Don't Stop Me Now (9 page)

And I haven’t even mentioned the sort of people who drive the damn things. They are not hairdressers. In fact, come to think of it, they wouldn’t know what a hairdresser was, with their mad barnets and their
huge, sprouting face-fuzz. And they are always dirty because they have to spend so much time under the car, mending it.

David Attenborough is currently putting the finishing touches to a six-part documentary about the life of bugs. Doubtless he has been to the ends of the earth in search of all the most rare and disgusting creepy-crawlies. But there was no need, because there’s no insect that can’t be found under an MG driver’s fingernails.

These guys bathe in engine oil. They eat Swarfega. And they talk and talk and talk about nothing but their infernal, limp-wristed, boneless-handling, sloth-slow, pug-ugly cars that are so unreliable even the damn wheels need servicing every few hundred yards.

‘It takes you back,’ they always say. And I’m sure it does, to a time of diphtheria and demob suits. Frankly, I’d rather go forward, and that brings me slithering to a halt beside the car you see in the pictures this week: the new MG SV.

My God, it’s a beast. There’s nothing wheezing or asthmatic about the huge V8 that lives under its bonnet. Though it can muster a wonderful bronchial cough when you poke its throttle with a stick.

Honestly, when you hear this thing start, it feels like everything within a hundred yards of the air intakes, all the air, the birds and the flies, have been sucked into the cylinders.

It started out in life as one of the world’s worst engines: the 4.6 that powers Ford’s Mustang in America. But Rover have changed everything, even the block, to create
a snarling, chesty monster that spits fire and havoc down those twin Scorpion exhaust vents.

Fuel consumption? Well, let me put it this way. Flat-out at 165 mph it’s downing a kilo of unleaded every minute.

In standard tune you get 320 bhp, which, in a car that’s made entirely from carbon fibre and weighs just 1,400 kg, is enough to get you from 0 to 60 mph in 5.3 seconds. The car I drove, however, had been tweaked to give 400 bhp. And you can buy a nitrous kit to take it up to 1,000 bhp.

Yes, 1,000 bhp – 200 more than Michael Schumacher used to win his last Grand Prix championship.

All we ever hear about Rover these days are the disaster stories. We’ve had the pension fund scandal, the losses, the deal with the Chinese to produce cars jointly – that fell through – and the tie-up with the Indians that has spawned the horrid little City Rover.

Even this new SV was born from a botch-up. Rover spent a couple of million buying an Italian company called Qvale that nobody had even heard of, and no one could pronounce.

I think they thought they might be able to cross the word Qvale out and put an MG badge on instead.

But in fact they ended up throwing pretty much the whole thing away.

I’m told that only its windscreen wiper motors have survived.

The new chassis of the SV is therefore being made in Italy by the same firm that makes the chassis for Ferrari and Lamborghini. The body is made on the Isle of Wight. The
engine is American. And Rover’s so short of money, it has to borrow trucks to bring all these pieces to Longbridge, where they’re all nailed together. This does not bode well.

So I am genuinely delighted to report that the heart of the beast is wonderful. A bona fide masterpiece.

The handling’s pretty good, too. There isn’t as much grip as you might have been expecting, but when you overstep the mark it puts a huge, gleaming smile on your face as the rear steps out of line in a totally controlled power slide.

Whoever set up this chassis knew what he was doing and what the enthusiastic driver wants. He is one great engineer, and I hope he makes man-love with the man who did the engine. I hope too that they have many man-babies together and that they all go on to be engineers as well.

And oh, how I wish we could end it there. But we can’t. There are many more inches of newsprint to fill and I’m afraid it’s bad news all the way.

First of all, this car is not priced to compete with a TVR or a Ford Mustang. It is priced to compete with the Porsche GT3, and that means it arrives on the market with its Birmingham accent, sporting a price-tag of
£
75,000. And that’s for the base model. The faster ones will be up there in six-figure la-la Lambo land.

Now this car is fast. Be in no doubt about that. But it simply isn’t as fast as the German and Italian thoroughbreds with which it must compete. It’s not very well equipped either. There is no satellite navigation, no air bag, and the seats must be moved fore and aft manually.

More worryingly, it’s not very well made. The day started with a dead instrument panel, which was a nuisance but not the end of the world. But pretty soon the anti-lock braking had also packed up, and that was more armageddonish.

Inside, there’s nowhere to put your left leg, the windows don’t go all the way down, the gearbox is awful, the wind noise at speed is terrible, the trim is woefully cheap, the seats don’t offer enough lateral support, and it is very easy to bang your head on the door frame. I know. One minute I was going round a corner, the next the rear tyres found some grip and shortly afterwards there was much sickness and a handful of stars.

Some said this was mild concussion. But I thought it might have had something to do with the petrol fumes that leak into the cockpit when you’re throwing it around a bit. Or maybe I thought it was petrol fumes because I was concussed. Or perhaps someone slipped me a tab of acid. God knows, but for 24 hours after driving this car I felt decidedly odd.

I feel odd now, and a bit cruel, because I wanted to like the SV. I think it is extremely good looking, a brutal symphony of testosterone and muscle, and I wish all cars sounded like it. At 150 mph it sounds… well, like rock’n’roll.

I really did hope that it would detonate the whole prissy wet weekend that is the MG experience by running off with your sister to a heroin den in east Africa. I wanted it to be bad. I wanted to take it to an MG owners’ club event and blow all the bugs out of their beards. But alas…

Yes, it is exquisite to drive, but the attention to detail and the overall quality just isn’t good enough for a
£
75,000 car.

And speaking of attention to detail, Happy Christmas to you all.

Sunday 21 December 2003

It has always been accepted that the car is the second most expensive thing you will ever buy, after a house. Really?

Anne Robinson admitted in her newspaper column last weekend that she has been bombing around in a Perodua Kelisa – a car built in a jungle clearing by people who go to work in shoes made from leaves.

Nonetheless, it costs just
£
5,000, so taking a family of four to the Caribbean for a summer holiday would be considerably more expensive.

There are other things which cost more, too, like a pair of binoculars I saw the other day in a shop window on Walton Street, or some kitchen cabinets, or a piece of jewellery from one of those shops on Bond Street. You could, if you were a mentalist, spend
£
5,000 on a suit or a cooker, or a set of speakers for your drawing room.

Getting married costs more than a Perodua Kelisa. Getting divorced costs more than two. And you’d need a fleet to pay for the cost of educating a child, or dying.

The thing is, though, that you don’t want a Perodua Kelisa, because it sounds like a disease, only has three cylinders and takes a fortnight or so to accelerate from 0 to 60. You know that you can’t have a real car, not a new one anyway, for much less than
£
9,000.

I would have concurred, but then, for reasons that
aren’t exactly clear, someone brought a new Fiat Panda round to my house to test. The cheapest version costs
£
6,295 and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that Elton John spent more than that on his hair.

I therefore wasn’t expecting much. And to reinforce this view, I remember the old Fiat Panda well. Styled by someone who only had access to a ruler, it came with hammocks instead of seats, no interior trim and the top speed of a Galapagos turtle. It was fine for the walnut-faced peasantry of Italy but not really on for anywhere else.

I was therefore a little surprised to find that the cheapest new Panda comes as standard with electric windows, an adjustable steering column, remote central locking, pre-tensioning seat belts, two air bags, a stereo and power steering that can be made super-light in the city.

Much more is available. Air-conditioning, for instance, as well as a sunroof, a CD player, parking sensors and air bags for your testicles. But even if you go mad with the options list, it’s still nowhere near the second most expensive thing you’ll ever buy. I bet Barry Manilow spent more on his new nose. I bet Danniella Westbrook spent more powdering hers.

Hell, I bet you couldn’t even buy a real panda for
£
6,300.

The first time I went out in it, it was raining. After half a mile the rain had turned to a sort of icy hail, and five minutes later it felt like I’d gone to another planet. Or maybe Canada. There was thunder, lightning and a blizzard of such ferocity that within moments the road was invisible under its new white blanket.

In front of me a Range Rover slithered to a halt,
bumping into the kerb, then sliding back down the hill. Ordinary cars had had it, their fat, sporty tyres utterly lost in the Arctic chill.

Yet my little Panda soldiered on, its skinny little rubber tyres cutting through the snow like four Stanley knives. Not once did it even give the impression of being in difficulty.

The next time I went out in it was Saturday night, and it had an even bigger surprise up its sleeve. The back was so roomy that it not only swallowed all three children but even gave them enough space in which to fight.

And then it was Sunday morning and time for minirugby. Now since Jonny Wilkinson punted that last-minute drop goal between the posts in Sydney, the number of people turning up with their offspring for training has swelled to the point where the car park looks like Bangkok at rush hour.

But this was no problem with the Panda, which slotted neatly between the posts of a croquet hoop on the bowling green. ‘What the hell’s that?’ cried the dads, mocking my car’s unusual appearance. ‘Handy,’ I replied, mocking the four-mile walk they’d had from the field where they’d parked their BMW X5s.

And there’s another advantage the Panda has over its larger and more expensive siblings. Normally it takes three or four minutes for their big engines to heat the cabin. But the Fiat was amazing. Turn on the engine – I timed this – and in just 21 seconds soothing warmth was flowing through the heater vents. In fact, it goes from 0 to 60°C almost as fast as it goes from 0 to 60 mph.

The 1.1-litre version takes 15 seconds to cover this yardstick and that, in human terms, is 18 months. The 1.2 isn’t much better, taking 14 seconds, although for some extraordinary reason it’s more economical. It’ll average more than 50 mpg.

However, I don’t want you to be put off by the lack of performance because, being Italian, it never feels underpowered or lethargic. In fact, I have to say it feels like the fastest car I’ve ever driven.

After the snow had been blown away by the gales, and the roads returned to normal, I couldn’t believe how much fun the Fiat was. Panda? Grizzly more like. You roar away from junctions in a cocoon of noise. ‘Grrrrrr,’ it goes up throughfirst, and ‘Grrrrr’ again all the way through second.

You brake late for the corner, turn in, and so long as you have the steering in its ‘normal’ setting there’s a huge amount of feedback from the road. It doesn’t whisper or mumble; it shouts at you through a megaphone. I’ve driven sports cars that are less communicative.

This is a car that puts a huge grin on your face. It waves its arms about and shouts, much like a waiter in an Italian restaurant. And sticking with this metaphor for a moment, the food it serves up, with aplomb, is delicious and tasty too.

But the best thing is, you’re rarely going faster than 24 mph. And this means you can have all the excitement of driving with almost none of the danger. If the brakes were to fail, for instance, you’d coast to a halt long before you hit the hedge.

And that, of course, brings me on to the biggest problem
with all Fiats. We assume the brakes will fail, and that the crankshaft will come off, and that the windows will start to play the hokey-cokey, while the central locking thinks it’s the horn. Fiats feel flimsy.

And it’s not just a perception either. In the recent
Top Gear
survey, Fiat had two cars in the bottom 10 and none at all above 93rd. Owners criticised quality, poor dealers and the high cost of spare parts. Nearly 72 per cent of Seicento drivers said they would not buy one again.

The Panda, however, breaks with tradition here. It feels much more robust than the Renault Mégane CC I wrote about two weeks ago, but then a bin liner would also have felt more robust. No, the Panda feels German. It feels like bits won’t drop off. It feels good.

Of course, this is only a feeling. The car was launched just two weeks ago, so it’s impossible to predict what will happen in the long run. But I will say it’s worth more of a punt than a Punto.

Put simply, I loved it. When it was here, I drove nothing else. The Mercedes SL, the Volvo XC90, all the other test cars, they all just sat on the drive as I bombed hither and thither in my new best friend.

Quite apart from being a proper, grown-up car, it has two tricks up its sleeve that are hard to ignore. It has a wonderful personality and it costs less than an Aga.

Sunday 8 February 2004

Under normal circumstances I know you’re not very interested in cars like the Kia Rio. However, stick with me because you can buy it, brand new, for one pound. One pound is really very little for a full-size car. Actually, it’s even very cheap for a two-inch model of a car. I’m not sure, but I bet you couldn’t even buy a pair of shoes for a pound.

Plainly, there are going to be a few drawbacks with a car this cheap. And, sure enough, there are. You may have seen
The Fly II
, in which a scientist attempts to teleport a dog. In one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve seen in a film, it arrives at its destination completely inside out. Well the Rio is uglier than that.