What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (6 page)

In the olden days most people who needed a family car bought a simple hatchback. A Ford Escort, perhaps, or, if they were feeling racy, a Volkswagen Golf. Not any more. Now, ordinary won’t do. Simple is dreary. The Hush Puppy has been ousted to make way for the clown shoe: the SUV. The crossover. The funky little retro bomb with scorpions on the bonnet and chequerboard door mirrors.

I wonder why. When I finish work today I shall potter over to the house and pour myself a glass of Château Léoube, the pink sort. It’s what I drink before supper. And during supper. And afterwards as well, usually. Wine is simple. It’s easy. And a bottle contains exactly the right amount for a single evening.

Beer is good, too. The Ford Escort of beverages. On a really hot day, when you’ve been busy outside, you don’t think, Oooh. What I really need now to quench my thirst is a banana daiquiri. You always want a beer: not the sort James May likes, with twigs in it, but a Peroni, in a glass with condensation dripping down the outside.

One of the things I hate most in life is when people come round to my house and ask for a gin and tonic. That’s four ingredients I must go and find. The gin, the tonic, the ice and the lemon. We never have a lemon in the house: why would you? And if we do, invariably it was picked before the Boer war and has the texture and juiciness of a marble.

And then there’s the ice tray, which either contains no ice at all, or it does but it’s one big lump that will not, even with the assistance of a hammer, come out of the container. To get round
this we recently installed a fridge that dispenses ice at the touch of a button. In theory this is brilliant, but what happens in fact is that you hold the glass under the nozzle and you get water instead. So you start again, and now it delivers enough ice to keep a Spanish trawler at sea for several months.

The first time this happened I attempted to clear up the mess with a vacuum cleaner, and now I have a message for you all: do not do this. Because Henry burped a bit and then broke.

Seriously, going to someone’s house and asking for a gin and tonic is like asking for a shepherd’s pie. And you wouldn’t do that because you know it’d be a nuisance. Especially if your wife has asked for a vodka and cranberry juice, with just a hint of lime. We don’t have any cranberry juice, or lime. Or vodka usually. Because the kids’ friends have drunk it all.

It’s always best, for convenience, then, to keep your drinking preferences simple. Yes, on a lazy Sunday morning it’s possible to spend an hour or so making a super-complicated Bloody Mary, but, no, in a packed City pub it is not acceptable to shout from the back, ‘Four Pimm’s, please, with all the trimmings.’

And now, in a link so tenuous a spider would call it flimsy, we shall move on to the modern-day equivalent of a pint of stout. The new Ford Focus. The car you didn’t buy because you fancied a Fiat Harvey Wallbanger or a Citroën Shirley Temple instead.

Ten years ago I bought a Ford Focus, and I still have it today. Occasionally I use it, and I am always amazed by what a joyous thing it is to drive. Thanks to independent rear suspension, an expensive solution to a problem no one in the world has ever noticed, it is an attack dog in the corners. The engine’s good, too. And, as we know, it can carry just as many people and dogs as a big 4x4. More, in fact, because our ancient labrador can no longer leap up into the Range Rover, whereas she can get into the back of the Ford.

The best thing about the Focus, though, is the amount of times it’s broken down. Have a guess. No. Because in ten years it
hasn’t gone wrong once. Every single thing still works. It’s a five-star car, that.

But what of the new model? Well, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a looker. With its black-painted sills, it appears sleek and slinky, more like a coupé than a family hatchback.

Inside, it’s a button-fest. There are millions of them on every flat surface; so many, in fact, that it takes several hours to find the one that starts the engine. I don’t mind this, especially as they are laid out in the same pattern that Porsche uses on the Panamera, and anyway they are necessary because this car has a lot of features.

Even the base models come with blue teeth and voice activation for the main controls. This doesn’t ever work, of course – like the iPod connector – but there are hours of fun to be had on long journeys asking the dashboard to do one thing and then wondering what it will do instead.

Problems? Yes. One. It’s all very well fitting wipers that move about in an interesting and unusual way, but they don’t clear even a small portion of the screen. John Prescott could hide in the blind spots.

Underneath all this, though, it’s a festival of electrotechnology designed to keep you pointing in the right direction. There’s a torque-vectoring system – wake up at the back – that gently brakes the inside wheel in a corner to prevent understeer and, as an option, a device that applies all the brakes very firmly indeed if you are about to crash into the car in front.

This kind of thing – and there’s tons more besides – is all very clever and demonstrates very clearly that the people at Ford who live with their mums and play with laptops could walk off with the geek of the year award at next year’s Mr Nerd competition. But when you put a layer of electronics between the driver and the road, some driving purity must be lost.

In short, this new car may be safer and more economical than the Focus I bought. But as a driver’s car it’s not in the same league.

And that, of course, means the Focus has lost its USP. I bought one because it was demonstrably better to drive than anything else. But why would you buy the new one rather than a – much cheaper – Hyundai or Kia?

The only thing I can think of is the engine that was fitted to my demonstrator model. This variant is called the Ecoboost, but don’t be fooled into thinking it runs on lentils and has an output that’s measured in flower power. It’s a turbocharged 1.6 that, even in sixth gear, provides a genuinely surprising chunk of grunt. And what’s even more surprising is that it’s very economical as well.

However, even here there’s a problem, because today you’d have to be a swivel-eyed lunatic to buy a car that runs on petrol. Or a billionaire. And if you’re a billionaire you won’t be interested, I’m guessing, in a Focus.

This means, then, that if you buy the Ford, you’ll specify a diesel. Nothing wrong with that. Ford’s diesel engines are fine. Not brilliant. But OK. And there’s the problem. You end up with an OK car with an OK engine. And is that what you want?

In short, there’s no big reason for not buying the new Focus. But there’s no big reason for buying one, either. Especially when other pints of beer are available for a lot less.

1 May 2011

I’ve been cycling. It was a charity bike ride and I completed the five-mile course in a little over two hours. Everyone overtook me. Partly this was because the uphill stretches were extremely difficult and partly because on the downhill stretches I daren’t build up speed because I was absolutely convinced the front wheel was about to come off.

This would have caused the forks to dig, suddenly, into the road and as a result I’d have been catapulted over the handlebars, landing at high speed, on the tarmac, on my face. I don’t like my face very much, but I do need it for talking and seeing where I’m going and so on.

And no, I wasn’t wearing a helmet. I don’t wear a helmet for skiing, either. Or on building sites. Helmets make the wearer look foolish. So I decided, after a long discussion with my lungs and my quads, that it’d be better if I simply went slowly. This, then, is what I did and actually it was fine.

What, however, was not fine was getting my bicycle and my wife’s to the start line. Needless to say, someone else fixed the bike rack – which we seem to own for no obvious reason – to the back of our Volvo and loaded the bikes onto it.

This worried me for two reasons. First, I’d have to drive halfway across England in a Volvo with two bicycles stuck to the back, which is like a scene from a Ski yogurt commercial, and second, after the ride was over, I’d have to fit the bikes into the rack myself for the journey home. And I am to this sort of thing what the Duchess of Kent is to spot-welding.

Still, I figured that since it was a charity bike ride, the finish
line would be awash with eager, Lycra-buttocked weird beards who’d take pity on the petrosexual and help out.

But there was a problem. After dropping my wife and her bike off at the start point for fit people, I was setting the satnav for the slobs’ start point when, KERPOW!, a man who was 700 years old reversed into the bike rack, knocking it clean off the car.

Have you ever tried to assemble such a thing? It is impossible. It makes no sense. You clip some straps behind the tailgate and then it just sort of rests on the bumper. To my eye that looked all wrong.

But since time was pressing, I moved on and examined the procedure for attaching my bike. This made even less sense, since all that prevented it from falling off and bouncing through the windscreen of the car behind, decapitating everyone inside, were two of those twisty things you use for doing up freezer bags.

I pushed and heaved and got chain oil on my face until eventually I decided I had to set off. That’s when I discovered two very sturdy-looking straps with big military-style clasps on the end. These didn’t seem to be important, though, so I left them dangling.

By driving very gingerly, I made it to the start line for fatties without beheading anyone. But now, in my mind, a big question mark hangs over the safety of things you attach to a car. Not just bike racks but roof boxes as well.

Ever fitted one of those? Of course not. Because lifting them into position will break your back, and dropping it, which you will, will remove all the paint from your car. Better, and cheaper, to buy whatever it is you were thinking of putting in your roof box when you get to wherever it is you’re going.

And another thing. A roof box is shaped just like a cruise missile, and if it becomes detached it will do as much damage. But have you seen the nuts and bolts they provide for affixing the box to your car? You’d be better off sticking it in place with chewing gum.

Let me give you a word of warning. If you come up behind a car with a box on the roof and some bikes attached to the back, keep your distance. Because they will have been fastened to the vehicle by someone who likes roof boxes and bicycling. Not Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Then you have snow chains. They are supposed to keep you moving when conditions are atrocious. But what they actually do is sever all your fingers and, if your wife is in the car, make you divorced.

Best, then, to buy a car that suits your lifestyle rather than a car to which various things must be attached in order for it to fit the bill.

Not the Renault Wind, then – the first car to be named after the effects of indigestion. Designed by a Frenchman, based on the humble Clio hatchback and built in Slovenia, it sounds perhaps the most stupid car in all of modern history.

It gets worse, because although it is a two-seater convertible, it was plainly not built to be light and sporty in the mould of an MG or a Lotus Elan or a Mazda MX-5. No. With its electric flip’n’over roof and its tiny little engine, it’s more of a city-centre pose-mobile, a Christian Louboutin shoe with a tax disc. I’m surprised, frankly, that its undersides aren’t red.

Of course, it’s normal at this point for the petrolhead to scoff, to suggest that the Wind’s body is writing cheques its engine can’t cash. That it’d be burnt off at the lights by a pedestrian. But I’m not going to do that because, many years ago, I used to own a Honda CR-X. And what you have here is the modern-day equivalent. I like it.

Yes, the 1.2-litre turbo engine’s a bit too small, but the non-turbo 1.6 isn’t bad at all. Go for this option and you get 131 bhp, which is enough to let you exploit the Botty Burp’s really rather excellent chassis. All quick(ish) Renaults feel lively in a Lucozade, good-for-you sort of way and this is no different. On country lanes it was – despite a ridiculously large steering wheel that makes the bigger driver feel cramped – fun, and,
better still, it’s not so fast that your passenger complains after five seconds about having the roof down.

In terms of practicality – well, you’re not going to get a bike in the boot, but because the roof folds in such a clever way, not as much space is robbed as you might imagine.

And to top it all off, prices start at £15,205. The range-topping 1.6 GT Line is only £17,010, which means it’s considerably less than the 1.6-litre Ford Focus I drove last week. Given the amount of equipment you get as standard, that looks good value.

However, there is just one chink in the armour. It feels as cheap as it is. This is not a car designed, I suspect, to be passed on to the next generation. The dash, the switchgear, the levers – everything you see and touch feels brittle. As though everything will last about as long as – well, without wishing to be too lavatorial – a fart.

8 May 2011

If you want to spend a lot of money on a house, there is a very large list of options. It could be in France or Florida. It could be old or new. It could be nestling on a bed of gravel in the Cotswolds or surrounded by a turquoise moat in Alderley Edge.

It’s the same story with restaurants and art and furniture and holidays. Money buys you choice. Unless you are planning on buying a car. Because when you are rich enough to take a seat at the top table in petrol heaven, there’s no choice at all.

You want a big, fast BMW. It’ll be uncomfortable. You want a big, fast Mercedes. It’ll be uncomfortable. You want a Ferrari or a Maserati or a Porsche. Uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. All of them have suspension made from concrete and tyres with the give of an African warlord.

The fact of the matter is this: with the exception of footballers and tennis players, most people who have enormous lumps of money to spend on a car are in their forties or fifties. They’ve done their time sleeping on chairs after parties and kipping on the floor because they can’t afford a taxi home. What they want, at all times, is to be comfy, to have a nice sit-down, to relax.

But the car makers have got it into their heads that this simply doesn’t apply when you’re coming home from work. No. The car makers think that you want to feel every ripple and every catseye. They think you want seats with the cushioning of a kitchen chair. They think that you want to feel at all times like you’re going for a lap record at the Nürburgring.

If the designers at AMG made sofas, they’d be fashioned from gravel and would come with spikes.

The new BMW range of luxury carpet: ‘Made from Lego bricks and upturned plugs.’ And the new Maserati bath: ‘Instead of water, or ass’s milk, we allow our customers to soak away the strains of the day, up to their necks in sulphuric acid.’

It’s bonkers, and you can see what’s going on. Car makers want their cars to be liked by
Autocar
magazine, and what
Autocar
likes is fast lap times. Engineers like fast lap times, too, because that shows they are better engineers than the idiots at BMW, whose cars are slower. It’s all just one big peeing competition, with you and me playing the part of the suckers with the chequebooks.

This brings me to Aston Martin. In the beginning it made the DB9, and we saw that it was pretty good. It rode as if it had been designed for the road, not the Nürburgring. But instead of making the new, smaller car – the Vantage – in the same mould, Aston’s boffins decided it should be more uncomfortable. And then, when they fitted that with a bigger, V12 engine, they decided that it should be more uncomfortable still. And then along came the DBS, in which they did away with the suspension altogether and fitted steel girders.

You would imagine that this would cause the marketing department at Jaguar to think, Aha. Now that Aston Martin has decided to make a range of racing cars, we see an opportunity, so let us soften the supercharged XKR. Because there are many middle-aged men with moobs and very wide bottoms who might like such a thing.’

’Fraid not. Jaguar decided that anything Aston could do, it could do better. So the current XK rides around on suspension seemingly made from a blend of granite and chest freezers. Run over a pothole in that car and you shatter.

As a result of all this, I had high hopes for the Aston Martin Virage. It was billed as a cheaper, more comfortable version of the DBS. All the style. All the speed. All the lovely interior detailing. But none of the rock-hard, racetrack, carbon-fibre nonsense that no one either needs or wants.

Well, it may have an automatic gearbox but it’s still a bitch. You can tell when you run over a white line whether the paint was gloss or emulsion. You know when you run over a pheasant whether it was a cock or a hen. And you can’t just feel the suspension refusing to budge when it encounters a bit of gravel; you can hear it, too. Raging away with a series of clumps and bangs.

It is a huge missed opportunity. It could have been the only expensive car currently on sale designed for people who actually exist. But it is just as uncomfortable as all the others.

In almost every other way, however, it’s better. With new sills and a new front spoiler, it looks even more beautiful than the DBS. It looks more beautiful than the most beautiful thing you can think of. Especially in deep, dark, last-vestige-of-the-day navy blue. And doubly especially if you go for the convertible version.

What’s more, it’s £25,000 cheaper than the DBS and, really, it’s hard to see why, since the two cars have the same 6-litre V12 engine. It may have been mildly detuned in the Virage, but you still get 490 horsepower, and that’s enough to get you from rest to the wrong side of the national speed limit in 4.6 seconds. Provided you are in the right gear – and the auto box can be a bit dim-witted sometimes – this is a very, very fast car.

It’s even fast at stopping, thanks to carbon ceramic brakes, and, of course, because the suspension and the tyres are so hardcore, it is utterly thrilling to hustle. You’ve never actually seen an Aston being hustled, of course, but if that’s your bag, the Virage is the best of them all. After the V12 Vantage, perhaps.

Drawbacks? Well, behind the wheel it is a bit cramped, and the price you pay for all that design elegance is that the buttons are quite hard to find. And even harder to press if you are on a bumpy road at the time.

The worst thing, though, is the new satnav. Unlike the old system, which only told you where you’d been, this one only tells you to slow down. Constantly, with a series of bongs. If it even
thinks there could be a speed camera nearby, off it goes, yelling and panicking.

It may well be, of course, that there’s a button for turning this feature off, but finding that would mean reading the instruction manual. And that’s not going to happen. I’m a man.

What’s more, when I told it I wanted it to go to London, its next question was, ‘What house number?’

We all need the same thing from a satnav system, so why do all car makers give us a choice about how the screen looks or what sort of voice we want? Choices mean submenus, and submenus are for people who live at home with their mums. Submenu people are the only people on earth who don’t actually need satnav because they never go further than the fridge.

So the Virage is a missed opportunity in this respect, too. And yet, I’m afraid I’m completely in love with it. It’s a hard car, and a hard car to operate, and there are those who say that the wheels are coming off Aston’s previously untarnished brand kudos. But get into a Virage in the morning and I guarantee you will feel good. Better than if you were getting into almost anything else.

At the raggedy edge, a Ferrari 458 is more rewarding to drive and a Mercedes SLS is more fun. But both those cars are a bit flamboyant. And that’s where the Aston scores. It isn’t.

15 May 2011