Don't Stop Me Now (26 page)

Fine. But then there is the problem of knowing which button on the key fob opens which door. There is absolutely no way of telling which one does the left and which one does the right, and in the same way that toast always lands butter-side down, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll hit the wrong one.

So you’ll be standing there, trying to look cool in front of all those pretty school-run mums, while electronically opening the wrong door.

We’re told that electric sliding doors mean children can scamper into the back without having to fold the front seats forward, and this may be so, if your child was created by Lowry. But in these days of PlayStations and lard-burgers, most kids wouldn’t have a hope in hell.

Of course, where the one thousand and seven’s funny doors really do pay dividends is in narrow parking spaces.

If I lived in Paris I’d have one like a shot because there, where you’re allowed to park anywhere so long as it’s stylishly done, Starship Enterprise docking ports would open up a whole new range of possibilities. You could park on pavements and still be able to get out. Hell, you could even park between the tables of your local patisserie. I’d like that.

But I don’t live in Paris. I live in Britain, where we have out-of-town superstores with clearly defined car parking spaces and city centres that are rigorously patrolled by Nigerians to make sure that no one parks at all.

We therefore simply don’t need those doors in the same way that we don’t need a 4-million decibel horn, because we’re too polite to use it, and we don’t need diesel engines because, unlike the Romans, we don’t need massive torque for physically shoving other cars out of a parking space that’s rightfully ours.

This is what I love about the world of cars: that we can see national characteristics oozing out of every rivet and every weld. Indian cars have huge back seats because all the nephews and nieces will want to come too. Italian cars have a buzz. American cars wobble. German cars are resolute. Swedish cars have bigger wheels for the deep snow. And so it goes on. It’s why there has never been a truly global car. And it’s why, when we look at the Peugeot one thousand and seven, we have to completely ignore those doors, I’m afraid, and concentrate on the rest of it.

Well, that was my plan, but the doors, I’m afraid, kept cropping up, partly because they make the little Peugeot very expensive – at
£
12,000 it’s
£
1,000 more than its closest rival from Renault – and very heavy. Not only does this result in the woeful acceleration (I think it’s the slowest car from 0 to 60 on the market today) but less economical than it should be, too.

Then you have problems with practicality. Unlike, say, a Honda Jazz, which can accommodate five, the Peugeot is strictly a four-seater. And while the rear bench can be moved hither and thither in a number of amusing ways, the boot is never what you’d call generous. There’s also a high sill over which all your shopping must be humped.

On top of this, it’s about as much fun to drive as a smallish bus, leaning badly in the corners and never ceasing to amaze you with its complete lack of grunt.

Good points? Well, it scored very highly in the big independent safety tests and you can change various bits of interior trim if someone is sick on them or if you’re bored with the colour. They’ve even produced one version with interior trim designed by Sadie Frost and Jemima French, which I’m sure would be great, if you had the first clue who these people were.

The 1007, then, is the motoring world’s cicada. Blessed with only one notable feature which, at best, is useless and at worst isn’t notable at all.

Sunday 1 May 2005

Do you remember when you were growing up and all your friends were allowed to go on school exchange trips to exotic places like France and Germany? Well, how’s this for progress? We now have an 11-year-old girl from Tokyo in the spare room.

Now, I’ve been to Japan and it was strange. The bath in my hotel room was vertical and made from wood, the food was mostly still alive, there weren’t any chairs, the walls were made from rice, I was fed by a woman with a completely white face and a shoe size of minus three, all the bars were full of men in slippers, singing, the traffic hadn’t moved since 1952 and all you could buy from vending machines on the streets were cans of drink called Sweat. And soiled pants.

Once I tried driving from Tokyo to Yokohama but it was impossible because none of the road signs made any sense. Elsewhere in the world ‘centre’ is
zentrum
, or
centro
or some such derivation, but in Japan it’s just a meaningless squiggle. Honestly, I would have found more cultural reference points if I’d gone to Venus.

So after a week I went back to my hotel and spent the rest of the trip under my bed, hiding. And I was 40. So how on earth would an 11-year-old girl cope over here? To get round the fact that the poor little thing didn’t
speak a single word of English, she was sent with one of those gadgets that only exists in
Star Trek
, the mind of Stephen Hawking and most Japanese high street electrical stores.

You type a message in Japanese and it speaks the words in a sort of Daleky Engrish. And the first words it spoke, just five miles from the airport, were ‘car sick’. Plainly, after 11 years in a Tokyo traffic jam, our visitor was unused to travelling at speeds in excess of 3 mph.

She was also confused by her supper on that first night, picking up a spoon and staring at it in much the same way that a traveller from the future might pick up and stare at a gramophone record. Plainly it made no sense. But then neither did any of the foodstuff that had been placed on her plate.

I couldn’t even use her gadget, partly because all the keys were in Japanese and partly because it had stopped saying ‘car sick’ and was now saying ‘broken’, over and over again.

We’d been told that the whole point of her trip was to provide an experience of England, but after the spoon episode we did give her some chopsticks. And then, after watching her use them to wrestle with a six-inch Yorkshire pudding, I’m afraid I relented and drove all the way to London for some sushi. To be honest, I felt so sorry for her I’d have gone out and harpooned a whale if that’s what she’d wanted.

To make matters worse she had arrived with a suitcase full of presents, all of which were exquisite but completely unfathomable. I mean, what kind of face are you supposed
to pull when you’ve just been given what looks like a squidgy test tube full of pink and green sticky tape? It turned out to be a pen that writes a musical score as you drag the nib across the paper. Honestly, I’d never seen anything so amazing in my whole life. But then everything’s relative. She’d never been to a house that had dogs on the inside and trees on the outside.

It’s said that genetically the human race is defined at one end by the tribesmen of New Guinea and at the other by the Basques. These, apparently, are the bookends. But I’m sorry. I reckon the genetic North Pole is a 6 ft 5 in. Brit and the genetic South Pole an 11-year-old Japanese schoolgirl.

And that brings me to the new Lexus GS430 I’ve been driving these past few days.

Like all cars, it has doors, seats, pedals, a steering wheel and lights at the front and the back. But how can this be, when it comes from a people who are baffled by a spoon? How do they make something so instantly recognisable as ‘a car’ when they can’t eat mashed potato without vomiting? We have knives and forks. They have chopsticks. We lie down in the bath. They stand up. We cook food. They don’t. Their culture is completely different from ours, and yet the Lexus, on the face of it, is just the same as a Jaguar, a Mercedes or a BMW.

Except it isn’t. It is much, much quieter. At 70 mph it’s so silent you can hear your hair growing. Sitting in your garden after a lovely lunch is more frantic. In the cabin you are so isolated from the real world that you get some idea of what it might be like to be dead.

The six-speed automatic box swaps cogs like an albatross changes direction, and even if you do put your foot down, the big V8 responds by humming, quietly, like it’s in a church arranging flowers. Driving this car is like being wrapped up in a duvet and carried from place to place by a small white cloud. Only faster. It is far from being a sports car – driving this car with gusto would be like going into a sword fight armed with a cushion – but in a straight line, at least, the 4.3-litre engine delivers the goods. It’d easily hang on to the coat-tails of a similarly priced BMW 5-series.

But the best thing about this car is the layout of the interior. If we ignore the spectacularly horrible wooden trim we find a sense of order and logic that would make Mr Spock look like a swivel-eyed madman. All the major controls are where you want them to be, and do what you want them to do, and all the minor controls are hidden away in a flap by your right knee.

Problems? Well, apart from the wood trim you have to dig deep to find anything tangible. The boot’s an awkward shape, I suppose, and there isn’t quite as much space in the back as you might expect. But neither of these things is a good enough reason for buying something else. As a long-distance cruiser this car is quite simply outstanding. Better than a Gulfstream V, and maybe even a rival for teleporting.

Unfortunately, I didn’t like it at all, partly because it’s about as attractive as a sponsored town centre roundabout and partly because Lexuses these days are driven by people who play golf, or people who like to slap their hos and
drive around at night shooting at business rivals with sub-machine guns. Gangstas? Golfers? I don’t want to look like either.

Mostly, though, I don’t like this car because it feels like a facsimile of the real thing. And that’s hardly surprising because that’s exactly what it is. A copy. A Mercedes clone.

Cars sit in the Japanese psyche along with spoons and mashed potato. They don’t come naturally. Oh sure, they can copy a Mercedes and use it to earn vast lumps of foreign currency, but how do you copy flair and panache and feel? The simple answer is: you can’t, so you end up with a completely soulless driving experience.

It’s a bit like those vegetarians who insist on eating hamburgers that are designed to look, feel and taste like the real thing. But they’re just not.

Technically, this new Lexus is probably better than a Mercedes, in the same way that a golden egg made by laser is going to be technically better than one of Karl Fabergé’s originals. But which one would you rather have?

Sunday 8 May 2005

A recent piece in the motoring section of Her Majesty’s
Daily Telegraph
contained a bold claim. That south of a line through Stoke-on-Trent, Derby and Norwich, and excepting Bodmin Moor in winter, there is almost nowhere in England where it might be a pleasure to drive a car for more than 10 consecutive minutes between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

The writer suggests that with 31 million vehicles on the road the country is now too congested to allow for untrammelled liberty at the wheel, and that these days nobody buys into the suggestion by car makers that their products are indispensable instruments of self-expression.

I’m sure this strikes a chord, but actually I think the last time someone was so wrong he was standing by an aeroplane at Croydon airport in 1938 waving a piece of paper around.

First of all, contemporary car advertisements feature dancing robots and windscreen wipers crawling across the floor and Gene Kelly breakdancing in the rain. The days when they showed a car whizzing hither and thither on some deserted mountain road to the musical accompaniment of Steppenwolf are long gone.

That’s because advertising agencies think like you do, and you think like our friend from the
Daily Telegraph
.

You think that because of the traffic and the speed cameras and the idiot in front it is no longer possible to enjoy more than three-tenths of a car’s performance envelope. And that it’s a waste of time buying a 155-mph BMW when you’ll get to work just as quickly in a
£
2.50 Perodua.

You’ve probably worked out – as I have – that if you parked all of Britain’s 31 million vehicles nose to tail the traffic jam would be a staggering 82,000 miles long. And what’s more, on Friday evening, coming home from work, you probably thought you were at the end of it.

I’m sure, too, that you look at all those empty roads on
Top Gear
and think,’ Yeah, right…’ Even my nine-year-old boy, whose school run takes a torturous 90 minutes, said the other day that the big wide shots of deserted tarmac were ‘unrealistic’.

But you know something: they’re not. We have neither the time nor the inclination, frankly, to digitally erase other traffic. We don’t film on Sundays at four in the morning. And nor do we have the power to close roads for our own gratification.

What’s more, I have a test route on which I take all the cars I borrow. And not once in 10 years have I had the run spoiled by traffic. Of course, I encounter other cars trundling along from time to time, but that’s what a 500-bhp engine is for, surging you past the dunderhead in a torrent of g-force and noise.

Last night at 6.30 p.m., just 70 miles from Trafalgar Square, I was able to fully explore the outrageous performance characteristics of a TVR Sagaris, changing
down two gears for the corners, feeling the loaded tyre straining for grip, then feeding in the power after I’d kissed the apex just so.

Last week I was in a Mercedes SLK 55 in Norfolk, on that arrow-straight road going past Lakenheath air force base. And had I been so inclined I could have kept my foot buried in the shag pile for about half an hour.

In essence, for every clogged-up road you can show me, I’ll show you ten that provide the driving enthusiast with every conceivable challenge and every conceivable view. I’ll show you roads that still provide the Steppenwolf soundtrack, roads you used to see in the car advertisements, roads that can still tingle the very follicles of your soul. Bikers know what I’m on about here. You ask one.

And then name any county you like, even the ones that snuggle up to London itself, and I’ll find you a damn sight more than 10 consecutive minutes of high-octane red-line thrills. I’ll find you a round trip that’ll pluck the strings of your heart like it’s a harp. These roads are there, I promise you. All you need to bring along is a decent car.