What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (16 page)

Once, I drove on a highway near Atlanta, in Georgia, that runs through a wood for about 16,000 miles. It was very boring. But after a quick trip to Wales last week I’ve decided that the M4 is even worse.

Some say that the most boring motorway in the world is the M1, but actually it’s not dull at all. It has a history and even a hint of romance. People have written songs about it and you pass many exciting places such as Gulliver’s Kingdom and the Billing Aquadrome. You’re tempted at every junction to get off and have a snout around. Except, perhaps, junction 22. Coalville’s not that appealing.

Plus the M1 makes your blood boil, especially at the moment, because almost all of it is coned off and subjected to a rigorously enforced 50-mph speed limit. Driving on this section is like reading the
Guardian
. It gets the adrenaline going and it makes your teeth itch with impotent rage.

The M4, on the other hand, is like a book with nothing written on any of the pages. You pass Bracknell and Reading and Swindon, and you would rather die, screaming, than go to any of these places. Eventually there’s a signpost to Theale, which doesn’t even exist. Have you ever met anyone from Theale? Been there? Read about it? I think it may have been hit seventy years ago by the friendly German bombs meant for Slough.

Then you have the ‘works’ exit, which looks as though it might lead to the sort of place where they keep grit and snowploughs for the winter. It looks harmless, municipal. But try to find it on Google Earth. Go on. Try. Because it’s not there. It’s
a slip road the authorities want us to believe goes nowhere. Spooky, eh?

After this non-event you are plunged into a nothingness that goes on for a light year until eventually you are asked to pay £6 to cross a bridge. Why is that? How can it cost £6 to use a fairly crummy bridge when for £10 you are given access to the whole of London?

I hate the M4, and what makes it even worse is that there’s no car made that makes it even remotely interesting. If you drive down it in something powerful, you will be caught by the speed cameras. If you opt for something comfortable, you will fall asleep and crash. If you go for something economical and sensible, you will become tired of the engine moaning out its one long song and deliberately run into the crash barrier to end it all.

There is, however, one car with just the right combination of features to keep you awake – to keep you interested in being alive – for just two hours more. The BMW M5.

I have always been a fan. The original, a 282-bhp version of the boxy 1980s 5-series, came out of nowhere and redefined what we thought might be possible from a saloon. And since then every single version has pulled off the same trick.

The latest is even more of a star. Unlike the equivalent AMG Mercedes, which looks like a street brawler, the BMW is a bit like a bouncer at a ‘nite’ spot that wants to be seen as posh. It’s wearing a tux, and you have to look hard to notice the neck like a birthday cake, the chest like a butter churn, the thighs like tugboats. It’s a big bruiser, this car, but there are a few clues. Just the blue brake callipers. And some
Wallpaper
magazine-style LEDs in the door handles.

Under the bonnet the old V10 is gone. In its place is a turbocharged V8, which is good if you are a polar bear but bad, in theory, if you are a petrolhead. However, in practice, you don’t notice the turbo lag. There must be a gap between you pressing the throttle and the warfare beginning but you never, ever, feel it. It’s not a great engine. But it’s very good.

My friends, who are not very interested in cars, said that the ride was ‘bumpy’ and that I ought to let some air out of the tyres. They were wrong. The ride is actually quite good. Another friend, who writes about restaurants, said it sounded like a diesel. He was wrong, too. It sounds like a tool for scaring dogs.

Out of town and away from my metrosexual mates, the new M5 continues to amaze. It feels heavy and the front is maybe a bit over-tyred, but it’s just so fast and so composed and so balanced and so wonderful that you even find yourself grinning a deeply contented grin when you are on the M4 and it’s raining and the burglar in the toll booth is still a hundred miles away.

There are so many toys to play with, so many things to do. You can set the engine up in sport mode and the gearbox in race mode and the suspension in comfort. And then, when you’ve found a setup you really like, you can store it in a single-button memory.

And then you can decide that actually, on some days, you prefer everything to be slightly different, so you can store this as well. Then you can choose precisely what information you would like on the head-up display. And then you can dive into all the submenus on the iDrive system and change everything up to the shape of the car itself.

So what we have here is a genuine four-seat limo. A car from which you would be pleased to emerge at a film premiere. But then this same car is also a tail-out, smoke-and-wail drift machine. And a finely balanced road racer, and a gadget. It’s everything. And it’s only £73,040. We’re talking five stars and then some.

However. There are a few problems. There are so many gadgets that some of the features are not very easy to use. Such as: last night I arrived at the
Top Gear
edit, put the gearbox in neutral and started to get out. ‘Bong,’ said the warning buzzer and ‘flash’ went the dash display. ‘You have not put the vehicle in Park. It may roll away. You may not lock the doors until you have put it in Park. Bong.’

‘Bong.’

‘Bong.’

‘Bong.’

I got desperate. There was no Park position on the flappy-paddle gearbox. ‘Bong.’ I applied the electronic handbrake so the car couldn’t roll away. ‘Bong. Yes it can,’ insisted the machine. ‘Bong.’

Eventually I went into the edit suite and said, quite crossly, ‘Does anyone here know how to put an M5 in Park?’ They were all very amused, but an hour later we were still none the wiser. We were so desperate that we even resorted to the handbook. But still there were no answers.

It turns out that you must turn the engine off when it is in gear. Then Park is applied automatically. If you turn off the motor when the box is in neutral, you are bonged at until the end of time. I would very much like to meet the man who designed this system. So that I can jab some cocktail sticks into his eyes.

I suppose that eventually you would become used to this. But there is something else that would always be a nag. The problem is twofold. In the olden days the M5’s price tag was justifiable because the car was much better than the standard 5-series. That simply isn’t true any more. The 530d M Sport is very possibly the best, most complete car in the world right now and it’s hard to see why the M5 costs £31,000 more.

It gets worse. Today the M5 is a cruiser. A bruiser. A heavyweight. A very different animal from the original. It’s a wonderful thing, be in no doubt about that, but if you hanker after the olden days, you can have an M3, which is still lithe and sharp and crisp. And it’s almost £20,000 less.

In short, then, the M5 is still a great car. But these days BMW makes other great cars that are considerably less expensive.

The M version of the 1-series is another example. Happily there is no M4.

29 January 2012

I’m in northern Sweden – really northern Sweden – slap bang in the middle of Europe’s last great wilderness. For 300 miles in any direction there is nothing but fir trees and snow. Very late in the morning the sun heaves itself above the horizon, hovers for a moment and then slumps out of sight again. It’s pale, the colour of custard, and entirely devoid of warmth. It’s cold here. Really cold. And I absolutely love it.

I love the crisp whip crack of a Scandinavian winter morning; no matter how many beers you’ve drunk the night before, even the most savage, lightning-bolt hangover is swatted into history by the dry, needle-cold crispness. I love the endlessness of the sky. I love the jumpers. I love the way everyone is so tall. But most of all I love the way that people up here drive their cars.

I was picked up yesterday at Luleå airport by a man in a van. Ahead lay a four-hour journey into the middle of nowhere. ‘We’ll do it in three,’ he said, slewing out of the short-term car park and pointing the nose of his Sprinter north. He was wrong. By travelling at a steady 80 mph, we were at the hotel in just two and half hours.

What makes this remarkable is that while the snowploughs had cleared the roads of drifts, they were still covered in a 4-inch veneer of sheet ice. In Britain such conditions would have had Sally Traffic urging everyone to stay at home and not venture out unless the journey was ‘absolutely necessary’.

But in Sweden my man in a van drove as though it were mid-summer in Corsica. Occasionally he’d have to put his mobile phone down for a moment to correct a small tailslide, but you
could see in his eyes the road surface was of absolutely no concern at all. Small wonder the world of motor sports is littered with people from these parts.

Of course, you’ve heard all this before. How the Swedes are born with an ability to deal with an oversteer. That they can drift before they can walk. But I’ll let you into a little secret. The Swedes crash. A lot. Last night I saw two trucks in ditches and a car that had hit a moose – messy. Especially for the car.

This morning I watched the driver of a BMW X3 struggle for twenty minutes to retrieve his hapless little box from a drift before a kindly soul in a passing Mercedes offered to give him a tow. Eventually the Beemer popped out of its icy trap like the cork from a well-shaken bottle of Moët and rocketed backwards straight into the side of the Good Samaritan’s Merc. I tried not to laugh but it was impossible. In fact, I laughed so hard the membranes around my brain came out of my nose.

I admire the Swedes for the stoic way they continue to go about their business. How they dismiss prangs as part of the price you pay for living among the Arctic foxes and the wolves. But let’s dispel any myth that they have superhuman gifts behind the wheel. Because they don’t.

Oh, and while we’re at it, can we stop pointing the finger at local authorities in Britain for never being ready when the snow comes? That’s the same as pointing the finger at the highway people in northern Sweden for not being ready to deal with a swarm of locusts.

And can we also pause for a moment to think about the real benefits of four-wheel drive. If it were necessary in inclement weather, the Swedes would have embraced it warmly as a tool for masking their perfectly ordinary driving skills. But they haven’t. You rarely see an off-roader up here. Mostly they drive what people drive in Leamington Spa.

Which brings me rather clumsily to a new version of the all-wheel-drive Bentley Continental, a car I have never liked very much.

The first car I drove was my grandfather’s Bentley, and it was a joyful experience, sitting on the old man’s knee, steering that vast bonnet around what was then the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. It should therefore be a brand that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

It doesn’t, though, because in recent times the Bentley has been hijacked by Paris Hilton and Wayne Rooney and others of a vajazzle persuasion. When I heard that the Manchester City player with the Brazilian on his head had recently had eggs thrown at his car during a night out, I knew immediately what sort of car it would be. And I was right. Mario Balotelli drives a Continental. Of course he does.

There’s more. This is not a car that claims to be especially fast. Nor is it designed to be especially sporty. So why does it need a huge, twin-turbocharged 6-litre W12 engine? I’ll tell you why. So that the people who buy it can boast about it to their friends down at the Dog and Footballer: ‘You’ve only got a V. I’ve gorra bloody W.’

Well, in the new model it’s gone, and in its stead there’s a lighter, nimbler, sportier twin-turbo V8. It’s loosely related to the engine you’ll find in the new Audi S8, only in the Bentley it sounds dirty. As though it smokes sixty a day. It is a glorious sound. And many times I cracked the double-glazed side windows to revel in its earthiness.

It hasn’t only transformed the way the car sounds. It’s also transformed the way it feels. I’m not going to call it chuckable, but it’s way, way better than Mr Rooney’s house brick. And way, way more economical, too. Wayne will get 17 mpg if he’s lucky. The new car will do 27 mpg.

Of course, you may imagine that with 2,000 more cubic centimetres and four more cylinders, Wayne and Paris are going to leave you far behind at the lights. Not so. From rest to 60 mph the new car is hardly any slower than the W12 version, and at the top end it’ll still nudge 190 mph. What’s more, it makes
a better noise, it’s more fun and it’s more economical. And £12,000 cheaper.

Inside, it’s much as you’d expect. Quilted leather, heater knobs that appear to have been mounted in honey, a dash made from turned aluminium and electronics from that endless well of common sense, Volkswagen.

It’s strange. All the things I hated in the big-engined car, I found myself liking in the new one. Four-wheel drive? Used to be pointless. Now it’s just right and exactly what’s needed. The overly sensitive parking distance control? Used to drive me mad. Not any more. The weight? Ridiculous. Now? It’s excellent – it makes the car feel solid and planted.

I suppose it’s a bit like, say, Derby. On a grey, wet, chilly day, it’s the worst place on earth. But change the sky to blue and all of a sudden it’s lovely. That’s what happened with the Continental. One detail has changed and it’s made everything seem better.

Except the styling. I’m sorry, but to look at, this car has all the appeal of a gangrenous wound. I’d sooner put the headless body of a moose on my drive.

Bentley needs to address this soon, and while it’s on the subject it also needs to do something about its brand ambassadors. In short, the next time a Manchester-based footballer steps into one of its showrooms, the company should give him a cheque for £200,000 and tell him to buy something else.

12 February 2012