Round the Bend Read online

  It hurts, I know, to tick all the options boxes when buying a car. But the simple fact of the matter is this: if you don’t, it is going to be worthless when the time comes to sell.

  Think about it. A combination of events in the Middle East, sub-prime mortgages in California, Northern Rock and a galactically stupid government has caused all Boxsters to lose half their value in ten minutes. So the only way you can make a car with wind-down windows and unicycle tyres appeal in the pages of Top Marques is to sell it for even less than the going rate.

  And boy did James scrimp. He didn’t even fit satellite navigation and who wants a Porsche with no sat nav? No one. Not unless they deliberately live in a house with an outside bog.

  What’s more, James – as we know from his hooped jumpers – likes an unusual colour combination, which is why his steel-wheeled, understudy Porsche, with its gramophone and no guidance system, has a brown roof and a brown interior.

  There is simply no call for a car like this. It could only be part-exchanged for some used butter. Plainly, James was very hurt by this. He’d worked hard for his car and now it was worthless. If Richard and I were girls, we’d have put our arms around him and hugged some sympathy into his system. Instead, Richard fell off his chair and my kidneys came out of my nose.

  There is a serious message hidden in all of this. When buying an expensive new car, accept, like a man, that it will plummet in value in the manner of a fat man plummeting from the top of a tower block. Accept, too, that unless you spec it up with every conceivable extra there will be nothing to cushion the fall. And, most important of all, avoid bonkers colour combinations. You may think that a brown roof makes you look sultry and interesting, but in the long term it will make you look more sort of bankrupt.

  Of course, you might think that the best way of avoiding depreciation problems in expensive cars is not to buy one in the first place. Unfortunately, if you go down this route, you may well end up at the wheel of a diesel-powered people carrier like the Kia Sedona. Billed by Kia as a slice of luxury at a down-to-earth price, it comes with seven seats that whiz about in all sorts of interesting ways, rear doors that slide electrically back and forth, an MP3 player, various airbags and braking systems that, they say, ‘help you stop’. And you can have the all-singing, all-dancing top model for less than £20,000 if you haggle hard.

  This, then, sounds a brilliant substitute for a proper car … in the same way that a bunch of flowers from your local petrol station sounds a brilliant substitute for a proper bouquet from a florist – right up to the moment you give them to your wife as an anniversary present. And then, all of a sudden, they are not brilliant at all. They are an affront to everything in life that matters.

  And so it goes with the Sedona. Behind the veneer of common sense and good value beats the heart of a wizened chrysanthemum. Its 2.9-litre turbodiesel engine pulls with all the vigour of a primary school tug-of-war team. The suspension is absolutely unable to deal with imperfections in the road surface. It jolts and shudders, and sometimes you get the worrying impression that the body is going to come off. Then your children will be sick.

  It gets worse. The Sedona is thirstier than you might imagine, there is wind noise on the motorway, the interior appears to have been made from plastic that Lego rejected and the exterior has the visual appeal of a smashed dog.

  I hated this car in the same way that AA Gill would hate microwaved meat. Or Brian Sewell would hate The Crying Boy. I hated it in the same way that I hate own-brand stereo systems. They have all the buttons and they have the low price tags but they have no soul. They were designed simply to milk people who know nothing about the subject. The Sedona is a white good. It is a fridge-freezer with windscreen wipers.

  And if you don’t believe me, consider this. Kia Motors is heavily involved with getting kids to walk to school. It will provide free high-visibility jackets along with information on how it can be done safely, and how you can get in touch with other parents to form ‘walking buses’.

  It is actually saying that its Sedona is so terrible that you are better off taking your kids to school on foot. And it’s right.

  And now I’m going to knock the final nail in the Sedona’s coffin. You might imagine that, because it’s so cheap to buy, you cannot possibly lose much money. Really? I’ve just been on the Auto Trader website and as far as I can work out, a Sedona sheds half its value in about eighteen months. Not even a wattle-and-daub Boxster can manage that.

  Happily, there is a solution to all this. Much to the annoyance of James May and Richard Hammond, it seems there’s one car out there that is able to sit in an oxbow lake, away from the turbulence of the mainstream and its vicissitudes – a black Mercedes SLK 55 with red leather seats and all the trimmings. Coincidentally, that’s what I have.

  1 June 2008

  The problem is … it’s out of this world

  Nissan GT-R

  Fifteen years ago, I went to Japan, sat in a traffic jam for a fortnight and came home again, a bit worried that this festering, superheated example of unrestrained car ownership would one day spread right round the world, causing everyone to think Ken Livingstone might have had a point.

  The traffic did not crawl. It did not move at all. The only way you could garner even half an idea of what it might be like to be stationary for so long is to blow your head off. Tokyo, in 1993, really was twinned with being dead.

  So you might imagine that after fifteen years of almost continuous global economic growth, things today would be even worse. That I could go back there now, and find the taxi I used for the airport run all those years ago still at the terminal, queueing to get back on the expressway. That there’d be people in jams all over the city with no idea the twin towers had come down.

  But, in fact, Tokyo now flows like the arterial blood in a newborn baby. There are no fatty deposits, no furred-up tributaries, no clots. Recently, at two in the afternoon, I tore up Tokyo’s equivalent of London’s Marylebone Road at 100mph. And there was not a single car in sight. Not one.

  A Communist might argue that this has something to do with Japan’s excellent public transport system, which classifies a train as late if it arrives more than fifty-nine seconds behind schedule. But the system was just as good fifteen years ago.

  A hippie might suggest that in the nation that gave us John Prescott’s Kyoto treaty, the average workaday commuter has hung up his wheels in shame and bought a bicycle instead. ’Fraid not, Mr Hillage. And nor have the city burghers invented a congestion charge that somehow cuts down on congestion, rather than just send a rude and impertinent bill every five minutes.

  No. What’s happened is very simple. Elsewhere in the world, cars have been getting larger. The current 3-series BMW is 4 inches longer than a 5-series from the late eighties. Today’s Polo is bigger than the original Golf. And the twenty-first century’s Rolls-Royce Phantom is bigger than an Egyptian’s house.

  Whereas in Japan, the law says that you must prove you own a parking space before you can buy a car, unless the car is less than 3.4 metres (11 feet 2inches) long and powered by an engine no larger than 660cc. And because almost no one owns a parking space, demand for cars that would fit in a budgie’s lunch box has gone berserk. There are currently fifty-eight different models on offer with the bestselling, the Suzuki Wagon R, selling to 250,000 people a year.

  Seriously, the cars they sell to us in Britain, which are the size of farms and skyscrapers – you hardly see them at all in Japan. Almost everyone has a car so small, many aren’t actually visible to the naked eye.

  The result is very simple. A traffic jam made up of normal cars will be twice as long as one made up of these Japanese ‘kei’ cars. And a kei jam will clear more quickly, because in a car the size of a bacterium you don’t have to drive round and round the block looking for somewhere to park. You just pop it in your pocket and the job’s a good ’un.

  Sadly, there are some drawbacks. First of all, because these cars are so tiny on the outside, th
ey are not what you’d call spacious when you step inside. This isn’t so bad in a country where most people are 18 inches tall but if you are, say, Dutch, you will struggle. Certainly, there is no way that two people could sit alongside one another in a Daihatsu Mira if either of them had shoulders.

  This brings us on to the next problem. Because the kei car can only be 3.4 metres long, there’s no point wasting any of that length with a bonnet. So the microdot engine sort of fits under the dash and you sit right at the very front of the car. This must be strange when you are having a head-on accident because your face could be less than a foot from the face of the chap coming the other way and you still wouldn’t have hit one another.

  Then there’s the styling. Or rather, there isn’t. Any attempt to give these cars a tapering roofline or a curved rear end is wasteful of precious capacity, which means all of them look exactly – and I mean exactly – like chest freezers. And because they have such tiny wheels they actually look like chest freezers on casters. And that, in turn, means they look absurd. And no one is going to spend their money on something that makes them look foolish.

  To get round this, the car manufacturers try to inject their chest freezers with a bit of funkiness and personality by giving them unusual names. They do this by getting the English dictionary and picking out words with pins.

  This means you have the Mitsubishi Mum 500, the Suzuki Alto Afternoon Tea, and from Mazda, the Carol MeLady.

  Would you go to work in a chest freezer called the Afternoon Tea? No. Neither would I, which is why, when I went to Japan last month, I got myself a 193mph, 473bhp four-wheel-drive, trixied up, hunkered down, road-burning controlled explosion. I got myself the new Nissan GT-R.

  It’s funny. In Japan, among the termite hill of kei cars, it felt like I was in a heavy metal blast from the past. It felt like I was blasting through a Girls Aloud gig in a rock dinosaur. But over here, things ought to be very different …

  The last time Nissan did a GT-R, it was based on the old two-door Skyline saloon. The company couldn’t do that this time round because the current Skyline saloon is too ghastly. So instead, a small team, in a hermetically sealed factory, set to work on a ground-up, handmade machine that would take the laws of physics and simply break them in half.

  The attention to detail has been extraordinary. For instance, the GT-R’s tyres are filled with nitrogen because ordinary air expands and contracts too much. And each gearbox is specifically mated to each handmade engine.

  It goes on. Japanese car companies rarely buy equipment from the round eyes. They always feel they can do better themselves. On the GT-R, though, you’ll find Brembo brakes. You’ll find a chassis that was developed initially by Lotus. You’ll find the best that Europe can offer mated to a computer control system that could only be Japanese.

  On the road, then, this £53,000 car – with its rear-mounted double-clutch gearbox and its handmade 3.8-litre twin turbo motor and its infinitely variable four-wheel-drive system – is, quite simply, how can I put this … very underwhelming. The noise it makes is normal. The ride is normal. The steering is normal. You can adjust all the settings as much as you like but it’ll make no difference. It still feels like a big Sunny.

  It’s not pretty, either. I know every shape and every crease serves an aerodynamic purpose, but it’s like free-form poetry. It’s like it was conceived by Bartok.

  Annoyed that Nissan could have lost the plot so badly, I drove it a bit harder. And then a bit harder still. And still it refused to reveal its hand. It was like driving a car that had fallen asleep. Like there was nothing that I, a mere human being, could do that would cause it to break into a sweat.

  There were no clues that I was driving something that could lap the Nürburgring faster than a Koenigsegg or a McLaren Mercedes. That I was in a car that can stop just as fast as a much lighter, ceramic-braked Porsche 911 Turbo.

  Even when I found a mountain road and went berserk, the GT-R remained utterly composed, absolutely planted. Occasionally, you’d catch a faint whistle from the turbos or maybe there’d be a little chaffinchy chirrup from the semi-slick tyres. But that was it. There was absolutely no drama at all. No sense that I was in something incredible. And the brakes, even after I’d pummelled them for half a day, were still ice cold and sharp.

  This, then, is an extraordinary car, quite unlike anything I’ve driven before. You might expect it, with all its yaw sensors and its G readout on the dash, to feel like a laptop. Or you might expect, with all that heavy engineering, for it to feel like a road-going racer. But it is neither of these things. It certainly doesn’t feel like it could do a 7.29-minute lap of the Ring. Even though I’ve seen a film of it doing just that.

  I dare say that if Michael Schumacher were to find himself in the eye of an Arctic blizzard, escaping from an exploding volcano, he might discover 10 per cent of this car’s abilities. But you? Me? Here? Forget it.

  Nissan, then, has done something odd. It has built a car for a time and a place and a species that simply don’t exist.

  8 June 2008

  Fair Porsche, my sweet Italian lover

  Boxster RS 60 Spyder

  If I were to walk round a modern-day motor show featuring all the latest cars with all their clever electronic gizmos, there might be one, or maybe two, that I’d think seriously of buying. While walking round a field in Leicestershire recently, I found about 200 cars that I’d have gladly swapped one of my kidneys for. There were a few I’d have swapped my heart for.

  It was the Auto Italia festival, an event at which thousands of car enthusiasts spend the day demonstrating who is best with a vacuum cleaner. They even have a competition to see who has the cleanest car. It is ridiculous.

  If you delve behind the preposterously lacquered paint and the Mr Sheened dashboards, however, you are left with acre after acre of machinery that will leave you breathless with desire. I wanted everything.

  And I’m not talking here about the fields full of Ferraris. Mostly, they were crummy 348s, which had wooden tyres and suspension made from old pianos. Nor was I overly bothered by the Lambos either. Owning a Countach or a Diablo is just another way of saying that you are deformed.

  No. The stuff that blew my trousers off was the humdrum 1970s cars from Fiat, Alfa Romeo and most of all, surprisingly, Lancia.

  Let us begin our romp down the autostrada of yesteryear with the Lancia Montecarlo. Early models were plagued with a tendency to lock up their front brakes and so Lancia took the unusual step of removing it from production while the problem was addressed. A year passed and everyone assumed the little sports car had gone for good. But no. Lancia then rereleased it, saying it had cured the issue by removing the servo. In other words, it had simply made the back brakes perform as badly as those at the front. Brilliant.

  Provided you never want to stop, you can buy a Montecarlo these days, in good condition, for about £4,000. And for that you get a 2-litre twin-cam mid-engined sports car with, if you want, a folding canvas roof, tweed seats and looks that could melt a girl’s face. I decided after about ten minutes that I didn’t want one at all. I needed one. It was more pressing than my next breath. I even started offering one owner some money and then, when that didn’t work, some quiet threats. ‘Look,’ I whispered. ‘This car will be no good to you if you have lost your legs. And you will, sunshine, if you don’t sell it to me …’

  His dignity was saved because, while threatening to burn his house down, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a selection of Fulvias. By modern standards, the Lancia Fulvia is not much to write home about. It has carthorse suspension at the back, a set-up that’s weirdly complicated at the front and a 1.6-litre V4 engine that, in the HF, develops just 115bhp. Fast? Well, yes, but only if you are a visiting Victorian, or you are used to driving a Motability shopping scooter.

  However, they are balls-achingly pretty and one of the show cars belonged to an old mate. ‘Hello, John,’ I said cheerily, but with a hint of Stanislavski menace. ‘Would y
ou like to sell me your car or would you like me to stab you in the throat and get the crowd to cheer as you gout arterial blood all over everywhere? Because those are your only choices.’

  Happily, from his point of view, I realized that I was actually leaning on the bonnet of a Delta Integrale at the time. And I decided that what I really wanted, more than anything in the world, was this ludicrous, left-hand-drive superstar from the original Sega Rally machine.

  Of course, people with blazers will explain that Lancias are old rot-boxes that fell to pieces long before anyone had a chance to drive them to the shops. But having driven across Botswana in a Beta last year, I can assure you this is bunkum.

  A classic Lancia will have no more problems than a classic Mercedes. Automotive time is a great leveller. So I’d made my mind up. I was going to buy, having buried the owner in a motorway bridge, a supercharged Lancia Beta HPE. Right up to the moment I spotted a right-hand-drive Fiat 124 Spider.

  Or no, hang on a minute. Isn’t that a 131 Mirafiori over there – the car that was advertised in a cage, growling? And it’s parked next to a 132. My head was starting to swim. And that’s when I spotted the Alfa Romeo Montreal.

  You may remember, at the beginning of the film True Lies, Arnie breaks into an embassy cocktail party at a snowy Austrian schloss. There are lots of cars outside but the only one that’s recognizable is a Montreal. And you can forget Morse’s Jag or Bond’s Aston. That’s the best bit of car casting yet. It is the perfect way of saying, without saying anything at all, what sort of people were at the party. People with style.

  This 2-litre coupé was first shown at a motor show in Montreal, hence the name, but by the time it reached production it had been given a road-going version of Alfa’s quad-cam, fuel-injected V8. Now with 2.6 litres, it developed 200bhp and had a top speed of 137mph. In 1970 that was lots.