What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (19 page)

After the recent and very sad deaths of six British soldiers in Afghanistan, questions were immediately asked about the worthiness of the Warrior armoured vehicle in which they were travelling when the bomb went off.

And equally immediately they were answered. The Warrior fleet in Afghanistan was upgraded last June at a cost of more than half a million quid a pop, with armour better able to deal with an explosion and improved seating to protect those inside from the shockwave.

The trouble is, of course, that the men who go to war in beach footwear and skirts know full well that this has happened and are now using bigger bombs. This means the Warriors will have to be upgraded again, which will mean more explosives are needed to blow them up. It’s a problem that’s faced military commanders since the dawn of time. And it’s a problem that will never end.

Each time there’s a tragedy, coroners can point the finger of blame. They can accuse defence chiefs of penny-pinching and the engineers who design these vehicles of incompetence. But the reality is very simple. If a bomb is big enough, it will tear through anything. And there’s nothing that can be done to change that.

Or is there? Because the truth is that man is constantly faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, and we have a habit of working out a solution. We devised ways of getting iron to float and to fly. We developed antibiotics to combat disease. We are clever. And nowhere is this truism more evident than in the car industry.

Every year, the European Union erects a set of ecological fuel-saving goalposts through which it demands car makers must pass if they want to continue doing business. And every year the motor manufacturers squeal and whimper and claim it can’t be done. Then they do it. And then the EU responds by moving the goalposts further away.

The most recent move was a big one, and it’s having a profound effect on how cars feel. You may wonder, for instance, why the easy-to-use automatic gearbox is now being ditched so eagerly in favour of a robotized manual system. These gearboxes invariably make town driving jerkier and I hate them with a passion. But an engine sending its power to the wheels through this system uses less fuel than an engine sending its power to the wheels through a torque converter.

And the car makers that are sticking with the traditional auto are now offering a setup with eight speeds. This means the car is constantly changing up or down. It’s very annoying. But with more cogs, the engine has to work less hard. And that means more mpg, which means the oil supplies will last a little longer.

It gets worse. Even Porsche has now started to use electric power steering, which means you only get a digital interpretation of what’s happening up front rather than the real deal.

And then we get to the starter motor. That now has to be the strongest component in many cars because their engines shut down when you stop at a set of lights. Then start again when you want to set off. I don’t know why this irritates me so much, especially as usually you can turn the system off, but it does.

Not half as much, though, as the trend towards dashboard read-outs telling me what gear I should be in. You’re behind a Peugeot on an A-road and are waiting for an opportunity to overtake. This means you are in third. ‘You should be in fifth,’ it says. It’s wrong. It doesn’t know what I’m going to do next. It doesn’t know I’m being delayed by an old man. It even has an opinion on changing down for a corner. ‘Nope,’ it says as you
slide it into fourth for a long left. And this is a system you can’t turn off. Unless you have a hammer to hand.

Another effect of the legislation is the trend for engine designers to replace cubic capacity with turbocharging. A turbo engine uses waste exhaust gases to spin a fan, which is then used to force air and fuel into the engine under pressure. Sounds great. But a turbo engine cannot have the immediacy of a free-breather. There has to be a delay between putting your foot down and actually going, as you wait for the exhaust gases to gather enough force to spin that fan.

These, then, are just some of the tricks being used by car makers to shoot their cars through the EU’s goalposts. And every single one of them makes a car a little bit worse.

Which means it’s now the job of car makers to mask the problems with the Elastoplast of ingenuity. And that brings me on to the diesel engine under the bonnet of the BMW 640d.

Yup. It’s a diesel in a BMW sports coupé, and if that isn’t a sign of the times, I don’t know what is. But it’s a BMW diesel, which means it hums rather than clatters. And it’s fitted with two turbochargers. A small one that gets going almost immediately, and then a bigger one to give you some oomph on the open road. Clever, eh?

Less clever is the name. Why is this called the 640d when the 535d has exactly the same engine? Not very logical for a company famed for its obsessive-compulsive nomenclature.

Naturally the engine is mated to an eight-speed box but to make sure you don’t notice the constant cog-swapping, the changes are so smooth, you don’t feel anything at all. It’s like being on a never-ending helter-skelter of torque.

This car is like an old house. It’s riddled with cracks but because of some extremely skilful plasterwork, you can’t spot them. BMW has addressed the problems presented by the EU and, in less than a year, has masked the efforts it made to overcome them with the silky smile of German efficiency.

But what of the car itself? Well, there are plenty of other
coupés on the market, but none has so much space in the back and none is anything like as squidgy Slumberdown-soft.

There’s a misplaced line of thinking in the car industry that anyone who buys a good-looking two-door coupé must therefore want a bone-shaking sporty ride. Some do, for sure, but plenty don’t. And that’s where the 6-series is brilliant. It is good-looking. It is a two-door coupé. It is stylish. And yet it rides like a hovercraft. Fit the optional £1,485 Comfort seats and it’s like driving around in a cloud.

There is a button that allows you to firm everything up, and even a sub-menu in the computer that lets you choose which bits of the package you want to be sporty and which you do not. And I recommend that on day one, you glue the switch in Comfort mode and leave it there. The Sport setting just makes you uncomfortable for no real gain in terms of handling.

What we have here, then, is a car that doesn’t just get through the EU’s goalposts but also goalposts that no other car maker has spotted. Goalposts for people who want good looks, comfort and economy.

25 March 2012

You don’t need an iPad. You can watch films on your laptop, you can store data on your phone and for taking pictures it’d be easier to set up an easel and break out the oils. An iPad is stupid. A complete waste of money, especially if you already have an iPhone, which does the same job. And can be used for speaking to other people, too. So why did I trot quite vigorously to the shop and buy one? Simple: iPads look nice. That’s it. The end.

We see exactly the same thing going on with Fiat 500s. Why do people buy them? Because they are spacious? Because they are fast? Because they are economical? No. They are surprisingly uneconomical, in fact. The only reason the little Italian cutester is to be found clogging up every chic street this side of the Urals is that it looks nice. That’s it. The end.

I could sit here now and tell you that, mechanically, the 500 is identical to various cheaper or more practical cars such as the Ford Ka and the Fiat Panda. I could tell you too that there is very little space in the back, that some drivers have found even the two-cylinder TwinAir eco-version struggles to do 36 mpg and that the 500 is made in Poland by people who just want to go home and watch telly.

But it’ll make no difference. The Fiat 500 is like a useless little mongrel at the dog’s home. The one with the wonky ears and the sad eyes. You know that it’ll be a bad buy. You know it will leak. But you soooo want it. It’s soooo sweeeet. And that’s the end of that.

Except it isn’t, because wading into the fray is the new
Volkswagen Up!, which unlike the Fiat 500 comes as standard with its very own exclamation mark.

There are plenty of variants from which to choose. There’s a Take Up!, a Move Up! and a High Up!, and then you have the colour-based special editions, which were going to be called the White Up! and the Black Up!. Until a VW bigwig realized a company that made Hitler’s favourite runaround shouldn’t really be selling a car called the Black Up!. So now it’s called the Up! Black. Clear? Good.

So let’s move on to the engines. There’s one. It’s a naturally aspirated three-cylinder 1-litre unit that is available in two states of tune. These are: not powerful enough, and nowhere near powerful enough. Prices start at less than £8,000, although the car I tested – the 74-horsepower High Up! – was £10,390, plus an extra £35 for carpets, £350 for cruise control and £225 for a laser to stop it crashing into things in towns. And what I’m going to do now is waste your time and several hundred of my words explaining why you should buy the Up! rather than the little Fiat.

First of all, the Up! is a lot more spacious inside. It has the longest wheelbase of any city car, and that means there really is space in the back for two children. Yes. Of course you can also get two children in the back of a Fiat, but only if you kill them and chop them up first.

Moving further forwards, I will agree the Fiat has a funky and attractive dash. But the VW’s is cleverer because in the High Up! it comes with a detachable ‘maps and more’ touchscreen that can be used outside the car like a TomTom satnav and then, when it’s clipped in place, as a phone interface, a satnav, an entertainment system or to show driving statistics. It works brilliantly.

I like the way the dash appears to be a big slab of painted metal, too, and even though this little car is made in Bratislava, it still feels Germanically, Speerishly well put together. I’d love to say the same of the Fiat but I can’t. So I won’t.

Further forwards still, we get to the engine, and here we stumble over the VW’s first black mark. Even though I was driving
the most powerful Up!, I couldn’t even think about pulling into the outside lane of a motorway unless there had been a terrible crash and the whole carriageway was blocked.

It doesn’t matter how far back the faster traffic may be – you will soon be in its way. Really, VW should have called it the Hold Up!.

It’s fairly pedestrian from 0 to 62 mph, but it’s the time it takes to get from 62 to 70 mph that really alarms. We’re talking hours and hours. The problem was that I had only 70 torques, whereas the little Fiat, which has one cylinder fewer, has 107.

Naturally Volkswagen will argue that the Up! is a city car and that this lack of oomph is of no consequence. But that’s rubbish. It’s OK to have a pair of city shoes and a city suit, but when you are spending £10,000 on a car, you expect it to be able to deal with cities and the countryside equally well.

Still, if you are happy to mix it with the trucks and the Peugeots in what Michael McIntyre calls the ‘loser lane’, it hums along and sips fuel like a mouse drinking sherry through the end of a hypodermic needle. In the real-world economy stakes, it’s a full-on Alcoholics Anonymous co-ordinator and the TwinAir Fiat is Oliver Reed.

To drive, it’s even Stevens, really. Both handle nicely. And both make fabulous noises. The Fiat sounds like a lollipop stick in a set of bicycle spokes whereas the VW sounds like Androcles’s friendly lion. It’s the pipsqueak that roared.

Apparently VW didn’t feel the need to fit its inherently unbalanced three-cylinder engine with balancer shafts because, it said, it was so small it wasn’t really necessary. And I’m glad because the end result is just so characterful. It put me in mind of the old three-cylinder Daihatsu Charade GTti, the first production car to offer 100 bhp per litre.

That, too, sounded fantastic, although, if memory serves, I was enjoying the noise so much, I crashed it into a wall. Something that’s not possible in the VW, thanks to its special laser option.

I could ramble on in this vein pointlessly for hours, likening the Up! to other rivals from Toyota, Kia and Citroën, but you’re not interested, are you? This is all just blah, blah, blah. Because while the VW is a demonstrably better car than the little Fiat, apart from the speed issues, you’re only really interested in how it looks.

I think the Up! looks fab. It was styled by Walter de Silva, who used to be in charge of design at Alfa Romeo and knows what he’s doing. I think the front manages to be cute, conventional and futuristic all at the same time, and I think the rest of it is a remarkable achievement – it’s a box but it doesn’t look that way.

The problem is, of course, the Fiat looks better. And while the Up! comes as standard with an exclamation mark, this is no match for Fiat’s vast range of scorpion stickers and Italian racing stripes and snazzy wheels. In short, the VW is a bloody good little car. But the Fiat’s quite a lot more than that.

That’s why you’re going to say Up! yours to the Volkswagen and buy the 500 instead.

1 April 2012

Pretty much every week we are told the best place in the world to live, work and raise a family is not St Tropez or Tuscany or California but … wait for it … drum roll … Denmark. The reasoning behind this is always the same. There’s no crime, no unemployment, no obesity, no vandalism, no jealousy, no angst and no dog dirt on the pavement.

However, the trouble with places where nothing bad ever happens is that nothing good ever happens, either. Living in Denmark, I’ve always thought, would be like living in a ping-pong ball. It’s a missionary-position country, sitting in the kaleidoscope of nation states like a low-tar, semi-skimmed splodge of beige.

What does it have that we are all supposed to covet? Extremely high taxes. Iffy weather. Lots of Lego to tread on in the middle of the night. And quite the worst pop music it is possible to imagine. The only Danish tune ever deemed good enough to be played on the international stage was ‘Barbie Girl’.

And it’s all very well telling us we should live there but it has an immigration policy that prevents anyone from doing any such thing.

I suspect even the Danes are baffled about why they keep being picked out as a shining example of humanity at its best. Just last week a newspaper in Copenhagen suggested it must be because, while cycling from place to place, visitors enjoy looking at all the pretty Danish girls’ bottoms.

Well, after a quick visit last weekend, I can confirm it is right. It is that. But there are other things, too. Lots and lots of other
things. The best restaurant in the world is in Copenhagen, everyone looks like Helena Christensen, in smaller bars you are allowed to smoke, the bacon is superb and, despite the cold, there’s a thriving cafe society. Every modern building looks as if it were designed by Bang & Olufsen. The water in the harbour is as clear as gin and the whole city even smells clean. It’s like breathing lemon juice.

In fact, I’ve decided that the world’s five best cities are, in order: San Francisco, London, Damascus, Rome and Copenhagen. It’s fan-bleeding-tastic. And best of all: there are no bloody cars cluttering the place up. Almost everyone goes almost everywhere on a bicycle.

Now I know that sounds like the ninth circle of hell, but that’s because you live in Britain, where cars and bikes share the road space. This cannot and does not work. It’s like putting a dog and a cat in a cage and expecting them to get along. They won’t, and as a result London is currently hosting an undeclared war. I am constantly irritated by cyclists and I’m sure they’re constantly irritated by me.

City fathers have to choose. Cars or bicycles. And in Copenhagen they’ve gone for the bike. There are many reasons for this. In Denmark cars are taxed to the point where they are fundamentally unaffordable to everyone except Georg Jensen, Ron Bang and Colin Lurpak. A base-model Volkswagen Golf is more than £25,000. A Ferrari 458 Italia is about £500,000. A Range Rover is essentially a Fabergé egg.

Then there’s Denmark’s obsession with wind turbines. There are so many, it’s actually quite difficult to land an aeroplane. In fact, the Danes have run out of land on which to build them so they are hurling them up in the sea. This means that if you’re out sailing, you don’t tack because of the wind. You tack because you are on an obstacle course. This has given the Danes a sense that they are on point in the war against carbon dioxide, even though not a single conventional power station over there has been turned off yet.

I should also point out that, geologically, Denmark makes Holland look like Nepal. The whole country is on its tiptoes, just managing to peep out of the sea. Which means cycling is always easy. They have a liberal attitude to bikes as well. So when yours is stolen, you simply help yourself to someone else’s. You can actually be fined £55 if you ride home at night without stealing someone else’s lights before setting off.

Best of all, though, in Britain cycling is a political statement. You have a camera on your helmet so that motorists who carve you up can be pilloried on YouTube. You have shorts. You have a beard and an attitude. You wear a uniform. Cycling has become the outdoorsy wing of the NUM and CND.

In Copenhagen it’s just a pleasant way of getting about. Nobody wears a helmet. Nobody wears high-visibility clothing. You just wear what you need to be wearing at your destination. For girls that appears to be very short skirts. And nobody rides their bike as if they’re in the Tour de France. This would make them sweaty and unattractive, so they travel just fast enough to maintain their balance.

The upshot is a city that works. It’s pleasing to look at. It’s astonishingly quiet. It’s safe. And no one wastes half their life looking for a parking space. I’d live there in a heartbeat.

But I don’t live there. I live in a country with Ben Nevis in it. And as a result we have to have cars. Which brings me on to the impressive-sounding Ford Kuga Titanium X, with a Duratorq engine and a PowerShift gearbox. This new addition to the Kuga line-up sounds like a tool for Clint Thrust, CIA agent, assassin and all-round soldier of fortune.

It looks like one, too, with power bulges on the bonnet, chunky alloys and an aggressive, lean-forward, ‘Do you want a fight?’ stance. It’s a car that in white would not look out of place on Martin Landau’s Moonbase Alpha in the Space 1999 television series. But, actually, it’s a school-run mummymobile.

Well, that’s what it’s supposed to be. But there’s no getting around the fact that while it appears to be a big, tall car on the
outside, it’s titchy on the inside. This is a problem because any dog big enough to climb into the boot isn’t going to fit when it’s there.

There’s another problem, too. The car I tested was priced, with options, at £31,840. That is a colossal amount of money, but despite this, it didn’t even have a satnav system.

As a tool, it’s not bad at all. There’s a bit of wind noise and the tyres make a racket, but it’s comfortable and apparently well put together and what equipment you do get was plainly designed by someone who recognizes the fact that not everyone in the world understands bits and submenus. It’s all very easy to use.

But I kept asking myself: What’s the point? Because all you are buying here is a Ford Focus on stilts. It doesn’t drive as well as a Focus, it uses more fuel, it costs a shedload more and there doesn’t seem to be an upside. Yes, some Kuga models come with four-wheel drive, but others don’t, so all you are doing is saying to Mr Ford, ‘Yes, I want a Focus, but can I spend a lot more on buying and running it, for no reason?’

In many ways, then, this car is like a Bang & Olufsen stereo. Humdrum innards, made appealing only by a bit of cunning styling. With the Kuga, however, the styling’s not quite cunning enough.

8 April 2012