What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (31 page)

It’s funny, isn’t it, how people argue about which mobile phone is best. Honestly and truthfully, to the vast majority of people, they are indistinguishable. It’s the same with wine. Of course there is a handful of enthusiasts who in a blind tasting really can tell white from red, but to the rest of us a £4.99 bottle of Château d’Asda tastes the same, and has the same effect, as a £45,000 bottle of Pétrus.

In fact, this is true of absolutely everything. Cheese. Pizzas. Caribbean islands. I spoke with a famous rock god the other day, who agreed that the whole debate about guitars is nonsense because they’re all identical.

And so are cities, really. Brummies will argue that Birmingham is better than Manchester or Liverpool or Sheffield. But to the casual observer they’re as different as milk bottles.

Then there’s music. To those who were born under the influence of Stanley Baldwin, the Rolling Stones sound exactly the same as N-Dubz. It’s all just boom, boom, boom, as the elderly are fond of saying. And I know what they mean because I simply cannot tell one piece of classical music from another. Unless it’s been used in an advert on the television, it’s all just one endless parade of girls sitting with their legs wide apart, sawing a cello in half with a bit of horse, and men blowing in tubes.

Yes, there are people who can tell not just Bach from Chopin, but also what orchestra they’re listening to and even what conductor is in charge. But for people with jobs and friends? No. It’s all just bars and tone.

You know where this is going and, of course, you’re right.
Cars are all the same too. They’re all Volkswagen Golfs. There are fast Golfs and big Golfs and cheap Golfs. There are Japanese Golfs and V12 Golfs and American Golfs. But they’re all Golfs.

I can tell the difference between a Ford Focus and a Vauxhall Astra, but that’s because I’m a nerd. However, I’m not such a nerd that I don’t realize both are actually Golfs. You could put my mother in a Lincoln Town Car and she would be incapable of telling it apart from her own car. Which is a Golf. She thinks my Range Rover is a Golf, too, albeit one that is idiotically hard to park.

She’s right, of course. I sometimes wonder why anyone ever buys anything else. You want a fast car? Buy a Golf GTI. You want an economical car? Buy a Golf diesel. You want a cheap car? Buy a Golf from the second-hand columns. You want a big car? Buy a Golf Plus. You want a convertible car? Don’t buy a Golf convertible. It’s terrible. But do buy a Volkswagen Eos. Which is a Golf.

You can fit five people in a Golf, the same number as you can get in a Rolls-Royce Phantom. A Golf will cruise easily at 95 mph, the same as a Bugatti Veyron. It is as reliable as Switzerland, as comfortable as your favourite armchair, as parsimonious as a Methodist’s auntie and, all things considered, good value too.

I’ll tell you how brilliant it is. Volkswagen has spent the past five years working round the clock on an all-new model. The company started with a clean sheet of paper and an open mind. And what it has ended up with is a Golf.

If you set out to rethink the concept of a table, you’ll end up with a table. And if you set out to rethink the concept of a car, you’ll end up with a Golf.

The boot is a little bigger than it was before. There’s a little crease running down the side. It’s cheaper as well. And though it’s longer and wider, it’s 100 kg lighter. Which means the new model is as parsimonious as a Methodist auntie’s lapdog. Or indeed any dog, because they’re all the same too. In fact all pets
are the same. Some stand in a field. Some live in a tank. Some purr, and some have a shell. But they all need feeding and housing and … I’m digressing.

Economy is probably the big news with the new Golf. And rightly so. Because if all you want is ‘a car’, then you want to spend as little as is humanly possible on fuelling it. Other car makers are fitting their Golfs with all sorts of stuff – independent rear suspension, for instance – which is fine for the tiny number of connoisseurs. But for everyone else? Independent rear suspension and the benefits it brings are less interesting and important than the result of a village cricket match in Pakistan.

No. When it comes to cars these days, the top 10 things that matter are: economy, economy, economy, economy, economy, economy, economy, economy, economy and safety.

My son is about to turn seventeen and wants a car. Does he want it to be fast? Good-looking? Comfy? Nope. All he is bothered about is economy. And he’s not alone.

VW has obviously realized this, which is why the 1.4-litre TSI GT model I tested is fitted with a four-cylinder engine that switches to two cylinders when you’re pootling along. And then shuts down altogether at the lights. What’s more, messages flash up on the dash, giving helpful hints on how to get the most miles from each gallon. One tells you, for example, not to disengage the clutch until the revs have dropped to 1300 rpm.

This makes sense because most people don’t realize how modern engines work. They think that if they put their foot on the clutch and freewheel when, say, going downhill, it saves fuel. Not so. An engine not in gear quickly slows to idle and needs fuel to keep it ticking over. But if you slow down without disengaging the clutch, the engine uses absolutely no fuel at all.

So, the new Golf. It’s light. It can run on one lung. And you get hints on how to maximize the mpg. That means almost 60 mpg, which makes this one of the most economical family cars on sale today. So that covers the nine most important things. For the tenth, it comes with a forward-facing radar system that
applies the brakes if it thinks you haven’t noticed you’re about to crash.

So what’s it like to drive? Well, you can choose from a variety of settings to suit your mood. All of them were good. Speed? That was good too. And so were the handling, the comfort and the quality. It was all good. Everything was good. It even has an optional self-park system. That was good as well.

Honestly, reviewing this car is like reviewing a floorboard. It’s impossible to say anything other than: ‘It does what it’s supposed to do.’ Which is why, for a summary of what the new Golf is like, I’ve turned to the
Oxford English Dictionary
. Golf. Noun. A road vehicle, typically with four wheels, powered by an internal combustion engine and able to carry a small number of people.

27 January 2013

THERE is almost nothing harder in this business than reviewing an AMG Mercedes. Because the engine dominates everything. It doesn’t matter whether you are in a two-seat sports car or a four-wheel-drive off-roader or a large executive saloon, all you can think about, and hear and feel, is that massive, throbbing, tumescent muscle under the bonnet.

AMG-powered cars all handle in pretty much the same way as well. In that they don’t really handle at all. You push the accelerator and you are going sideways, immediately. And I’m sorry, but when you are on the Oxford ring road, in a cloud of your own tyre smoke, being deafened by the jackhammer soundtrack, it is pretty difficult to think about seat comfort or visibility or indeed anything much at all.

In an AMG the car is simply the knife and fork. The engine is what you’re eating. And in a restaurant it’s the food that matters. Not the utensils needed to deliver it to your mouth.

However, in recent months things have changed. When AMG started making mainstream cars, it had supercharged and non-supercharged 5.4-litre V8s in various states of tune. And then it did a range of non-supercharged 6.2-litre V8s that, for reasons we don’t understand, were claimed to have a capacity of 6.3 litres.

All these engines were exactly the same. Choosing which you liked best was like choosing a favourite type of thunderclap. Some were a bit more powerful than others, but when you were screaming and praying and sweat was flooding out of every pore, you really couldn’t tell.

Now, though, things have changed. All the new AMG engines are twin-turbocharged 5.5-litre V8s, and they’re different. The bellow has gone, and with it the terror. You can now drive an AMG without ear defenders and nappies. And this means you can concentrate on what the utensils are like.

As a diesel-powered estate car, the CLS Shooting Brake doesn’t appear to be that good. It’s less spacious – at least with the seats down – slower from 0 to 62 mph and considerably more expensive than rivals from Jaguar, Audi and BMW. But that isn’t the case with the AMG 63 version. Because it doesn’t really have any rivals at all.

The CLS saloon was, it’s said, designed by a Mercedes stylist almost as a doodle. He wanted to know what a Jaguar would look like if it were done by his company. His bosses liked what they saw, his squiggles made it into production and now there is an estate version called the Shooting Brake.

Strange name. A ‘brake’ was the name given in the olden days to a carriage that was used to break spirited horses. Later, British landowners would modify them so they could be used to carry people, guns and dogs on shooting parties.

So, in the early days of the motorcar anything designed to carry stuff in the back was called a shooting brake, and when these became common on various estates around the country, the generic name changed to ‘estate car’. Think about that the next time you fire up the five-door Ford Escort.

Today, to get away from the rather toffish imagery, car makers call their estate cars by other names. BMW has the Touring and Audi the Avant. And the Americans, of course, the station wagon. Because over there large, practical cars evolved at railway stations, hauling goods from train to train, rather than on grouse moors.

But Mercedes has ignored this egalitarianism and resurrected the shooting brake handle. On perhaps the least practical estate car in human history. For a shooting party it would be hopeless. Unless, of course, the shooting in question were a drive-by in Los Angeles. Then, I suspect, it would be excellent.

The 63 AMG version is very, very fast. And because the histrionics are mostly gone, sometimes you barely even notice. There’s a momentary strain on your neck muscles when you first plant the throttle, and the next thing you know, the white lines have become a blur and you’re in Arbroath.

It even does well on more testing roads. You always felt in old AMG cars that you were having to manhandle them through the bends. That’s something I like. But I also like the way the Shooting Brake seems to be dancing. It feels agile and light, which it emphatically is not.

And yet somehow, despite the power and the corpulence, it seems to have grip. You no longer have to countersteer every time you pull over to pick up a pint of milk. You can even get from one side of Guildford to the other without spinning.

It’s comfortable too. On even the most potholed roads it would make a tremendously stable gun platform. It’s a bit like an ageing rock god. The anarchy is still there in its DNA. But these days it prefers cocoa to cocaine.

Problems? Yes. The traditional automatic gearbox with its torque converter has been replaced by a multi-clutch system. Doubtless this is very good news for Johnny Polar Bear, but, like all modern flappy-paddle solutions, it is annoying.

In Comfort mode, things are just about acceptable, but if you switch the system to Sport, it becomes dim-witted. Especially around town, where it has a habit of responding to requests for more speed exactly half a second after the gap you were aiming for has disappeared.

Also, my test car had so many toys, the dashboard was almost indecipherable. And if you dive into a submenu to see what’s what, or maybe turn off the lane-keeping assistance, you could be stranded in a world of electronic gobbledygook for a year.

Further back we find that the boot lid opens and closes electrically. Why? Who thought that customers would enjoy standing in the rain for an age, looking like dorks, while the motors went
about their business? I have arms. I can open a boot perfectly well, thanks.

Not that there’s much point, in the CLS, because this really isn’t designed for the antiques dealer in a hurry. You’re certainly not going to get a wardrobe in there, that’s for sure. And that’s because this car is like its four-door brother. It’s mostly about style.

And I must say that on that front it does rather well. Today a lot of modern Mercs are overdesigned. They have too many creases in their flanks and too many unnecessary details. But this one is bob-on. It’s tremendous-looking, which leads me to a peculiar conclusion.

If you want a car to carry school trunks and horse paraphernalia, you can do better with the offerings from Jaguar, Audi and especially BMW. I think the 530d Touring is one of the best cars made.

And yet even that doesn’t have quite the appeal, somehow, of Merc’s new drive-by shooting brake. It’s not a sports car. It’s not really an estate. But, unlike anything else, it is a little bit of both.

I said earlier that it has no rivals, and that’s true. But only because these days you can no longer buy a Reliant Scimitar.

10 February 2013

I don’t understand why people get so cross when politicians do a U-turn. Would you rather they were so consumed with towering self-belief that they ploughed on regardless? Because I wouldn’t. Take Michael Gove as an example here. The education secretary expressed a desire to change the way exams were run. There was much brouhaha from interested parties. And, having listened to their objections, he’s decided to abandon his plans. What’s wrong with that?

If I were a politician I would constantly express a desire to invade and conquer France. I’d explain that it simply isn’t morally correct for such a lovely country to be in the hands of the French and, as a result, I’d ask the armed forces to work up some kind of plan.

And what they’d do is talk me out of it. They’d explain that we simply don’t have the muscle, and that even if we did, the United Nations would impose all kinds of unpleasant sanctions. So that eventually, and much to the relief of just about everyone, I’d announce that we would be invading and conquering Spain instead. Technically that would be a U-turn. But it would also be an example of common sense.

It’d be the same story with cats. I’m afraid that if I were prime minister I’d announce that they must all be executed. This would prompt a great deal of debate and eventually I’d be forced to say, ‘Oh, OK. Your cat can live. Just so long as it doesn’t leap into my lap and show me its anus.’

This is because I am wise. Unlike His Tonyness, who was not. He was so wrapped up in his own self-importance that after he’d
decided to invade the Middle East, no amount of reasoning would cause him to back down. And look where that got us.

So, no. We need to stop criticizing politicians when they make U-turns and start congratulating them for being open-minded and flexible. Which brings me neatly to the Bentley Continental GT.

I was first shown this car shortly before it went on sale in 2003 and I’m afraid I was at a loss. The designer was standing there, all wide-eyed and expectant, but I simply couldn’t find the right word. ‘Amazing’ is what I usually use when presented with a hostess’s terrible pudding or an actor’s disastrous new play. But ‘amazing’ didn’t really work with the Conti. ‘It’s awful,’ I said.

And it was. I’d never seen a car that managed to be both bland and ostentatious at the same time. And there were some details that looked plain wrong. But still, the styling was a triumph compared with the way it drove. It may have had a mighty W12 engine, but there was absolutely no sense that it was doing anything that a much less wasteful V8 couldn’t achieve. It was just there, like a big piece of Georgian plumbing, turning fuel into absolutely nothing interesting at all.

What’s more, the four-wheel-drive system removed any sense of finesse and the suspension settings had plainly been chosen by June Whitfield. Well, not necessarily by June herself, but someone of her ilk: someone with no interest in cars whatsoever. As a result, the Continental GT felt like a big, useless, thirsty waste of leather and aluminium. I hated it and said so.

Then came the customers. Bentley gave one to Mrs Queen and was probably hoping for James Bond. But what it ended up with was Jay-Z, Mario Balotelli, Paris Hilton, Xzibit and Steven Gerrard. A shocking array of people you would not like to have round for dinner.

Small wonder the depreciation was so bad. A new Bentley would look good in your exclusive gated community. But the entire appeal of this car was wanton consumption, so nobody
wanted to be seen dead in a used one. Which is why you could, and still can, pick up barely run-in examples for about 6p.

As the years crawled by, Bentley took the cash from its increasingly terrible customer base and spent it on a raft of technical improvements. None of which did anything to change my mind.

There was, for instance, the Continental Supersports version, which was intended to be a pointy racer. But it was no such thing. Because you can’t make a go-kart if you start out with a lorry. It was, frankly, an idiotic car.

But still Bentley kept on going. And last year announced a new, lighter, more economical V8 GT. It was just as fast as the W12 but did 10 more miles to the gallon. And it made a dirty sound when you accelerated. And I liked it.

Of course, the customer base didn’t. Because footballers, rappers and the stars of various sex tapes are not given to saying, ‘Please may I have the second-most-expensive Rolex?’ Or, ‘Yes, I like this hideous house very much. Especially the fake pillars. But do you have anything that is easier to heat?’

So, to keep them happy, Bentley has fiddled with the W12 version to create what it is calling the GT Speed. The suspension is tweaked, as is the twin-turbo W12, so that now, with a flat-out maximum of 205 mph, it is the fastest Bentley yet. Plus, according to my televisual colleague James May, who recently took one rallying on
Top Gear
, it’s the best.

He’s wrong, of course. It isn’t as good as the V8. But I will admit he does have a point. First, unlike almost any other fast car, it rides properly, steering a hitherto unexplored path between the wallowy detachment of a Rolls-Royce and the youthful and sometimes misjudged harshness of a BMW, Jaguar or Aston Martin.

Then there’s the gearbox. Other manufacturers are moving at breakneck pace towards the double-clutch systems that make it easier to pass EU emissions legislation. But Bentley has stuck with a traditional automatic, albeit with eight speeds.

Don’t think, however, that because it’s soft and fitted with a
slushmatic that it’s a slouch. I put my foot down on day one and, so savage was the acceleration, I never put it all the way down again. This is a blindingly quick car.

And it’s good value too. The new Aston Martin Vanquish is nudging £200,000. The Bentley is just £151,100. Not cheap. But for what you get, not bad at all. Certainly it comes with a lot of toys. And while many of the buttons and knobs are handcrafted and chromed and very Bentleyish, the fact is that behind the scenes, it’s pure Volkswagen. Which is another way of saying, ‘It’ll all work.’

Sprinkle into the mix four seats, a commodious boot and a body that isn’t as big as it seems and you end up with a pretty compelling car. So here comes the U-turn. In the past you would see someone cruise by in a Continental and you would think, You bought that because you know nothing about cars, you are not interested in driving and you wanted simply to tell your friends at the golf club you have a Bentley.

Now, though, things are different, because if I see someone cruise by in a Continental GT Speed, I shall think, There’s a chance you bought that because it’s a bloody good car.

17 February 2013