Don't Stop Me Now (25 page)

The front, though: that’s where you want to be. Because, although the CLS is based on the ordinary E-class, it’s actually 40 per cent stiffer. Which means it’s 40 per cent more sporty. And to make the recipe even better, the car I tested had a 5.5-litre supercharged AMG

V8, the engine that sounds like a Second World War fighter and goes like a modern-day rocket.

Sadly, because it has such a rich seam of weapons-grade torque, Herr Beckenbaur’s car has to make do with the old five-speed automatic gearbox. It would rip Merc’s new seven-speeder to shreds. They say, as always, that the power of this engine is so brutish that the top speed of the car has to be electronically checked at 155 mph. But I saw 175 on the speedo, and it was still climbing like a bat out of hell when I ran out of road and had to hit the brakes.

Aaaaargh. They were astonishing. Mash your foot on to the brake pedal, and I’m not joking, it really does feel like your face is being torn off. The G forces are so immense it actually hurts.

This is because the CLS uses the same technology we first saw on the McLaren SLR. When it’s wet, the pads pulse slightly to keep the discs dry, and if you lift your foot off the throttle in a big hurry, the computer system notices and orders the braking system to tense so it’s ready for some action.

And what’s more, it’s the brakes that are also used to keep the car in check, should you find yourself on a motorway exit road going a little bit faster than is prudent.

Even if you have the traction control system turned off, Big Brother is still awake, and if he detects the onset of a slide, the offending wheel is individually reined in without you having to do a thing. It all sounds too brilliant for words.

But after just 10 minutes of hard use, the Mercedes
Achilles heel reared its ugly head. The whole dashboard went bright red as the on-board Blair delivered the bad news. ‘Brakes overheated. Drive carefully.’

Mercedes says it’s cut its profits from
£
3 billion to
£
1 billion a year in a drive to improve quality. But I fear it may have to cut them still further.

Certainly, some of the trim pieces on the CLS are a bit low-rent. The plastic on which the seat massage button is mounted looks like it’s come off a Hyundai.

But then, if I’m being honest, this is nit-picking and I really was brutal with the brakes. So let’s give Herr Beckenbaur’s car the benefit of the doubt. I certainly want to, because it was a gem: fast, handsome, well priced, comfortable and blessed with a handling balance that’s pretty close to perfect.

And here’s the thing. To hammer the point home about Merc’s car-for-everyone policy, I was going to sign off by listing a number of stupid small changes that I’d like to see on a CLS if I were to buy one. It was going to be stuff like a green steering wheel and a 5.6-litre engine instead of a 5.5.

But you know what? In truth, I can’t think of a damn thing I’d like changed. I’d take it as it is.

Sunday 20 March 2005

In two million years man managed to discover only three important things: fire, the fact that wood floats, and the horse.

Then within 100 years, starting in about 1820, he came up with everything else. Railways, cars, aeroplanes, horror stories, antibiotics, electricity, the telephone, the computer, the lawnmower, photography, the record player, the typewriter, barbed wire and, of course, linoleum.

One day you were painting bison on the side of your cave. The next, you were chatting on the ‘phone’ with Aunt Maud in Wakefield while listening to the news on your ‘radio’. It must have been a nightmare for the new-fangled science-fiction writers. Because by the time they got round to finishing their books all their ideas had become science fact.

But then we arrived in, ooh, about 1920 and everything just stopped.

Mobile phones. Word processors. The Eurofighter. They’re all just developments of ideas that came along in the nineteenth century. And it’s easy to see what went wrong: the British Empire collapsed.

I’m going to use Isambard Kingdom Brunel here as a case study. When he fancied the idea of building a new train or a new bridge or a new tunnel, he had to find
benefactors. And they were everywhere, gorged with cash from the empire’s 11.5 million square miles and its 400 million inhabitants.

Initial estimates for his Great Western Railway, which was to link London with Bristol, suggested it would cost
£
2.8 million. But this, as things turned out, would only have got it as far as Slough. The actual cost was a truly astronomical
£
6.5 million.

And when it was finished he went back to the financiers and said: ‘Let’s keep going. Let’s take the passengers off the trains in Bristol and put them on steamships to America.’ And they agreed, paying for the SS
Great Western
and then the SS
Great Britain
and, when that ran aground, the enormous SS
Great Eastern
. The biggest ship the world had seen, or would see, until the
Lusitania
came along, 50 years later.

Now imagine if IKB were around today. And try to imagine how far he’d get if he suggested to Network SouthEast that it should finance an idea he’d had for scramjet flight to the space station, and then plasma drive rockets to the most distant of Saturn’s moons.

Today nobody looks at the long term. Nobody builds great houses for the grandchildren and huge gardens for the generations to come. The quick-growing leylandii has replaced the oak as our tree of choice. And shareholders will fire any CEO who doesn’t turn a profit within the next quarter of an hour.

‘So thank you for your very kind offer, Mr Brunel. But would you mind awfully getting lost.’

Nowadays we celebrate James Dyson as a great engineer
because he invented a vacuum cleaner with no bag. And we swoon over the latest mobile phone because it can send a grubby 10-second video clip of your genitals to your girlfriend.

The single best invention I can think of in the past 20 years – 20 years! – is Sky Plus. But it’s not really up there, is it, with the invention of flight or electricity or the car.

Speaking of which…

You may marvel at the new Aston Martin V8, but may I prevail upon you to stop and think for a moment. Yes, it is handsome and, yes, it is fast. But it is still propelled by a series of small explosions, just like Karl Benz’s tricycle, more than 110 years ago.

I’m absolutely certain that, given a free rein and a bottomless vat of money, someone in Scotland, which is the font of all inventiveness, could by now have made a new type of engine that runs on brussels sprout peelings, perhaps, and develops limitless power.

But, instead, the great engineering minds are employed to think of new ways in which the cup holders can slide out of the dashboard. Honestly, they’re talking about the fitment of MP3 players in cars these days as though they’ve created a cure for the common cold.

The last truly great piece of automotive ingenuity came from Toyota who, in the late 1960s, showed the world that cars didn’t have to break down all the time. But since then the world’s car makers have been playing around with the seven degrees of separation.

We’ve had engines with three cylinders and five and
ten. We’ve had engines at the front, in the middle and at the back. We’ve had air bags for your face, your wife and your children. We’ve even had air bags for your testicles.

And we’ve had the Fiat Multipla. In the middle of the 1990s Fiat noticed that you could buy cars with one seat, two seats, three seats, four seats, five seats and seven seats.

Which meant there was a gap. In the big scheme of things it wasn’t a particularly big gap. But in the stagnant climate of late-twentieth-century industrial thrustiveness it was a yawning chasm. There was no car with… wait for it… six seats.

The solution they came up with was a family-sized hatchback that had three seats in the back and three in the front.

So radical and amazing was this that plainly the car needed a whole new look. And so the Multipla was born, the first car to resemble an Amazonian tree frog.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be a mistake. Customers liked their cars to resemble sharks or leopards or, er, cars. But not frogs. And so the Multipla was a monumental flop. And then it was dropped.

And now it’s back again. But this time around the quirky styling has been replaced with a blandness that beggars belief. I have to say that this is the most boring-looking machine in the whole of human history. I’ve seen more exciting cardboard boxes.

And to make matters worse, while Fiat was fiddling about, Honda cottoned on to the six-seat idea and came up with the FR-V, which I suspect may be the second most boring-looking car in the whole of human history.

There’s obviously a problem with this three-and-three layout. It means the car has to be square and, because it has to be tall too, to give an impression of space and practicality, it also has to be cubed. As a result, you end up with the Borg spaceship from
Star Trek
.

And there’s another problem, too, which becomes evident when you take one into town. While it will fit comfortably into spaces denied to the longer and more traditional people-carrier, its girth makes it a nightmare in narrow streets. I spent most of my week with the Honda and the Fiat, backing up.

It’s funny. I never really noticed this with the old Multipla. Maybe it’s because that front end was so scary, other people backed up to get away from it.

Or maybe it’s because the overpowering styling obliterated the faults. Asking how wide the old Multipla was would be like asking if Adolf Hitler had big feet. It sort of wasn’t important.

Anyway, if you live in a Georgian town with broad streets and you have precisely four children, which is best? On the face of it the Fiat looks good. While the top models cost around the same,
£
16,500, there’s a cheap entry-level Multipla for
£
13,300, whereas the least expensive Honda is
£
14,700. It should also be mentioned at this point that Fiat can sell you a diesel, whereas Honda cannot. Neither can do an automatic gearbox.

But I’m afraid that a test drive shows the Honda to be the better choice. It’s noisy, sure, but it rides more smoothly, it’s faster, and it feels as though it’s made from materials that will last beyond next Tuesday.

Let’s not forget that in the
Top Gear
customer satisfaction survey, Honda won and Fiat didn’t. By a long way.

To be honest, though, I really didn’t like either of them. They were dreary and bland, and the width really is a nuisance. So if you have three children, may I suggest you buy a packet of condoms. If it’s too late, buy a Toyota Corolla Verso.

Sunday 27 March 2005

So what, exactly, is God’s most stupid creation? The pink flamingo, the avocado pear, Stephen Joseph from the pressure group Transport 2000? There are many choices even before you get to the koala bear.

It sleeps for 18 hours a day, only waking up to gorge on eucalyptus leaves, which make it stoned. So stoned in fact that whenever it sees anything that isn’t a eucalyptus tree or another koala, it becomes so frightened it gives itself chlamydia.

This can’t be much fun. Sitting around in a tree all day, in a big fur coat, in Australia, with a bent mind and a sexually transmitted disease that you caught without actually having sex.

Mind you, I’ve just come back from a couple of weeks in Barbados, where I had plenty of time to study something even more mad. The cicada.

Finished in brown and green, this small insect is so completely camouflaged when sitting in a tree that not even the most eagle-eyed predator would stand half a chance of spotting it. So why, you may be wondering, does it make such a monumental din? I mean, if you’re hiding from certain death, it’s best not to bellow. This is the main reason why snipers, for instance, don’t crawl through long grass with ghetto blasters strapped to their backs.

And yet the virtually invisible cicada has been equipped with such a powerful voice that it must fold its own ears away before letting rip.

Scientists will tell you that this is because the poor thing is so well camouflaged it would never be able to find a mate without shouting. But come on. Moles manage. So does Steve Davis.

No, the real problem is that, contrary to the popular view in travel agency brochures, hot tropical nights are noisier than the opening of a new Las Vegas hotel. You’ve got the constant pounding of the surf, the frogs, which sound like a million wonky paddle fans, and the monkeys, who could give the Grateful Dead a run for their money. To be heard above this lot, you need to have a 400-watt mouth.

And now, to make matters even worse, the people of Barbados have started buying cars. Except that over there they are not really seen as cars as such. They are horns, which can also be used for moving people and stuff.

I have not seen a copy of the Barbados
Highway Code
, but plainly no one is told to mirror, signal then manoeuvre. There seems to be a commonly held view that you can do whatever you like, at whatever speed takes your fancy, so long as you are leaning on the horn at the time.

This means, of course, the cicada is safe from predators. No airborne hunter can hear it any more. But then neither can its potential mates, which means that from now to the end of its truncated time on the evolutionary cycle, the poor thing will be reduced to a life of onanism.

Interestingly, this brings me on to the new Peugeot 1007, which, for legal reasons involving James Bond, cannot be called the one-007 and must be referred to as the one thousand and seven.

The first and most striking thing about this car is its doors, which do not open in a conventional fashion. Instead, when you press a button, they slide backwards on runners.

At first it’s hard to see why this should be a good thing. Being French, they’ll be badly made and will therefore shoot backwards every time you accelerate. Though to counter this my test car had such a weedy 1.4-litre petrol engine and a power-sapping sequential gearbox that 0–60 mph took 18 seconds. This means there is no G force at all, and, as a result of that, the doors won’t fly off the handle.