What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (28 page)

When my dad announced that he’d become engaged to a girl from the next village, his parents were mortified. ‘What’s the matter with the girls from our village?’ they cried.

Psychologists don’t call this limited-horizon thinking ‘Nissan Almera syndrome’, but they should. The Almera was just some car. White goods you bought by the pound or the foot. It did nothing badly, but it did nothing well, either. It was for people who saw no need to eat fancy food or to holiday outside Britain. It was a bucket of beige, a non-car for those frightened of the exotic.

Of course, it was not alone. There was also the Toyota Corolla. A fridge with windscreen wipers. A car for people who daren’t look at the sunset lest they become aroused. Chicken korma people.

Happily today in Britain both the Almera and the Corolla are gone, buried with the ghosts of Terry and June in a cemetery on a bypass, under a perpetually grey sky, beneath a headstone that no one will ever visit. We’ve moved on. We all want Range Rover Evoques these days. Or mini MPVs or maybe a swashbuckling coupé. The meat-and-potato hatchback is dead.

Except it isn’t. It’s lower than it used to be and more sleek. It’s replete with styling details to arouse the curiosity. It’s no longer the girl from down the street. It’s an internet bride, a brogue with scarlet laces. The Ford Escort has become the Focus, all independent rear suspension and tricksy diff. The Vauxhall Astra has stepped out of its mackintosh and slipped into a pair of open-crotch panties. Even the new Volkswagen Golf looks as if it knows where Tate Modern is.

And now we get to the Mercedes A-class, the latest frumpy-dumpy hatch to have been force-fed a diet of vodka and Red Bull. The original had two floors, one a few inches above the other. With straight faces, Merc’s engineers explained that in the event of a crash, the engine would slide into the gap and thus would not turn the occupants into paste. And I don’t doubt this was true.

So why does the new car not have such a feature? If it was such a bonzer idea, why drop it? Could it, I wonder – a bit rhetorically – have something to do with the fact that the real reason the original had two floors is that it had been conceived as an electric car and needed somewhere to store the battery?

Happily Mercedes has now realized electric cars have no future and, as a result, one floor is enough. It has also realized that it can’t just sell a packing case with wheels any more. Today we live in a skinny latte world and instant coffee won’t do. A hatchback, therefore, has to have some zing.

So the new A-class has all sorts of styling creases down the flanks, a titchy rear window and a massive bulbous nose with the grille from what appears to be a truck stuck on the front. It now looks like the sort of car they might have used on the moon base in Space 1999.

And I tested the 250 AMG version, which has massive wheels as well. I want to tell you it looked a bit silly, a bit garish, a bit overstyled. But I can’t because, actually, it looked tremendous. Many others also thought so.

Inside, it’s good, too, chiefly because it feels like a much bigger Mercedes. However, there were a couple of issues. I have new shoes. They are Dr Martens and I like them very much but they were too wide for the gap between the wheelarch and the brake pedal. This meant that every time I pressed the accelerator, I slowed down.

And there’s more. When you push the driver’s seat fully back, your shoulder is adjacent to the B pillar. This means you can’t drive with your arm resting on the window ledge. I’m surprised by how annoying that was.

There was another surprise as well. This is an AMG-badged car, and that is the same as a three-chilli warning on the menu at your local Indian restaurant. You expect, if you turn your foot sideways to press the throttle, to have your eyes moved round to the side of your head so you end up looking like a pigeon. But no.

The turbocharged 2-litre engine spools up nicely enough and the rev counter charges towards the red zone, but the speedo confirms what your peripheral vision has been suggesting: you aren’t picking up speed at anything like the rate you were expecting.

A quick glance at the technical specifications reveals the reason. There’s no shortage of power but most of it is used to move the excess weight. This is a heavy car. You feel that weight in the corners, too. No AMG Mercedes is built to generate 6 g on roundabouts – you need a BMW for that – but this one feels inert and out of its depth. So it’s not that fast in a straight line. And it’s not that exciting in the corners. And the gearbox isn’t much cop, either.

Perhaps the AMG badge is to blame. Perhaps it’s writing cheques the car isn’t even designed to cash. Perhaps, beneath it all, it’s designed to be a quiet and unruffled cruiser. On a smooth road, that’s certainly the case. But introduce even the slightest ripple and you’d better be sitting on a cushion at the time because the ride in this car is terrible.

I’m told that on standard wheels, with normal suspension, the new A-class is pretty good. But in the AMG trim it is – and I’m choosing my words carefully here – effing unpleasant. Fast Mercs in the recent past have got quite close to the line in terms of unacceptable stiffness. This one crosses it.

But towering above the ride in the big bag of mistakes is the fuel tank. It may be large enough if the engine under the bonnet is a diesel, but when it’s a turbo nutter petrol bastard, you can’t even get from London to Sheffield and back without filling up. God knows what it will be like when the 350-bhp four-wheel-drive
version arrives next year. That won’t be able to get from 0 to 62 mph without spluttering to a halt.

The standard car, I don’t doubt for a moment, is all right. It’s certainly getting rave notices from all quarters. But this hot one? No. It’s surprisingly poor in too many areas.

And it’s not like you’re short of alternatives. If you want a prestigious badge, Audi will sell you a fast A3 that won’t break your back or cause you to spend half your life putting petrol in the tank. But my recommendation is that you forget the badge and buy an Astra. I drove the VXR recently, and while it may have only three doors, I was extremely surprised by how good it was. And how comfortable.

Strange, isn’t it? The Astra. It used to be a byword for everything we thought we’d left behind. But after a bit of a makeover, the girl from your own village is better than the generously breasted temptress from Stuttgart.

4 November 2012

Many years ago I saw a magnificently idiotic film in which Sylvester Stallone played the part of a tough cop who was cryonically frozen for a crime he had not committed. Then, at some point in the future, he was defrosted so that he could rush about punching people in the face.

Every single thing about it was idiotic, especially the director’s vision of what the future might look like. People drove around in cars that were satellite-controlled to keep them at the speed limit. The radio stations only played silly little ditties from television commercials. It was illegal to swear or make fun of anyone because of their colour or their creed or the state of their mental health. It all seemed bonkers. And yet here we are in 2012 and it’s pretty much the Labour party manifesto.

There was something else as well. Capitalism had run amok to the point where there was really only one company that controlled everything. I seem to recall it was Taco Bell. That isn’t in Ed Millipede’s head, of course. But it’s almost certainly coming anyway. In fact, in the car world you could be forgiven for thinking it’s already here.

You might think when you buy a Seat that you are buying something with a bit of Spanish flair but, actually, you are buying a Volkswagen Golf. You may think when you buy a Skoda that you are buying 15 feet of sturdy Czech ingenuity. Nope. That’s a Golf too. Audi A3? Golf as well, I’m afraid.

So what about an Aston Martin Cygnet? Surely, you’re thinking, that can’t be a Golf. You’re right. It isn’t. It’s actually a Toyota. The Subaru BRZ? That’s a Toyota also.

I am particularly excited at the moment about the new Alfa Romeo 4C. Which is a Mazda MX-5. Then you have the Ford Ka, which is a Fiat Panda. The Fiat 500 is also a Panda. And the subject of this morning’s missive is a Panda as well, even though it doesn’t say so on the back. It doesn’t say Lancia, either, which is strange because that’s the company that made it. And that’s why I’ve been trying for two straight years to get my hands on one.

I firmly believe that in the past hundred years Lancia has made more truly great cars than any other brand. Ford gets close. So does Ferrari. But Lancia edges it, thanks to the Stratos, the Fulvia, the 037 – the last two-wheel-drive car ever to win the world rally championship – the Delta Integrale and other, more elderly models with running boards that exist now only in the minds and garages of people who played the drums with Pink Floyd.

Even when Lancia was not very good, it was still rather brilliant. The Gamma was a classic case in point. We all knew that on full left lock, a design fault meant the pistons could meet the valves in a head-on collision, causing the engine to explode. But we didn’t care because it was so very, very pretty to look at.

Then you had the supercharged HPE. Made from steel so thin you could use it as tracing paper, and sold as an estate even though it was no such thing, this was a triumph of style over absolutely everything else that matters and I loved it.

Some say that Lancias were unreliable and while this is almost certainly true, it’s hard to be sure because they had usually rusted away long before any of the mechanical components had the chance to malfunction. Fans didn’t mind, though, because of those bite-the-back-of-your-hand-and-faint looks.

The trouble is that in the 1980s the Italians handed the styling department over to someone who plainly went to work with a box on his head. The result was a range of cars that oxidized and blew up. And didn’t look very nice in the process. With hindsight this was not a good idea. We can tolerate bad-tempered lunatic
girlfriends if they are pretty. But not if they look like the Beta saloon. Or the Dedra.

The result was disastrous. Sales plummeted and Fiat, which owns Lancia, decided to pull its problem child out of Britain. And that, we thought, was that. Only now, almost twenty years later, Lancia is back. The Ypsilon.

Let’s look at the obvious problems first of all. Number 1: the man with the box on his head is plainly still in charge of styling because the list of things I’d rather look at includes every single thing in the world.

Then there’s the name: Ypsilon. The company may argue that this is a Greek letter but it sounds like another Greek letter, epsilon, and as anyone who has read Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
will know, an epsilon is synonymous with idiot. It means lavatory attendant. It means loser. The manufacturer may as well have fitted a swastika badge, arguing that it’s an ancient Buddhist symbol. It is, but …

I’m afraid things get much, much worse. This is a horrible car to drive. The 1.3-litre diesel engine feels as if it’s running on gravel. The driving position is suitable only for an animal that doesn’t exist. The dials are so far away from where you sit you can’t read them, the handbrake sounds like it’s been made from bits of a 1971 roof rack and, as a result of the materials used to line the interior, it feels like you are sitting in a wheelie bin. Still, at least it’s slow and devoid of any excitement whatsoever. And fitted with a gear lever that has been shaped specifically to make it extremely unpleasant to hold.

There are two settings for the steering. Nasty. And Very Nasty. The latter makes the system so light that you daren’t open the window for fear the resultant breeze would cause you to do a U-turn. And Nasty means you drive along, suffering from a nagging doubt that the wheel has nothing at all to do with your direction of travel.

Ride? That’s dreadful. Noise? Awful as well. And then we get to the brakes. You get what looks like a pedal but actually it’s a
switch. So you are either not braking, or braking so violently that you are going through the windscreen.

Other stuff? Well, it’s got back seats that fold down, a boot and a big button on the A pillar that, so far as I can tell, does nothing except distract you from the rest of the terribleness. It also has cruise control, for no reason that I can fathom. Still, you might be thinking, at least you can go to parties and tell everyone that you have a Lancia. Well, yes, I agree, that would be good. Except you can’t because this car is actually sold here as a Chrysler.

This is because Fiat recently bought Chrysler and reckons that in Britain that badge is better than the Lancia one used on the other side of the Channel. That’s the sort of thinking that resulted in a car this bad being made in the first place.

Still, at least there’s a solution. You simply buy a Fiat 500 or a Fiat Panda or a Ford Ka instead. They’re all exactly the same as the Ypsilon. But much better.

11 November 2012

When we buy a really fast car, the last thing we want is a really fast car. We may think we do. But we don’t. The top speed of a car matters when you’re a child. My dad’s car is faster than yours. And it matters when you are a teenager.

I bought a Volkswagen Scirocco when I was twenty because
What Car?
magazine said it accelerated from 0 to 60 mph a little bit faster than my mate’s Vauxhall Chevette. But when you are an adult you realize that you will never accelerate from 0 to 60 mph as fast as possible because a) people will think you are an imbecile and b) you will need a new clutch afterwards.

Nor can you ever indulge in the 1970s pastime of proving to other motorists that you have a faster car than they do, because these days all cars can do 120 mph. This means you have to do 140 mph to make your point, and when you’re at that speed, someone’s going to put you in a prison.

Let’s get to the point. If all you want from a car is speed, you should buy a Nissan GT-R. If you use its launch control, it will leave the line as though a comet has crashed into the back of it. And it will keep on accelerating until stark, naked fear causes you to remove your foot from the pedal. And we haven’t got to its party piece yet: its all-wheel-drive ability to get round any corner at any speed of your choosing. With the exception of a few silly track-day specials, the Nissan GT-R is the fastest car money can buy.

But you didn’t buy one, did you? Because it’s a bit ugly. And it’s a Nissan. And you thought your friends and neighbours might laugh at you.

My colleague James May recently bought a really fast car. It’s a Ferrari 458 Italia and with a fair wind it will zoom along at 200 mph. But he will never drive it at anything like that speed. Ever. And even if he did take it to ten-tenths on a track – unlikely, I know – he’d still get overtaken by a GT-R.

You buy a Ferrari because you think it makes you look interesting, rich and attractive. You buy one because you like the feel of the thing, or the styling, or the cut of the salesman’s jib. You buy one so, at night, when it’s dark and you’re feeling worthless, you can say to yourself, ‘But I have a Ferrari.’ And you will feel better. I know. I’ve been there.

Another friend recently bought a Mercedes C 63 AMG Black Series. And within days he was sending me texts saying it was a bit scary on full throttle. Wouldn’t know, mate. I’ve never used full throttle on my Black, the CLK, because there’s a big difference between admiring a slumbering crocodile and running up and poking it with a stick.

I have a Black for all sorts of reasons. I like the pillarless doors. I like the flared wheelarches. I like the body-hugging seats. And I like the noise it makes. Unfortunately, in order to make its tremendous sound, the engine has to be very powerful, which, as a by-product, makes the car very fast. But it’s not fast not in the way that a GT-R is fast. You can use the speed in the Nissan. If you try to use the speed in a Mercedes Black it will put you in a tree.

Every human being on the planet, with the possible exception of Ed Miliband, likes the feeling of being a little bit out of control. Push a child high on a swing and it will squeal with delight. But when the big kids start pushing the roundabout too fast, the sound it makes tends to change somewhat.

Which brings me to the new BMW 1-series. The top-of-the-range M135i has been winning rave reviews because, unlike the hot hatches made by every other company, it has rear-wheel drive. This means you can ‘hang the tail out in a corner’.

Indeed you can, but there is a price to pay for this. Because
the car has rear-wheel drive, the big six-cylinder engine is mounted longitudinally. Also there is a prop shaft running under the cabin, and at the back, beneath the boot, are many components that aren’t necessary in a front-wheel-drive car. Net result: you have less space inside than you do in, say, a Ford Focus or a Vauxhall Astra. So you pay more and get less space, simply so that you have the ability to power-slide through roundabouts. Something you will never, ever, do.

However, here’s the thing. I have a watch that will still work 3,000 feet underwater. I have plumbing that can deliver water so hot it can remove skin. And I often eat in restaurants that serve food so complex that it’s way beyond the limited range of my smoke-addled palate. Also, as we know, I have a car that can go 80 mph faster than I will ever drive.

And that’s what gives the BMW M135i such massive appeal. You will never go round a corner trailing smoke from its out-of-shape rear … but it’s nice to know you could.

There is a lot more to commend this car as well. It has a supremely comfortable driver’s seat, an excellent steering wheel, impossibly Germanic controls and a perfect driving position. Get in and, no matter what age has done to your frame, you will immediately feel at one with the machine.

Then there’s the engine. To appease those of a tree-hugging disposition, it is fitted with a compound turbocharger, which means that, after a hint of lag, there is a never-ending stream of bassy, gutsy power. In the real world, where there are other motorists and lampposts and policemen, this car is as fast as you would ever want.

And because it’s rear-wheel drive, the front wheels don’t have to multitask. They have only to worry about steering, which means the car feels balanced. It’s fantastic – as good as the Mercedes A 250 AMG I tested recently was bad.

There’s more, too. While it’s better-looking than its predecessor, which had the appearance of a bread van, it’s still no beauty. But, unlike all its rivals, it’s free of bling. Like all modern BMWs,
it’s understated and tasteful. Yes, rivals have more space inside, but we’re talking about a few centimetres here and a bit of an inch there. And if you truly like cars and truly like driving, that is a price well worth paying.

One thing, though. I do wish BMW would reserve that M badge for cars that have come from its motor sport division, rather than sticking it on anything that’s a bit faster than usual. The M135i may say M on the back. But if you look underneath, there’s no limited-slip diff, so it isn’t an M car really. Unless the M here stands for marketing.

That, however, is my only gripe. And it isn’t enough to warrant a lost star. Because the M135i is so lovely to drive and because it’s available with a proper automatic gearbox and because it has pillarless doors and because it’s only £3,000 more than a similarly powerful Vauxhall, it gets full marks from me.

18 November 2012