Clarkson on Cars (37 page)

But no, the man in charge of the M1 lives in Surrey, as do all his relations and friends. He was born in Godalming, educated in Woking and thinks the north is a barren place where people eat mud, so every penny at his disposal is spent on the Surrey section of the M25.

This makes him something of a hero at local dinner parties where he is seen to be spending wisely. Well, matey, I’ll be something of a hero in the north when I come round to your house one night with some copper wire, a brace of crocodile clips and a battery.

I digress. There were other roads too, like the simply glorious A631 from Gainsborough to Bawtry. It’s smooth and mostly straight and everyone drives quickly. Obviously, everyone up there has sports cars paid for by EC farm subsidies but really, they do drive well.

They do not drive quite so well in Wiltshire. Here, nearly everyone has a Vauxhall Nova saloon with quite the skinniest tyres it is possible to imagine. From behind, these cars look like an elephant on four bite-sized unicycles.

And they drive so slowly that you really need sensitive measuring equipment to ascertain that any forward progress is being made at all. On the wonderful A350, you will find cars that have been travelling from Warminster to Blandford Forum for the last seventeen years.

I know about the slower pace of life in rural Britain, but surely, they must be hungry by now. And in need of a haircut, I should think. By the time they get there, the people they wanted to see will have moved to Australia.

However, having spent the past fifteen months travelling the world, the last fourteen days have, despite it all, convinced me that Britain is a truly remarkable country, with tiny pockets of individualism around every corner. I know of no country which can offer such a rich tapestry in such a small place. Move twenty miles and everything from the architecture to the accent changes.

But there is one thing that ties this whole country together. There are no kangaroos here.

Which makes me wonder just a little bit why on earth so many people with large four-wheel-drive vehicles feel the need to fit ‘roo bars’.

It doesn’t matter that they’ve been named bull bars in this country, I’d be willing to bet that, in your entire driving career, you will never, ever round a bend to find the way blocked by either species.

You may, however, find a person, in which case your bull bars turn the probability of his death into a foregone conclusion.

Being hit by a two-ton Range Rover is pretty much guaranteed to make someone’s day less enjoyable than might otherwise have been the case, but if the blow is dealt by a small piece of ironwork, he’ll be playing the harp by the time you’ve stopped skidding.

There’s talk of legislation being introduced to outlaw frontal automotive ironmongery but it’s far better to try a little bit of persuasion first. So here goes.

Bull bars are only really useful should you hit a bull. All the bulls in Britain are in fields, surrounded by electric fences.

In the olden days, children were lucky to get an orange and a piece of string for Christmas.

Small wonder then that they were happy to charge about the woods in their big shorts, making guns out of twigs. These were simple times.

My generation was a deal more sophisticated. For Christmas, I wanted Hot Wheels and in the woods, I needed a Johnny Seven machine gun with detachable pistol.

But now, toys need to have buttons. Kids don’t run around in the woods any more; they sit in front of a computer screen, pretending to shoot people. They don’t use Meccano or Lego to build anything, because even the simplest PC allows them to create their own space shuttle. 3D is out. 2D is in.

Why build a buggy out of an old pram and some cardboard boxes when you can have Super Mariokart on your Super Nintendo?

Today, the idea of doing anything mechanically is as daft as diphtheria.

And that means the children of today, when they climb into the car of tomorrow, will find the idea of a gear stick faintly idiotic. Which is why the car of tomorrow will not have one.

Already, the automatic gearbox, which was developed as a labour-saving device for the more mature motorist, is beginning to become more complicated than a life-insurance form.

Even in a basic car like the Ford Mondeo, you have the usual PRND21 arrangement but then there’s a button which switches the transmission between sport and economy modes. And then there’s another button which cuts the overdrive out. And in more expensive models, you get the option of a winter mode too.

It’s like my dishwasher. By the time I’ve figured out what all the knobs do, I could have gone to the sink and out Nanette Newmanned Nanette Newman. And then there’s the video, which frankly, is more useful as a dishwasher than as a device for taping television programmes; something it just cannot do.

However, children can work videos, and washing machines, and if the eleven-year-old I ran home the other day is anything to go by, they’re pretty bloody impressed with the sport/economy switch on my Jaguar’s gearbox too.

But this, by the time he’s driving, will be small fry – a DC3 alongside HOTOL. I know this because I’ve just been driving a BMW B3 Alpina Switchtronic.

Now this, I want to make it quite plain from the outset, is my kind of car. It has a huge 3.0-litre engine shoehorned into a tiny body and it goes like stink. Everything’s blueprinted and balanced too. It is a £45,000 honey.

But by far the most impressive feature was that switchtronic box which enables you to alternate between Mr Cardigan and Mr Shoemaker at the touch of, guess what, a button.

You can, if you like, pootle around all day with the automatic gearbox doing all the work but when the road is empty and the red mist descends, you simply take over manual control.

And then you change gear by hitting one of two little buttons on the back of the steering wheel: the one on the left takes you down a cog, the one on the right upshifts.

There is no clutch pedal and there’s no need to lift your foot off the throttle when changing gear – when the revs hit the red line, your index finger twitches and whoosh, the engine’s back on cam, hurling you at the horizon like you inadvertently hit the hyperspace switch.

The trouble is, you need to concentrate. For me, there is nothing natural in this process and while I can see it improves performance and enables you to keep both hands on the wheel at all times, I kept running up against Big Brother.

First, when you’ve made two quick changes, you need to wait a couple of seconds before you can make a third. Second, it won’t change down if your speed is too high. Third, if you forget, it will change gear for you automatically. Fourth, it goes into second when you stop and finally, I could never remember what gear I was in.

In a normal, manual car you reach for the gear stick and its mere location reminds you what’s what. With switchtronic, I kept trying to change up from fifth and then, in desperation, hitting the other button to see if I could get a reaction from that one.

Which I got from the car behind as, without the benefit of brake lights, I started to slow dramatically.

There is a little light which says what gear you’re in but there’s the problem. It is little. Very little.

I don’t doubt that with practice, I’d get the hang of it and that I’d never want to go back. In the same way as I’ve now got the hang of this Apple Mac and would not want to revert to a typewriter.

The thing is, though, that today’s children will expect a car to be operated by a series of buttons and will therefore find switchtronic completely natural. They will not need a period of adjustment and they will not care that the car’s computer won’t let them make mistakes.

And there’s the pity. Switchtronic, like traction control and anti-lock brakes, does enable you to go that bit faster and that bit more safely. But without the risk, where’s the fun?

In the woods, in 1967, if I shot you with my spud gun, you knew about it. In 1995, when a Nintendo dinosaur eats me up, I only have to hit the reset button.

I like gadgets. I like things that make a car go faster. And I especially like devices that keep me away from trees. But I also like driving, and there’s the rub.

Fly by wire may work in airbuses but real cars should have levers.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that there is no such thing as a bad car these days.

The Nissan Serena is a bad car. So is the Terrano. The Mini Convertible is a bad car and the same goes for the BMW 316i Compact. Then there’s the diesel Golf and the equally diesel Mercedes C class. I could go on. I haven’t mentioned the Lada Samara, for instance.

So why then, given the huge choice of cars on offer these days, do people buy cars like them?

Well, you only have to look at what some people wear to see that idiocy is alive and well these days.

I’m usually a bit baffled when I see someone ambling along in a curious pair of strides because he must have walked into a shop – and actually chosen them. He must have gone along the rack, discounting sensible, subtle alternatives. He must have pulled out the nasty pair, ignored the titters of the staff, tried them on and stood around in front of a mirror thinking, YES, these are the ones for me.

But hey, it’s only 30 quid. The average price people pay for a new car these days is £10,200 and that is big bucks. So how come people get it so wrong so often?

Well, figures show that most people don’t take test drives. Dealers report that nearly 90 per cent of BMW 7- and 8-series customers never set foot inside the model before they take delivery. They’re handing over maybe £50,000 for a car which, for all they know, could be absolute rubbish.

So if they aren’t taking test drives, how have they made the choice? Car magazines? I think not, as most tend to be read by children and even the biggest seller of the lot –
Top Gear
– only has a circulation of 137,000 which is small beer compared to the 2 million cars sold in Britain every year.

Motoring journalists in general perhaps? Nope. On the
Top Gear
television programme, I praised the Alpine A610 to the hills and Renault sold six. Quentin Willson told 6 million viewers that the top of the range Citroen XM was marvellous – and they sold seventeen.

It works the other way round too. I said the first incarnation of the current Escort was awful and within months, it became Britain’s best-selling car. I said the Toyota Corolla was worse and it is the world’s best-selling car.

I can only conclude from this that people are making their choice exclusively on advertising. Which explains everything.

People are buying the BMW 316 Compact because they really do believe it is the Ultimate Driving Machine. It is not. Damon Hill’s Williams Renault is.

Mothers are choosing that ghastly Nissan Serena because they understand it can seat a boy-scout troop. Yes, well so can a bus stop but you wouldn’t buy one of those to use on the school run, would you?

The Car In Front Is A Toyota. Not necessarily. I’ve just come home from the pub and I followed a Mercedes. Besides, what does that strap line tell me about a Toyota? Nothing.

Same goes for the new Nissan QX commercial. It Exists. So does dog dirt but I don’t want any outside my house.

And what the hell is going on with that Honda Civic on the television? For a start, I had to watch the ad four or five times before I knew what sort of car it was, and second, what is so clever about playing a film backwards?

But the absolute prize must go to Volvo. Now, the T5 is a truly terrific car and I was jumping around like a small boy when the 850 beat all comers in the recent Touring Car race at Donington, but why did that funny-looking chap in a big T-shirt drive across the Corinthian Canal on two rails when there’s a perfectly good bridge just upstream?

Of course, I do understand that television commercials are only supposed to let us know the car is available and that press ads give us a bit of meat for the bones, but really, you can’t go around spending thousands of pounds on something just because someone with blue spectacle frames at Goodyear Stickleback and Bunsen Burner has dreamed up a snappy strap line.

You Can With A Nissan. You can go to bed with Claudia Schiffer if you have a Sunny? You can use water instead of petrol in the 200? Ooh, I’d better have one then.

Nicole. Papa. Oh f *** off.

With advertising, car companies are trying to create an image but I am not inclined to spend ten grand on a Clio just because it is the favoured transport of a doddery old Frenchman and his daughter who spends all day with cucumbers on her eyes and some chocolate sauce on her face. Plus, she wears French knickers and I hate French knickers almost as much as I hate the French.

And then there’s the dude in the clever ad for the equally clever Audi A4. He’s a prat who likes to win and who thinks badges are important. He doesn’t like the A4 because it’s too understated.

All this tells us about the A4 is that it’s not a BMW which is a dangerous game to play in a country where people would sell their children to Moroccan drug dealers if it meant they could have a 316.

There are good advertisements though. I enjoy the aborigine and the Vauxhall Calibra much more than I enjoy that Tigra running into some big space hoppers on the beach.

The space hoppers tell us that the chaps at Lowe Howard and Spink were desperate whereas with the aborigine, we understand the Calibra is a quiet car. The trouble is that while it may well be the most aerodynamic production coupe in the world, it is not especially quiet.

If you want a quiet car, you should come round and buy my neighbour’s Volkswagen which this morning was utterly silent on account of the fact it would not start.

If only everything in life was as ridiculous as a car commercial.

I remember the first time I experienced the sheer magic of electric windows. I stood, eyes wide and bladder bursting with excitement as the Peugeot salesmen tried desperately to talk my dad into buying a 604.

It was an ugly car, and probably slow and thirsty too, but it had powered windows and I wanted my dad to buy it so much, I ached. There have been other disappointments in my life since – a divorce springs to mind – but no memory is quite so painful as the day when my father rejected the Peugeot and bought an Audi, which did not have electric anything.