liked looking at it. I liked the sheer surprise of pressing a button and then trying to work out what I’d done. There’s one obstacle, however, that I’d have to jump before I signed on the dotted line.

  In the past few years, Citroën has struggled to make its products popular in Britain. Or indeed anywhere where people walk on their back legs. So, to get round that, it’s indulged in a business strategy that most experts would call ‘a bit daft’.

  First, it has offered its cars at enticingly low prices and then garnished them with cashbacks, 0 per cent finance and the promise of a Thai massage for everyone buying one before the end of May. I sometimes get the impression there are so many incentives on a Citroën C3, for example, that if you buy one the dealer will give you £40. And some of his daughters.

  Of course, this policy doesn’t really work for you because if you can buy a Citroën new for minus £40, what’s it going to be worth when you want to sell? And obviously, it doesn’t work for Citroën either, but that hasn’t stopped the company. In about five minutes I found a Citroën dealer willing to offer me a new C5 with well over a thousand quid knocked off its list price.

  Of course, there was probably some detailed small print attached to the offer. But, needless to say, I couldn’t have read it.

  11 May 2008

  Face lifted, clanger dropped

  Mercedes-Benz SL 63 AMG

  Over the past century there has been a handful of cars that stand out as especially innovative, brilliant and important. If they were paintings, they’d be in the Louvre. If t
hey were animals, Texans would have their heads on a wall. These are the Mozart motors. The Mona Lisas.

  And sitting comfortably in the mix is the Mercedes 300 SL gull-wing. People in baggy jumpers and worn shoes speak in reverential whispers about how the futuristic engine was canted right over to one side so that the bonnet could be low and sleek. They talk of its light but immensely strong tubular frame and how 29 of the 1,400 made were fabricated entirely in aluminium. And when you get them onto the racing car that spawned the gull-wing, many are so overcome with emotion, they have to go to the lavatory.

  This gives me a problem because if I were to draw up a list of the five most important cars ever made, the gull-wing wouldn’t be on it. I’m afraid I can’t see what the fuss is about. And that, if you’re a motoring enthusiast, is a bit like an art collector saying he doesn’t see why people get in such a flap about the Sistine Chapel.

  To me, the gull-wing is a bit like Meddle, the Pink Floyd album that gets enthusiasts of the band all hot under their kaftans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very advanced. Blah, blah. Revolutionary. As far as I’m concerned, however, the SL dynasty didn’t kick off until the pagoda-roofed model came along in 1963. This was the brand’s Dark Side of the Moon. If you’ll forgive the mangled rock references, this was Genesis.

  The 1963 SL did not have a canted-over engine or a fuel-injection system that was forty years ahead of its time. It had no racing brother that scored memorable victories at Le Mans. It was just a very, very pretty car with an engine and some wheels.

  It was also, I think I’m right in saying, the first car ever made that looked feminine. It was a miniskirt with windscreen wipers. A man in one of these looked as wrong as a man in a thong. But put a girl behind the wheel and the effect was profound. I once saw Kate Moss drive by in a 280 and I had to pull into a lay-by for a while.

  Sadly, after eight years, Mercedes stopped making an SL for girls and aimed its new model at Bobby Ewing.

  Bobby liked the new SL very much. He used it to drive around Dallas being unfaithful. But then, one day, another character from the show used an SL to run him down. This made him very angry and he spent the next two years in the shower.

  Like the pagoda-roofed version, Bobby’s SL was not very sporty. Even the 5-litre V8, which came along in 1980, produced only 237bhp, which meant it had a fairly miserable top speed of 135. It wasn’t very pretty either, but despite these drawbacks the SL remained in production for eighteen years. A record for any Mercedes, except the G Wagen.

  The car that eventually replaced it in 1989 rather stretched the SL concept. It’s supposed to stand for ‘Sport Light’, and this version was sporty and light in the same way as an East German Olympic shot putter was sporty and light. It weighed about the same as the moon, which meant that if you drove along the Pacific Highway at more than 83mph you could make the tide come in.

  This was one of the first cars I road-tested on Top Gear and because I was a bit naïve I loved it, especially the adjustable suspension, which was a new idea back then, and the clever electric roof, which was operated by eleven motors. I also liked the hugeness of the thing and the wall of gadgetry. Weirdly, however, despite the buttons and the bulk, the femininity was back, and as a result this model was bought largely by extremely wealthy orange ladies in Cheshire and Harrogate.

  It was in 2002, nearly forty years after it had last done a decent SL, that Mercedes got the recipe right again. It built a version for debonair, good-looking, modest and interesting people. And despite this I bought one. Again, it wasn’t sporty or light but the SL 55 AMG version I bought did go, and sound, like thunder. I liked it very much, although there were one or two details that I hoped would have been addressed when I drove the facelifted model last week.

  First of all, there was the suspension. Most of the time it was fairly soft and comfortable, even when you asked it to be hard and sporty. That was fine. It suited the lazy, cruising nature of the car. But because it was designed by someone with a laptop, rather than someone with a lathe, it couldn’t cope when it was presented with a sharp ridge or pothole. The whole car would skip sideways in a move that was not dangerous, but was unsettling and uncomfortable.

  Next, there was the woeful choice of colours for both the interior and the exterior. When you are spending £100,000 on a car, the dealer should be able to make the seats from his wife’s pubic hair if that’s what the customer wants. But no. You get more choice of colour and materials in a Turkish prison.

  Then there was the laughable ‘linguatronic’ system. In theory, you could speak instructions and the car would obey. In practice, it never had a clue what you were on about. So when you asked the sat nav to set a course for home, it would tune the radio to some shouty man on Fox FM. And when you asked it to ring the office, it would call up pretty well everyone but.

  Strangely, Mercedes has not changed any of these things on the new SL 63 AMG. It still plays hopscotch on badly made roads. It still isn’t available in flame orange or the colour of my wife’s eyes. And the linguatronic can still speak only Klingon.

  So what has Mercedes done? Well, it’s ditched the iron lung of a supercharger and fitted a normally aspirated 6.2-litre V8. This means you get about one more brake horsepower, but before you grow too excited about that I should point out that you get a lot less torque. And it’s developed right up the rev range, exactly where you don’t want it. The engine produces more carbon dioxide, too.

  In addition, it has now fitted a seven-speed automatic gearbox, which is two more cogs than you need. Or want. On the plus side, the gearbox does come with a feature called ‘sport+’, which drops you down the box when you are approaching a corner. What’s more, if you specify the £2,230 driver’s package, you get to go on a training course. And Mercedes ups the limited top speed from 155mph to 186mph.

  The car I drove was also equipped with an £8,230 performance package, which meant I had larger front brakes, a limited slip differential and a steering wheel that wasn’t circular.

  If you steer clear of the options list, the new car is broadly similar to the model it replaces, except for one thing. A huge thing. For some reason it’s been littered with boy-racer carbon-fibre tinsel and, at the front, given a hare lip. I spent hours examining this design detail, wondering if I was missing something. I wasn’t. Mercedes has – and there’s no other way of putting this – cocked up.

  I’d love to think that this morning the entire team of designers is busy at work in Stuttgart, correcting its mistake. But as we know from the SL’s history, the process of evolution is slow. It’s therefore likely we are stuck with that gargoyle until 2015. And that is a problem for someone who wants a large, comfortable and fast two-seater convertible.

  The Aston Martin DB9 doesn’t work as a drop top. It doesn’t look or feel right. Its little sister, the Vantage V8, is great but it’s far more hardcore than the Merc and that might become wearing. The Bentley Continental is a good alternative, provided you don’t mind having eggs thrown at you as you drive around. It is awfully pompous, somehow. And the BMW 6-series. Hmmm. This has exactly the same problem at the back that the Merc has at the front.

  I’m therefore forced to conclude that the best of the bunch is the Jaguar XKR. It doesn’t have the clout of the Merc. It doesn’t have the Airscarf, which wafts warm air onto the back of your neck as you drive along. It doesn’t have a lot of the Merc’s breathtaking range of toys, in fact. Crucially, though, it doesn’t have the Merc’s ruined face either.

  18 May 2008

  So awful even the maker tells you to walk

  Kia Sedona 2.9 CRDi TS

  It’s hard to understand why so many people watch Top Gear. Some say it’s the cinematography. Some reckon there’s a chemistry between the three presenters. Most think it’s because there’s nothing else on at that time on a Sunday evening.

  I think, however, that its main appeal is this: when something goes wrong for one of us, the others don’t rush over with furrowed brows, concerned tones and a silver
post-car-crash blanket. Instead, we point and laugh. ‘Ha ha ha. Look. James’s head has exploded.’ And that makes a refreshing change in a world full of counsellors and sobbing footballers.

  Of course, you might imagine that this is all done for the cameras; and that after they’ve all been turned off we put our arms round one another and behave like women. ’Fraid not. In fact, when the cameras are turned off, we’re even worse.

  Just last week, the three of us were waiting for a delayed plane in Belgium. Or it could have been Holland. Or Japan. Whatever, we found a copy of what is basically Asian Babes for petrolheads. It’s called Top Marques and is stuffed full of classified ads for cars you can nearly afford.

  Naturally, we decided to see what our own cars are fetching in these times of rising fuel prices and eco-mentalism. This turned out to be a rich comedy gold mine because two-year-old, ultra-low-mileage Porsche 911s, just like Richard Hammond’s, are going for 75p.

  His little face was destroyed. He sat there working out how many crappy awards ceremonies he’d hosted to buy that car and how it had all been for nothing. He may as well have simply lobbed his money on a bonfire. Christ, it was funny. James May and I laughed that dangerous life-threatening laughter; the sort where your brain starts to run out of oxygen. At one point, I coughed up my own liver.

  Eventually, after about two hours, we’d calmed down enough to see how much James’s Boxster might fetch. And this, unbelievably, was even funnier. Not because of the drop, which was mighty, but because most of the enormous depreciation was not as a result of market forces or events beyond James’s control. No. He’d brought the massive hit on himself by being an idiot.