What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (37 page)

In the olden days it was jolly difficult to design a car. You had to use slide rules and pencils and guesswork. And you couldn’t simply buy in parts from Lucas, because it was usually on strike, and even when it wasn’t, the parts you’d bought didn’t fit and wouldn’t work anyway.

It would take years – and all the money the government had – to get your new model designed, and then you’d have to make all the tooling necessary to put it into production. This is why, when a car went on sale, it stayed on sale for 200 years. It’s also why each car company made only a handful of models.

Today, though, you just fire up your laptop and ask it to design a car, and while you go for a chat at the water fountain, it comes up with the answer. An answer that’ll be safe, economical and made from parts that will be delivered bang on time and that will work.

What’s more, the finished product will be modular. Which means that all the expensive bits can be used on other models. It’s for this reason that Volkswagen made just three models in 1960. And about four million today. Because while an Audi A3 looks different from a Golf, underneath it isn’t.

This is good news, of course, but because it’s now easy to make a new model, car makers are going a bit mad. Which brings me to the subject of this morning’s column …

In the beginning there was the BMW M5. Then BMW made a two-door version of it called the M6. And now there’s a four-door version of the two-door M6 that is called the M6 Gran Coupé.

It’s going to be a tester for BMW’s showroom salespeople, that’s for sure. Because they will have to say to prospective customers, ‘Yes, it has the same engine and running gear as the M5. And the same number of doors. But here’s the thing, sir. It’s £24,000 more expensive and there’s less space inside.’

A car maker can get away with that when a coupé is dramatically and noticeably better-looking than the saloon on which it is based. People will always pay for style. But when the coupé isn’t dramatically different? Hmmm. As I said. It’s going to be tough for the hair-gel-and-Burton boys.

However, let us be in no doubt that the M6 Gran Coupé is extremely good-looking. It’s better-looking, weirdly, than the two-door M6. And while there is a hefty price premium, it does come with some things the M5 doesn’t have, such as a carbon-fibre roof for a lower centre of gravity.

There’s more too. While I like the M5, it does come with a whiff of the enthusiast about it. Every one you see has been bought second-hand on the internet, fitted with private plates to disguise that fact and then polished to within an inch of its life. Then you have the driver, who always looks exactly like the sort of person you don’t want to sit next to at a dinner party. The sort of person that refers to his car by its manufacturing code, not its name. With an M6 Gran Coupé you don’t get that association. Yet.

Plus, I’m a sucker for pillarless doors and rear seats that are separated by an (optional) console full of knobs and dials. Sitting in the back of this thing is like sitting in a private jet, and no one’s complained about that. Even though your knees are in your nipples, your head’s on the ceiling, it’s deafening and there’s no lavatory.

So, yes, I will say that there is just enough in this car to warrant the price premium over both the M6 and the M5. Right now it’s the M car to have. Provided that’s what you want. But is it?

Well, not the first time you drive it, that’s for sure. God, it’s complicated, and there is an electric German on hand to stop
you doing anything out of sequence. Or that feels natural. Or sensible. It won’t let you do anything without ordering you to do something else first. This means that soon you will be screaming at it, ‘I own your arse! And if I want to put you in Drive without pressing the switch first, I will!’

Sometimes, though, it asks you to do things that you can’t do. Such as putting it in Park before getting out. Which is tricky because there is no Park button. ‘Bong,’ it says. And then ‘bong’ again. And then ‘bong’. You feel like Dustin Hoffman in
Marathon Man
, constantly being asked if it’s safe, and you panic because you don’t know the answer.

Eventually, when you are mad and drooling, you will get out anyway, hoping the bloody thing does roll into a river. And this is the good bit. When you get out, it goes into Park all by itself. I wanted to kick it.

Some of the electronics, however, are very good. The satnav is huge and brilliant. The ability to choose settings for the suspension and the steering and the powertrain and then store your preferences for future reference is wonderful. And … I’m sounding like a stuck record. Because I said exactly the same thing when I reviewed the M5 last year.

There’s another similarity too. A great sense of weight. When you push down on the accelerator, you sense that the 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 is really having to gird all of its 552 loins to get the car rolling, and it’s the same story when you turn the wheel. You feel as though you are asking the suspension to deal with something that’s heavier than most monasteries.

And yet strangely it weighs less than two tons. It’s not a lightweight, by any means, but by today’s standards it’s not a porker either. And, anyway, some people enjoy the sense of driving about in a hill. Rather than rolling down it while inside a balloon.

However, you won’t be thinking about weight when you really mash the throttle into the carpet, because this car absolutely flies. It’s really, properly fast, and, better still, it doesn’t make much of a song and dance about it. There’s a trend these days
for fast cars to let you know they’re fast by barking every time you go near the throttle. The BMW doesn’t. It just gets on with its speed, efficiently and with no fuss.

Cornering? Yup, it does that too. And from memory it does it better than the two-door M6, which feels woolly and soft. Sadly, though, I’m not going to ring the man in BMW’s suspension control department (electronics subdivision) and ask why this is so. Because undoubtedly he’s the sort of chap who would enjoy telling me for hours.

It didn’t take me long to work out that this car is special and unusual. An M5 with a hint more style. A genuinely nice place to sit. And, all things considered, it’s not a bad price tag. Yes, its value will depreciate like a fat man falling off a tower block, but £97,490 in the showroom isn’t bad. Not when you see how much Aston Martin wants for a Rapide.

Mercedes, of course, does the CLS 63 AMG, which is similar, and Audi has its RS 7 in the wings. But for now I think the BMW makes the most sense. If it had sensible controls and a Park button, I’d even consider giving it four stars, but it hasn’t, so …

30 June 2013

This morning a man in a chunky-neck jumper and corduroy trousers is sitting down to his plate of kippers, blissfully unaware that he’s the last person in Britain to have been christened Malcolm. It’s much the same story with his wife, Brenda, and his friends from the lodge, Neville and Roger.

Who is Britain’s youngest Simon? Is there a Clive aged under ten? Where is the last Derek? Do you live next door to the final Brian?

This cull of monikers doesn’t happen in Iceland, because the government gives new parents a list of names from which to choose. But here the army of opinion-forming orange people have got it into their heads that they can call their poor little tyke pretty much anything that comes into their heads. And, frankly, why go for something traditional such as Edith or Gertrude when you can name your little girl after a sweet white wine, or a village where you had particularly enjoyable sex in Crete?

This, of course, brings me on to the naming of cars. By and large it’s always been very simple. Expensive cars such as BMWs and Mercedes and Audis were given numbers and letters. Smaller, cheaper cars had names. And usually those names were absolutely terrible.

Fiat has always been especially hopeless. Over the years, it has had the Road and the One and the Point. But we can’t forget Austin Rover, which named the car it said would save it from the dustbin after the Paris underground system. Can you imagine Renault calling its next little car the Tube? No. Neither can I.

Volkswagen isn’t much better, but there’s a reason for this. In
the past it would give a shortlist of names to executives in the company, who were asked to rate them out of ten. Which meant the winner was invariably the name that was everyone’s second or third favourite. How else could they have arrived at the Golf? That’s like calling a car the Herpes.

Then we have Nissan, which for a long time kept alive traditional English names that Coleen and Wayne felt were beneath them. There was the Cedric, the Gloria and the Silvia.

Toyota, meanwhile, called the first car it tried to sell in America the Toyolet. Until the importers suggested that Toyopet might be a bit better. And then we had the Mitsubishi Starion. Which was supposed to have been the Stallion but there was a mix-up caused by the Japanese problem with the letter ‘l’.

There have been some good names, though. The best by a mile – and I won’t take any argument on this – is the Interceptor. The Pantera was pretty good as well but, really, for consistently good names you need to look to America, which has given us the Thunderbird and the Mustang, the Cougar and the Barracuda.

It’s a confidence thing, I guess, the big, toothy ability to name an awful, slow car after a wild, ferocious animal: it’s like calling your son Hercules, even if you have an inkling he’ll grow up to be a six-stone weed with asthma and pipe cleaners for arms.

All of this brings me on to the new baby Vauxhall. The company has called it the Adam, which was the Christian name of the founder of Vauxhall’s sister brand Opel, but the car maker says that’s not why it chose the name. It says it chose Adam for the reason that UKTV changed the name of its G2 channel to Dave. Because it’s a nice name. I think I agree.

The Adam is supposed to take Vauxhall into territory currently occupied by the Fiat 500 and the Mini. It’s supposed to be a trendy car for young urbanites. But there’s a small problem with that. The Fiat and the Mini hark back to cars people remember fondly, but what does the Adam hark back to? The Chevette? The Viva?

‘The Prince Henry,’ said a spokesman for General Motors, Vauxhall’s owner. Well, it’s true. The Prince Henry was indeed very special – the first performance car – but if you can remember that, I suspect you’re not really in the market for a small car. Or indeed any car. Not since your final road journey in that hearse.

No. This new car cannot rely on people wanting to recapture a flavour of the Fifties and Sixties. It’s going to have to stand up on its own four wheels. So does it?

There are three trim levels: Jam, Glam and Slam. But each is available with a bewildering array of options. There are, and I’m not making this up, billions and billions of permutations. And don’t worry if you make a mistake and order ‘Men in Brown’ door mirrors – that’s what they’re called – because you can have them changed for the ‘White My Fire’ option in a jiffy.

In fact, when you become bored with the look of the interior you’ve selected, you can change it next month or next year for something completely different, for £70.

The upshot is that you cannot hate the way the Adam looks because you can make it look however you want. You can’t really hate it as a town car either. There is space in the back for two people, provided their lower legs are no more than 3 inches thick, and there is a boot that’s just about big enough for a midweek shop.

Visibility is good, the clutch is light, the steering is nice and the ride comfort is exceptional. Take away all the connotations, and the fashion aspiration, view it as a town car only, and I have to say it’s better than the Fiat and the Mini.

But as an all-round car, I’m not sure. The model I selected was a 1.4-litre Slam with a chessboard roof lining, yellow trim on the wheels and a billion other sporty features besides. This meant it looked like a hot hatch, and one thing’s for sure: it wasn’t.

The Adam is not at all fast. It doesn’t handle with much enthusiasm
and at 70 mph on the motorway it feels awfully busy – as if it’s sort of surprised to be there.

There are more things too. It doesn’t come with satellite navigation or a telephone, because it is designed to hook up to your smartphone and piggyback the features on that instead. In theory this is a properly good idea. I even asked a man from Vauxhall how it all worked, and in a matter of seconds, well, minutes – well, a quarter of an hour – he had the car talking to his phone.

But when I was left to fly solo, my phone treated the Adam in the way that a reluctant bitch treats a dog. There was no mating at all.

So. There are problems but overall it’s a likeable and practical little car. The only thing that would stop me buying one if I were in the market for such a thing is its other name. Adam is fine. Vauxhall, though? They’ve still got some way to go with that.

7 July 2013

There are many wonderful cars on the market right now: the Ferrari 458 Italia, the McLaren 12C Spider, the Bentley Continental GT V8, the Mercedes SLS AMG, the Lexus LFA, the Aston Martin Vanquish and the BMW M6 Gran Coupé. All are fast, stylish and characterful and I’d happily own any one of them. But I can’t, because driving around in a flash car is like driving around naked. You tend to get noticed. Which is not something I find very enjoyable.

When I’m out and about I’m asked constantly to pose for a photograph. ‘It’s for my sister who’s going on a hockey tour,’ they always say, while rummaging around for their cameraphone.

Several minutes later, after I’ve heard all about the hockey tour and how her boyfriend has a BMW M3, she has found the camera on her phone and is asking passers-by to take a shot. But they don’t know which button to press so they end up taking a picture of their own nose. Or turning it off. And by the time they’ve had a lesson, someone else has arrived. ‘Oh, my son would never forgive me if I didn’t get a picture.’

Resisting the temptation to say, ‘Well, don’t tell him you saw me then,’ I agree to a snap, only to discover he’s a bit of a David Bailey and wants me to move into the shade because the shot’s a bit too backlit. And soon my two-minute trip to the shop for a pint of milk has turned into a two-hour photoshoot.

This, of course, is a time-consuming by-product of appearing on the television. But when it happens on the road, it’s actually pretty dangerous. People brake and swerve and cut across three lanes of traffic to get a shot of me. Once, a chap in a Mini was
so busy videoing me he crashed into the car in front. A car that was being driven, amusingly, by a gorilla of a man.

One of these days someone is going to be killed and that’s why I want my next car to be inconspicuous. And that’s a problem, because every single car that offers the speed and excitement I crave comes with look-at-me styling. Except one: the Volkswagen Golf GTI.

So, I’m sorry. Every week I come here and review a car for your benefit, but this morning I’m reviewing a car for mine. Because the new GTI might just be the answer to all my prayers.

When Volkswagen first created the fast Golf thirty-seven years ago, it was truly classless. I knew housewives who scrimped and saved to buy one. And I knew someone who part-exchanged his Gordon-Keeble. It was also a car that was all things to all men. It could carry five people. It had a boot with rear seats that folded down. It had body panels that cost no more to repair than those on the normal Golf but, thanks to its 108-bhp engine, it was faster and more exciting than any of the sports cars that were kicking around at the time.

The Mk 2 GTI was pretty good as well, but since then the mojo has been slipping away. You had the impression that VW was making a GTI because it felt it had to, not because it was something that excited it in any way. But for the Mk 7 the company brought in the man who did the Porsche 911 GT3 RS. And from what I’ve been hearing, the original magic is back.

The engine is a 2-litre turbo that produces 217 bhp. But for an extra £980 you can have the performance pack, which takes the output up to 227 bhp. I tried that version and after a short time knew that in the real world this car could keep up with just about anything.

Quietly. There’s no fuss with this GTI. No drama. No rorty exhaust noises. You see a gap. You put your foot down. The overtaking manoeuvre is completed. You reach a bend. The electronic front diff makes sure there’s no understeer and no
unseemly tugging at the steering wheel either. You come out on the other side. It is a machine built to make speedy progress. It is German.

There’s more too. It costs just £195 more than the previous model and, thanks to a camera-based emergency braking system, it has fallen five insurance groups. And for a 150-mph-plus car it is also extremely economical.

What we have here then is a bundle of pure, undiluted common sense. Except for two things. First, you can’t buy it with optional 19-inch wheels in combination with a sunroof – no idea why. And second, you can choose between Comfort, Normal and Sport settings for the front differential, the suspension, the gearbox and the steering, so I did a test. I took the car to
Top Gear
’s test track, put it in Normal and asked the Stig to do a lap. He did it in 1 minute 29.6 seconds. I then put it in Sport. This time he did a lap in 1 minute 29.6 seconds. So then I put it in Comfort, which softens everything up. He did it in 1 minute 29.5 seconds.

Adjustable suspension and gearboxes are fitted to many cars these days, and I’ve long harboured a suspicion they make no difference to how fast a car goes. And here’s proof. Sport makes the ride uncomfortable but provides no benefit at all. In its Normal setting the GTI is tremendous. The sportiness is still there – the times prove that – but Comfort mode is sublime. It’s phenomenal and brilliant.

Inside, it’s as logical and as sensible as a German’s knicker drawer and you have the impression that everything will still be working perfectly in ten years’ time. Except for the radio, which broke after two days. And a bit of trim round the rear window, which fell off. But to be fair, I was testing a pre-production model. And the man responsible for these mistakes will have been shot by the time the lines start to roll for real.

Best of all, though, nobody took my picture as I drove along. I had a car that can rip holes in the physics books, that can scream to 62 mph in just over six seconds, that slices through
the bends like a well-drilled monoskier and that is as comfortable as having a nice lie down. But nobody looked at it twice.

The only thing that annoyed me was the double-clutch flappy-paddle gearbox. It was impossible to set off from the lights smoothly, and by the fourth day I was being driven mad. By the seventh I was so angry my nose was beginning to itch. And then I discovered the ‘auto hold’ button.

Fitted to stop the car rolling backwards when you are doing a hill start – you can’t ride the clutch with a flappy-paddle box and there’s none of the in-built ‘creep’ you get from a traditional automatic – it applies the brake whenever you stop. And then, when you put your foot on the throttle, it takes the brake off again. But not fast enough. Hence the jerk.

I turned it off and all was well. Very well. For me this car is perfect. And if you’re honest, it’s perfect for you too.

14 July 2013