Don't Stop Me Now (16 page)

So, yes, the world’s supercars would take it on a long straight, but come on. What long straight? Are you going to take your Ferrari up to 180 on the M27 to make a point? I don’t think so.

And anyway, eventually you’d get off the motorway and the Evo would catch you up again. This is because, when it comes to the business of going round corners, the Evo is quite simply in a class of its own.

You turn in and immediately a bewildering array of acronyms awaken from their electronic slumber to get
you round the bend at a pace that will leave you reeling.

On the previous generation of Evo VIII the all-wheel control (AWC) gave priority at all times to the anti-lock braking system (super-ABS) which meant that under heavy braking the active centre differential (ACD) and the active yaw control (AYC) were disengaged.

Not any more. Now you can set the attitude of the car under braking, and still the yaw moment will be controlled.

Mumbo-jumbo? Not from behind the wheel it isn’t. You fly through corners thinking how in God’s name is this possible. You’re being flung out of the supremely supportive seat, everything that isn’t bolted down is being thrown round the interior, and yet the tyres, which are still just rubber, are hanging on.

All Evos are good at this, but the MR FQ-340, perhaps because of the reprogramming or perhaps because it has an aluminium roof to lower the centre of gravity, can make you seriously cross-eyed.

I urge you with all my heart to beg, steal or borrow one of these things and take it to a quiet road you know well. It will completely redefine your concept of what driving’s all about.

In the hands of a Formula I racing driver, a Porsche Carrera GT would be faster. But if the world’s future depended on me getting from here to Stow-on-the Wold in less than 10 minutes, I’d take the Mitsubishi every time. It inspires such extraordinary confidence and there’s always the sense that, no matter how fast you ask it to go round a corner, it has plenty of grip left in reserve. It is magical.

What I really love, and I do hope the people who edit this page have shown this in the pictures, is the way its muscles seem to be growing out of all those ducts in the front. You get the impression that the machinery is barely contained within the body and that it’s torn great holes in the metal, in the same way that the Incredible Hulk messed up his shirt whenever he became angry.

That said, however, this is far from a good-looking car. Underneath all the visual froth, it really is a cup of instant coffee, an extremely dull, four-door Japanese saloon car. And that spoiler doesn’t help. Imagine Huw Edwards with a big bling signet ring and you get the idea.

You curl up like a foetus with embarrassment every time you park it in a built-up area, because you know everyone’s looking and everyone’s thinking, ‘What a prat.’

Still, because it is a four-door saloon it is reasonably practical. I mean it has a boot and so on, and it does come with such niceties as air-conditioning and electric windows. It also has one of those stereos that slide out of the dash and beep a lot. However, not being 12, I couldn’t make it work.

It wasn’t the end of the world, though, because once I was up past, ooh about three, the din coming out of the Matrix-Churchill supergun at the back would have drowned out even Danny Baker. It’s a rich, deep baritone that rattled every single window in my house whenever it started.

What I liked even more, though, was the ride. Yes, the body is as stiff as a teenager but, unlike previous Evos,
this one can actually run over manhole covers without snapping the people inside.

It isn’t even on nodding terms with ‘comfortable’ but it’s not bad. And I like to think that by giving the suspension more bounce, the new lightweight wheels are in contact with the road more often, giving even more grip.

This, I know, has been a furiously technical and deeply insightful look at a car and if you were hoping for 1,000 words on satsumas, followed by 30 on the car, I apologise. Normal service will be resumed next week.

In the meantime, those of you who love cars, and love driving, go and try the Evo. After a mile you’ll be vomiting superlatives too.

Sunday 25 July 2004

Damn it. I had some plans to introduce foxhunting in cars when the more traditional equine variety is banned, but now the government has announced it is deciding whether four-wheel-drive vehicles should be banned from Britain’s ancient rights of way.

At the moment, you can drive any car down any so-called green lane providing you can prove that it was once used as a road. Those of a rambling disposition – and remember the Ramblers’ Association began its life as an offshoot of the communist movement – say this is preposterous. You shouldn’t be able to drive a Range Rover down the Ridgeway just because it was once used by a bullock cart in 1628.

Now I agree, people who spend their weekends in combat trousers pushing one another’s Land Rovers out of muddy puddles are probably mental. I certainly wouldn’t use one as a babysitter, that’s for sure. But if they want to spend their free time driving their Isuzu Troopers into a lake, that’s their business. And anyway, only 5 per cent of the nation’s enormous network of country paths are available to off-roaders, so taking that small piece of the pie away does seem a bit unfair.

Fairness, however, doesn’t really bother eco-twerps. They had a speed limit on all waterways in the Lake
District, except a tiny part of Windermere on which normal people could water-ski and ride jet bikes. Now, however, thanks to the communists, even this little piece is about to be taken away and given back to Bill Oddie.

If off-road cars are banned from the countryside, we may have a problem, because there are also whisperings in the rectory of power that they may also be banned from town centres. Everyone, apparently, is getting fed up with mums in their Chelsea tractors taking up too much space and generally bashing into everything.

So all in all then, not an especially good time for Land Rover to stick its neck above the battlements and announce the arrival of a new Discovery. A car that cannot be used in town… or out of it.

Now I should make it crystal clear at the outset that I absolutely loathed the last Disco. It used the old Range Rover’s chassis, which means it was rooted in the late 1960s, and boy, could you tell on the road. You could have given one to an asylum seeker as a sort of welcome-to-Britain gift and he’d have gone straight back home again.

And it had the most awful image problem, because it was driven either by mums or by murderers. Mums liked the seven seats. Murderers liked the early models, at least, with proper locking differentials, which were very good off-road. This meant they could drive far into the woods to bury their victims’ heads.

The new car is a completely different animal. The raised rear roof line remains for those who have a pet giraffe, and the doors seem to have come from a different
car but, overall, there’s no doubt that it’s a looker. A sort of Matra Rancho for the twenty-first century if you like.

Underneath, you get a separate chassis and a monocoque, so you have the toughness to deal with the green lanes you won’t be driving on and plenty of refinement in towns, where you won’t be driving either.

It is a hugely comfortable car to drive: quiet, not too roly-poly in the bends and blessed with an extraordinarily delicate throttle pedal that makes parallel parking – even on a steep hill – a complete doddle. The only thing I really didn’t like about the new Disco driving experience was the parking sensors that beeped pretty much constantly and went hysterical when I was still miles from the car behind.

What good is 2 feet in a modern city-centre parking slot? They should be set to go berserk when you’re 2 millimetres from impact, not 2 feet.

This is especially annoying, because the latest Disco is so big that you’re always 2 feet from everything. You could be in Paris and still be only 2 feet from your own front door. Mind you, at least this does mean that there’s now a small boot to be found behind the third row of seats.

Under the bonnet you get a 4.4-litre version of Jaguar’s 4.2-litre V8. This could uproot trees with its torque and it surprises you with its power. And if you don’t fancy mpg figures in the low teens, you can have a diesel that uses the stunning twin turbo from Jaguar’s S-type.

Inside, while you don’t get the style or flair of a Range Rover, you do get a sense of utilitarian toughness. You
could certainly detonate a small – let’s say one-kiloton – bomb in there, and nothing would break. Prices haven’t been announced yet, but expect the base models to start at less than £30,000 and the more expensive, HSE petrol versions to nudge
£
50,000.

The Discovery is likely to be better off-road than its big brother, the Range Rover. It is also bigger, more powerful, more torquey, faster, more practical – thanks to the seven seats – more economical and considerably cheaper.

On this basis it would be easy to sign off by saying the Disco is better than one of the best cars in the world. But I’m afraid we’re far from the end of the story. You see, the Range Rover is actually a five-seater executive car that happens to have four-wheel drive. Its rivals are the Mercedes S-class and the Jaguar XJ8.

The Discovery is the other way round. It is supposed to be an off-road car that you can use on the road. Its rivals are the John Deere tractor and the wellington boot. This is why the new version worries me. I have not yet had a chance to take it off-road, but I know I’ll miss having a selection of levers that make an almighty clunking noise when you pull them, as solid chunks of pig iron interlock with other solid chunks of pig iron.

Instead, you get a rotary knob that you use to tell the car what sort of surface you’re on: grass, gravel, a muddy track, sand or the M1. The onboard computer then changes the settings to optimise the diffs and the ride height and the throttle sensitivity.

In theory it sounds amazing, and in practice it’ll
probably work beautifully. But if I were in the middle of the Kalahari, I’d rather have two chunks of pig iron than some silicon chips that were designed and developed by four blokes in Banbury. Of course, you may argue, the Discovery will not be used in the Kalahari or even the Lake District, so why worry about how it will perform there?

Oh, come on. That’s like saying a nuclear missile will never be fired, so why worry whether it will fly. It’s nice to know it can.

Whatever, one day soon I’ll do something mad and adventurous with the new car to see if it can handle the rough stuff and then I’ll report back.

In the meantime, I do have some concerns. The man from Land Rover could lift and tilt the middle row of seats easily, but that’s because he was built like a supertanker’s anchor and had arms like slabs of ham.

I struggled, and I suspect a mum with a screaming child under one arm would be completely flummoxed. The Volvo XC90, which is also made by Ford, remember, is a much more practical and marginally more spacious proposition – and cheaper, too, it must be said.

I also noted that each occupant in the rear is given controls to change the radio station. This sounds fine in theory, but do you let your kids choose what they listen to when you’re driving? I don’t. And if they had the wherewithal to override my decision and switch to Radio 1, I’d take a hammer to them – and their control panels – within the first three miles.

Here’s the big one, then. Would I swap my Volvo for
a Disco? The Land Rover’s certainly nicer to drive. It feels more substantial, too, as though you’re getting more ‘stuff’. It also has better engines and undoubtedly more ability off-road. However, I mainly need a device for moving children to and from school, so the answer is ‘no’.

As a car for mums, the Disco is narrowly beaten. But at the first possible opportunity I’ll take one off-road and we’ll see just how it shapes up as a car for murderers.

Sunday 22 August 2004

There is a great deal in the news these days about the forthcoming election in America, in which an incoherent man with eyes that are suspiciously close together is up against a man with an enormous chin. Why? We aren’t treated to daily updates from the elections in Lesser Micronesia, or Holland, so why are we inundated with every last utterance from these super-buffoons?

A cynic might say that the newspapers and television stations maintain permanent offices in America and need to keep the staff employed with something. A more rational person would explain that this is more than a national election. It’s a plebiscite to decide who becomes leader of the free world.

OK, well if this is the case: if he really will be my leader, why can’t I have a vote? Why should I leave the choice to a bunch of tobacco-chewing backwoodsmen who aren’t even bright enough to mark the voting papers properly?

I mean it. If the president of the United States really does think he’s the leader of the free world, then the free world should have a say in who gets the job. That’s me, you, every Indian, every Russian, every German. And yes, every Iraqi, too. All of us.

But no; our fate is in the hands of a people whose IQ is
generally smaller than their waistbands. A people who’ve trawled their 263 million citizens and come up with Bush and super-chin as the alternatives. A people whose soldiers wear sunglasses while trying to defuse trouble on the streets of Baghdad. You’re not Jean-Claude Van Damme, you idiots. Take them off. Let them see your eyes. Or are you like the president? Do you only have one?

As a sort of protest about everything, but the sunglasses thing most of all, my wife recently decided to purge everything American from the house.

At first, I suspected this would be a long and painful task that would send us back to the Dark Ages, but do you know what? Most of the electrical equipment is from Japan, or Germany. The furniture is largely Italian or British. And pretty well everything else was made in China.

All I could find that bore the legend ‘Made in America’ was my toothbrush, which makes you wonder what they’re all doing over there, apart from cleaning their teeth.