What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (42 page)

Peter Mandelson has been responsible for many important initiatives over the years. Though for the life of me I can’t actually recall off the top of my head what any of them were. Er … he had a moustache, and is reputed to have once mistaken mushy peas in a Hartlepool chip shop for guacamole. Oh, and without him the snazzy car I’m going to discuss might never have happened.

Mandelson was business secretary in the aftermath of the global economic crash and decided that what the British car industry needed to help it through the ensuing recession was a bit of government support. He therefore came up with the scrappage scheme.

The idea was simple. If you bought a new car, you’d get £2,000 for your old one, no matter how asthmatic and rusty it had become – well, as long as it had an MoT. The effect was instant. Sales of new cars rocketed by 30 per cent, airfields filled up with old bangers that would go to the crusher and everyone was very happy.

Those of a green disposition were pleased because old cars produce a lot more carbon dioxides than new ones. Shiny-suited car salesmen were happy because they didn’t have to spend all day at work playing solitaire. You were happy because you got £2,000 for a car that was worth just shy of £7.50, and even the taxpayer was happy because, thanks to VAT, the government was earning more than it was giving away in subsidies. But the people wearing the biggest smiles of all were the Korean car makers: Kia and Hyundai.

You see, people were not exchanging their old cars for BMWs or Audis or Range Rovers. No. They were going for cheap runabouts. The scrappage scheme – not just here but in Germany and France as well – took Korean car dealerships from small lots on industrial estates in towns you’ve never heard of to centre stage in the cities. Let me put it this way: 98.8 per cent of all the cars Kia sold under the scrappage scheme were to people who had never owned a Kia before. Frankly, Mandelson should be given the freedom of Seoul. Certainly he should be adopted as a bonnet mascot for Kia. Especially as the name is derived – and I’m not making this up – from the Korean word ‘to come out’.

Kia did not begin making cars properly until 1986. And even then only in very small numbers. In fact, it made just twenty-six. But the following year its numbers were up to more than 95,000. And all of them were extremely horrible. They continued to be extremely horrible even as the 21st century dawned.

I still maintain the worst car I have driven is the Kia Rooney. Or was it Rio? And the second-worst is the equally Korean Hyundai Accent with a three-cylinder diesel. Both still make me shiver. I’d rather sit in a bucket of vomit.

Had people bought one of these under the scrappage scheme, they’d have been breaking into the airfields and the scrapyards to get their old bangers back.

Today, though, things are very different. The Kia Sportage SUV is charismatic. The latest Kia Cee’d is verging on excellent, as is the coupé version, the Pro_Cee’d, and then there’s the hot version of that. A hot Kia. A vehicle to rival the Volkswagen Golf GTI and the Ford Focus ST. Who’d have thought it?

First of all, the Pro_Cee’d GT is extremely good-looking. Sporty without being brash. It hints at its potential with discreet nudges, such as the red brake callipers, the deep sills and the little red stripe across the radiator grille. The lines are exquisite.

Then you get inside and it’s much the same story. Yes, legroom in the back is tight, and after you’ve tilted and slid the front seats forwards to let someone in, they return to a position
that would suit only Richard Hammond. But we see this idiocy in many cars these days. What we don’t usually see is quite so many buttons.

I was driving the high-spec Tech version and it was festooned with switches. And equipment. You get a tremendous satnav system, and a button that changes the look of the instrument panel. You get voice activation and iPod connectivity. You get far more than you would get on a Golf GTI, that’s for sure.

After you set off, it continues to impress. It’s quiet and comfortable, and the driving position is perfect. There are lots of places to put your stuff, and nothing is rattling around in the enormous boot because a cargo net is holding everything in place. I especially liked the position of the gear lever in relation to the wheel, and was deeply impressed by the tiny gate through which it moves. First, third and fifth are no more than a few millimetres apart. It’s as if Kia has taken the best bit of every hot hatch that’s yet been made and put them all in the Pro_Cee’d GT.

Then the company has given it a seven-year warranty and a price tag of £22,495 – about £3,600 less than VW charges for an entry-level GTI. So that’s all great and tremendous …

Unfortunately after about half an hour you realize that the whole car is a sham. A matrix. A veneer of excellence draped over a lot of pile-’em-high-and-sell-’em-cheap rubbish.

And it isn’t hard to see why. Mothers Pride is a brand of sliced bread, and if all you want is a base on which you can serve a helping of baked beans, that’s absolutely fine. But what Kia has done with the Pro_Cee’d GT is wrap a slice of what my grandfather used to call ‘wet vest bread’ in a faux crusty exterior with bits of nut sprinkled here and there.

The electric power steering and the brakes feel cheap. So does the gear-change action, and so especially does the 1.6-litre turbo engine. It’s so lacking in torque that you often stall when trying to dribble away in second. And at the top end it sounds like a cement mixer full of gravel. Speed? Well, there’s some, but
nowhere near as much as the red brake callipers and all those buttons would have you believe.

Then there’s the weight. If Kia had been serious about making a proper hot hatch, the GT wouldn’t weigh more than the Pacific Ocean. And it’s a heaviness you can sense when you are cornering, accelerating and braking.

Kia needs to understand that the real hot hatches from Ford and Volkswagen are designed by engineers who care, and signed off by accountants who really wish they didn’t. The Pro_Cee’d GT? It’s just a half-witted attempt to pull the wool over our eyes. It’s not cheap just because it costs less than a Golf GTI. It is, in fact, expensive, because it costs so much more than it should.

In the Seventies various long-forgotten electronics companies made music systems that appeared to offer the same level of performance as Wharfedale, Marsden Hall and Garrard. They had many bells and whistles and they were cheap, but to anyone with ears they sounded dreadful. Well, that’s exactly what’s going on with the hot Kia. It’s a good-looking, well-equipped bag of Virgin Cola. I hated it.

24 November 2013

Every lunchtime on Radio 2 Jeremy Vine hosts a topical news and discussion show in which the ‘motorist’ is always portrayed as a swivel-eyed, testosterone-fuelled speed freak with the social conscience of a tiger and a total disregard for the wellbeing of others.

This always strikes me as odd because just about everyone over the age of seventeen is a motorist. Which leads us to the conclusion that in Vineworld all adults are men, and we are all mad or murderers or a worrying mix of the two.

There was a debate recently on the show about pelican crossings and how elderly people are not given enough time to reach the other side of the road before the lights go green. I know, I know. It was a slow news day. Apart from the tornados in America, the typhoon in the Philippines and the floods in Sardinia.

Anyway, Vine said that when an elderly lady is marooned in the middle of the road and the lights go green for traffic, motorists start to rev their engines. Really? What motorists do this? I have been driving for thirty-six years and not once have I ever been tempted to rev my engine to encourage an old woman to get a bloody move on. What’s more, I’ve never heard anyone else do it either. The idea that an adult would do such a thing is preposterous.

But, of course, you can’t be bothered to telephone the show and say that, because you would be faced with someone who says it happens all the time. And then you’d be in a does/doesn’t argument until it was time for ‘Mandy’ by Barry Manilow.

This meant the counter-argument was put by a lunatic from
a ‘motoring’ organization who said that if the lights at pelicans were retuned to give old people time to cross the road, it would be bad for the economy. At that point I switched over to Radio 4.

Later in the show they were going to be discussing bicycles and why, in London alone, in the past month seven million cyclists have been killed by motorists on purpose. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to that because at no point would anyone say, ‘If you’re going to put thousands of bicycles on the streets of London it is inevitable that some of them are going to be squished.’ That would be the voice of reason. And that isn’t allowed in Vineworld.

There are other issues, too, that are always held aloft as shining examples of the motorist’s stupidity. We all drive with our rear fog lights on, apparently, even when the weather is dry and clear. Really? I ask only because I haven’t seen anyone do that for twenty years or more.

We all hog the middle lane as well. This, of course, is true, but usually because the inside lane is crammed full of lorries. So technically we’re not hogging it. We’re just using it. We also block yellow junctions. Nope. You’re confusing us with bus drivers.

Then we have young motorists who tear about at breakneck speed. This is a given. A fact. There is no arguing with it. Even though it simply isn’t true. Most young people I know drive extremely slow cars very carefully because they can’t afford the petrol that breakneck speed requires.

Yes, in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a problem with twockers, and kids on the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford tearing hither and thither in other people’s hot hatchbacks. But that doesn’t happen any more. So complaining about it is like complaining about BT giving people party lines. And the quality of the recordings on Dial-a-Disc. And French 101 lavatories.

There is, however, one Vine discussion topic that is worth the time of day. The new-found fondness people have for SUVs. Naturally in Vineland they’re called Chelsea tractors and they’re all driven by silly rich women and they all have bull bars. And
pretty soon the producer will put a caller through from the Labour party, who will say, ‘They were designed to go off road but all they ever do is put a wheel on the pavement.’ And then I switch over to Radio 4 again.

The fact is this. There are two types of off-road car. There’s an off-road car that is designed to go off road. A Range Rover, for instance. And then you have off-road cars that are not designed to go off road. These are called SUVs and they annoy me.

I look at everyone in their Honda CR-Vs and their BMW X3s and their Audi Q3s and I think, Are you all mad? An ordinary estate or hatchback costs less to buy and less to run and is nicer to drive, more comfortable and just as practical. But it doesn’t take up so much bloody space.

I parked yesterday between two of the damn things in a London square, and because they were so wide I couldn’t open my door, which meant I was stuck inside, being forced to listen to Vine’s callers phoning up to moan about secondary picketing.

Now, though, things are getting completely out of hand because Audi has decided that what the world really needs is another fast SUV. And so welcome to the SQ5, the fastest-accelerating diesel SUV of them all.

First things first: it’s not fast. If Audi had really wanted it to blister tarmac and earn its own slot on Jeremy Vine, the company would have given it a big petrol V8. But instead it has a twin-turbo diesel unit that is made to sound fast by the fitting of a speaker to the exhaust system.

Furthermore, if Audi had actually been serious about making it a high-riding modern-day take on the old quattro, it would have entrusted the suspension alterations to its in-house performance division. But it didn’t. It simply added some fat tyres and lowered the suspension and left it at that.

You read that right. It lowered the suspension. So Audi made a car that was jacked up to suit the weird new trend. And then to capitalize still further on that trend, it lowered it again.

Oh, it’s not completely horrid to drive. It zooms along with a
fair degree of urgency, and I have to say the compromise between ride and handling isn’t bad at all. Even though it’s not as good as it would have been if the roof weren’t a menace to much of Europe’s air traffic.

Inside? Well, the back bench slithers backwards and forwards – a nice touch – but you don’t get satnav as standard, which seems a bit mean. The worst thing, however, is the visibility. The pillars, the headrests and the door mirrors all seem to conspire to make everything outside disappear. You could easily run over a cyclist in this vehicle and simply not know it had happened.

Which brings us to an inevitable conclusion. No. Motorists get a bad-enough press as it is, without driving around in cars such as this. I drove it for one day. And then went to Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula, to get away from it. I’ll come back when it’s gone.

1 December 2013

It’s strange. Today there are far fewer car makers than there were thirty years ago. And yet choosing what sort of car you would like next has never been more difficult. This is because thirty years ago only one thing mattered: the letter at the beginning of the numberplate. That’s what told your neighbours you had a new car.

The idea of identifying a vehicle’s age by a letter on the numberplate started in 1963. But quite quickly the car makers noticed that it was creating a massive problem. Because the letter denoting age changed on January 1, everyone wanted to take delivery of their new vehicle on New Year’s Day. This meant car salesmen had to sit about dusting the pot plants for eleven months and then work like mad ants over the Christmas holidays. It made life tough in the car factories as well and created a cash-flow headache seen previously only in the nation’s turkey industry.

And so in 1967 the changeover date became August 1. This, it was felt, would create two spikes. One at the beginning of the year, when people could take delivery of a 1968 model. And one in August, when the new letter became available. But it didn’t work. That letter meant more than the endeavours of Pope Gregory.

That letter trumped everything. It said you were doing well. That life was being kind. It was critical. Nobody cared what sort of car they bought just as long as other road users knew it was new. And strangely the people this helped most of all were the comrades behind the Iron Curtain.

Cars made in the Soviet bloc were cheap. They were therefore
the easiest way of getting the right letter on your driveway. People would see the H-registration plate and say, ‘Have you seen the Joneses at number forty-seven have a new car?’ and simply not notice that it was a Moskvich. Which wasn’t really a car, so much as a collection of pig iron fashioned into a rough approximation of a car.

Or the FSO Polonez. Made in Poland by people who didn’t care, from steel that was both heavy and see-through, it was utterly dreadful. The steering wheel was connected to the front wheels by cement, and when you pressed the accelerator, it felt as though you had sent a signal to an overweight and sweaty man in a vest, who rose in a disgruntled manner from his seat in the boot to put some more coal on the fire. Eventually this would cause you to go 1 mph faster.

Braking? Yes. It had that. Though really it was like trying to stop an overloaded wheelbarrow on a steep, muddy hill. Certainly in both cases you tended to end up with brown trousers. But despite all this the FSO sold in respectable numbers because it was available at no extra cost with a V on its numberplate.

Then there was the Lada Riva. It was originally designed by Fiat when Ben-Hur was still the star attraction in Rome – I mean the actual Ben-Hur, not Charlton Heston – and the design rights were sold to Lada, which promptly didn’t develop it at all. Why should they? There was a thirty-year waiting list at home, there was no competition and there were plenty of people in Britain who’d buy one because of its numberplate.

Oh, the company had other reasons. It would argue that because the Lada was designed and built to handle Russian roads, it was tough. This was untrue. It was actually designed to handle Italian roads and it had the crash protection of a paper bag. The pillars supporting the roof had the strength of drinking straws, which meant that if you rolled during an accident your head was going to end up adjacent to your heart.

Skoda, bless it, tried its hardest with some interesting designs. But back at home it had no yardstick against which these designs
could be measured. So often they didn’t work. Though when I say ‘often’, I mean ‘always’.

Unusual rear-suspension design on rear-engined cars meant that if you tried to take any corner at any speed, the rear wheel would fold up, the car would spin and you’d hit a tree and die screaming in a terrifying fireball. And at your funeral they’d say how sad it was because you’d just bought a new car.

Of course it was inevitable that one day the alphabet would run out of new letters for car registration plates, and so someone came up with the system we have today. You can still tell a car’s age from its registration plate, but only if you have a calculator and the brain of an elephant.

Some say it was Ronald Reagan’s proposed Star Wars technology that finished the Cold War and brought down the Berlin Wall. Others reckon it was the accident at Chernobyl that caused Mikhail Gorbachev to come to do the business with Margaret Thatcher. But actually it was the registration-plate change. Because that one single thing ended the demand for cheap-at-any-price new cars.

Which brings me, after quite a long run-up, to the Dacia Sandero. Prices start at £5,995, which on the face of it is astonishing value for money. Yes, it’s built in Romania, which has exactly the same car-building history as Ghana, but it’s actually based on the one-before-last Renault Clio. So. This is a car that is based on a 2007 Renault, that does more than 55 mpg and that is yours for less than the price of most holidays.

There is probably an inconsequential issue with its name. Even though it’s spelt Dacia, which in English rhymes with fascia, its maker insists that actually it should be pronounced ‘datcha’. Which means you could end up with a Russian country house.

Using the Romanian pronunciation is silly. It’d be like the Florentine marketing board urging British people to visit Firenze. We wouldn’t know where to go.

But what of the Sandero itself? Drawbacks? Yes. Plenty. It
looks as if it’s been styled by someone who’s never actually seen a car before. And it is a bit spartan. And a bit cramped in the back. And a bit slow. And a bit roly-poly in the corners. And, compared with some of its rivals, it produces quite a few carbon dioxides, which means you have to pay £125 a year in vehicle tax.

In the olden days none of these things would have mattered, because for less than £6,000 you could have had the latest registration prefix. But now you just get a thirteen or a sixty-three and nobody really knows what any of that means.

So the Sandero must be judged as a car, and I’m sorry, but for £5,995 you can do quite a lot better by trawling through
driving.co.uk
,
The Sunday Times
’ second-hand-car website. This, then, is why buying a cheap new car is so much more difficult than it was. Because without anything that identifies it as new, you may as well plunge into the vastly more complex world of pre-owned.

8 December 2013