What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (8 page)

I wonder if we realize just how fast the age of electronic communication is taking over our lives, and shaping them and ruining them.

Unless you are a slipper and sherry enthusiast, you will be aware of a computer game called
Call of Duty
. The idea is simple. You run about shooting people in the face with a selection of large weapons. And then, if you believe the nonsense, you go out for a pizza and are overwhelmed by a sudden need to stamp on a tramp.

Of course, you can play by yourself or with friends. But, staggeringly, you can also play against unseen people in Canada or Israel or Siberia. It is incredible. And all the people you’re trying to kill are being operated by unseen tramp-stampers in sitting rooms and shops and offices all over the world. If you have a microphone, you can even speak to them as you play, whooping whenever you fire a 12-gauge shotgun directly into their testes.

Unfortunately, like nearly everything powered by ones and noughts, it sounds brilliant but it doesn’t quite work. You start the game. It tells you it’s searching for other people in the world. It finds some. It does some electronic wizardry. And then it says the connection has been lost. So you go through the process again. And then again. And then again. And then you have a game of Scrabble instead.

We see the same thing with wireless routers. Wonderful. A must-have accessory. But, as I’ve said many times before, they work 10 per cent of the time and you spend the other 90 per
cent of your life with your head in a cupboard, on the phone to a man in India.

The problem is, of course, that electronics companies always want to be first with a new idea. So the idea makes it onto the market before it’s completely ready. This is why nothing electronic ever quite works.

Satellite navigation is a prime example of this. In the early days it was hopeless and would try to send you through Leicester Square, which was pedestrianized by William Pitt. The system in my last car refused to acknowledge there was such a thing as the M40. And we were constantly reading stories about people who’d obeyed the electronic voice of reason and ended up in a river, with a crab in their nose. But that was probably their fault for being idiotic.

Today you’d imagine that all of the mapping issues had been resolved, and to a certain extent they have. But the back-room boys – the sort of chap who wears a black T-shirt, lives with his mum and doesn’t wash terribly often – are always shoehorning new submenus into the setup. And those are being rushed out as well.

Take the traffic warning technology. The idea is that the map informs you of hold-ups ahead so that you can plan a route around them. Very clever. It cuts congestion, saves fuel, spares your temper and keeps the polar bears happy.

But the system in the Mercedes CLS that I’ve been driving for the past week is forever getting its northbound and its southbound muddled up. Which means I spend an hour dribbling along a country lane, with my door mirrors in the blackberry bushes, avoiding a queue that’s going the other way.

What’s more, a stern-sounding woman interrupts Chris Evans to say in a weird voice that there is a queue ahead. She even gives you the average speed in the queue and adjusts your estimated time of arrival accordingly.

Because of one of her warnings last week, I realized that I would not make it to the restaurant I’d booked before it shut. So
I called to cancel the reservation, phoned home to disappoint the children and plodded onwards towards the jam. WHICH WASN’T BLOODY THERE.

There’s more. One of the features provided is a list of all the restaurants in the area. It asks what sort of food you want and then takes you to the nearest eatery that is equipped to help. The trouble is that people only ever want Chinese, French, Italian or Indian. But it would be racist to limit the list to just four options. So, to keep everyone happy, it comes up with every single country in the world. If you have a modern Mercedes and you live in the highlands of Scotland, do please enter ‘Balkan’ and let me know what on earth it comes up with.

I was also amused by the other things it will help you find. Many are useful. Hospitals, police stations and so on. It will even help you locate the nearest mosque, which is clearly important if the sun is going down and you are a Muslim.

But then the black T-shirt brigade obviously thought, Uh-oh. We can’t list just mosques, because it looks as though we are favouring the children of Muhammad over those who support other teams. So, it will also find the nearest synagogue. But – black mark here – it does not seem to think that Methodist chapels are worthy of a mention.

Also, it could not find the Devils Dyke pub on Devils Dyke Road, just north of Brighton. And it will not let you enter a seven-character postcode. It ended up making me very angry. The command-and-control system in my old Mercedes is very good. This new one? It’s so clever, it’s actually a drooling vegetable.

And then we have the phone system. Until very recently Mercedes fitted an actual telephone that was hardwired into the car. What that did was work. Now the nerds in the back room have decided that Bluetooth is good enough. It isn’t. People speaking on Bluetooth sound like deep-sea divers, and that’s when they’re both in an anechoic chamber. Communicating with someone in a car on Bluetooth is like trying to communicate with a corpse.

Electronically, then, the Mercedes CLS has taken a couple of steps forwards and about five in the other direction.

It’s the same story with the shape. The original CLS is said to have been designed by a young stylist who wanted to see how a Jaguar would look if it were made by Mercedes. It was weird, but undeniably attractive.

From the front the new one is even better, but, as with other new Mercs, there’s a styling detail over the rear wheelarch that simply doesn’t work at all. Styling details need to be there for a reason – a hump in the bonnet hints at great power beneath, for instance – but this one is just fatuous. I pretty much hate it.

I also hate the gearbox. The old seven-speed auto has been replaced with the double-clutch flappy-paddle system found in the SLS. It’s electronic, so it works well, except when you are in town going slowly. Then it’s jerky and unwilling to respond when you want to exploit a gap in the traffic.

The rest of the car, though. Wow. It’s been festooned inside and out with lots of neat bits of jewellery that stop just short of being blingy and, in the case of the CLS I’ve been driving, add £27,000 to the £80,000 price tag.

And then there’s the engine. It’s AMG’s new twin-turbo V8 – with, on my test car, a performance upgrade to 550 bhp and 590 lb ft – and it’s much more muted than the old 6.2. Under big acceleration you still get some machinegun noises from the tailpipes, but it’s quieter, more civilized. I’d go so far as to call the driving experience imperious. When slower drivers see this coming, they get out of the way in a big hurry. You feel a bit like Idi Amin. Or was that just me?

Overall, however, I think that some of the original CLS’s appeal has been lost. And, as a result, if I wanted to buy a big, stylish four-door saloon, I’d just walk past this and go for the Maserati Quattroporte.

12 June 2011

Have you actually stopped for a moment and looked – really looked – at the new BMW 5-series estate? All things considered, I would say that this is one of the most handsome cars ever made. It has all the BMW hallmarks: the body seems to have been stretched to the limits simply to cover the wheels, and there’s the traditional Hofmeister lean-forward kink in the rear pillar. It’s a tiny design detail that makes the car look as though it’s going a thousand miles an hour even when it’s in a golf club car park.

And yet the car doesn’t look old-fashioned. There’s something about the shape of the bonnet that makes it look as though it may be visiting us from the future.

It’s the same story on the inside. All cars of this type, if we’re honest, feel and look pretty much the same from behind the wheel. But not the Beemer. It’s all very minimalist and unusual. As if you’ve accidentally plonked yourself down in a Bang & Olufsen catalogue. And the 5-series estate is not alone. The new(ish) Z4 moons me with its beauty when I see one go by, and then there’s the limited-edition 1-series M coupé. It’s not a coupé, actually; it’s a saloon. Actually, it’s not even that. It looks like the box in which your washing machine was delivered, only to make sure you don’t throw it away by mistake, it has enormous wheelarches.

I love this car because what it says when you look at it is this: I am very fast and I don’t need to shout about it. It is very fast, too. Faster than a Cayman R. Faster than a Lotus Evora. Faster than you would believe possible. The 1-series M coupé is very
probably my favourite car on the market right now. Or it may be the M3. I’m not sure. But it’s one of those two.

I can’t believe I just said those things. I’ve spent the past ten years laughing at the man who styled BMWs and the idiots who drove them. BMWs? They were nothing more than expensive and very hideous mounting brackets for your stupid personalized plate. Montblanc pens with windscreen wipers.

I was a Merc man. But Mercs these days are getting a bit too chintzy for my taste. And so are Jags. And the Lexus is still stuck at the back, in its hairy sports jacket, wanting to smoke its pipe. So now I’ve switched my hero worship from United to City. I’ve become a Beemer man.

I should say at this point that I don’t like all BMWs. The X1 is very terrible, and so is the genital wart that is the X3. Then you have the X6, which is idiotic, and the little 120 diesel, which seems to be a bit boring. But the rest? Mmmm.

That’s why I almost skipped with delight to the door of the car of the new 640i convertible, and I was looking forward to driving it very much.

We see some of the current BMW good and the bad in the styling. Roof down, it’s excellent, but when you press the button to put the roof up, it seems a slightly tipsy man comes and erects a tent with which he’s not completely familiar above your head. Why the vertical rear window? It looks stupid.

There’s more silliness, too, in the name. There was a time when the numbers on the back told you the model and the engine size. So a 325 was a 3-series with a 2.5-litre engine, and a 750 was a 7-series with a 5-litre engine. Very sensible. Very German. But now the logic has gone, so the 640 I was testing was a 6-series with a turbocharged 3-litre engine.

It’s a new power plant that develops many horsepowers and big wads of torque. And it’s allied to an eight-speed gearbox that is fitted solely so the man who invented it can go to gearbox conventions and tell other gearbox enthusiasts that his box has more cogs than theirs. It shifts well enough, but eight speeds? In
a car with this much torque? As the XJS proved all those years ago, three is all you need.

And three would suit this car far more because it is the laziest machine I’ve driven since the old Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. It is not built for point-and-squirt hammer-time trips to the racetrack. Shock and awe? Lock and snore, more like. It even comes with a TV screen of such vastness, it’s unfair to call it a television. This is a home cinema.

This, then, is built to move you and your family, provided the children are both amputees, around in the greatest possible comfort. It is a car designed for Houston dentists. A fatboy car.

We should rejoice at the news. Too many expensive cars these days are ruined by low-profile tyres and ebony-hard suspension. Too many are honed on the Nürburgring. So, while they work on a track, where they will never be driven, they are bone-shakingly horrid on the road, where they will.

The BMW is soft. Squidgy. Comfy. The steering wheel is connected to the front wheels with a big soft bag full of melted chocolate, and the noise it makes at speed is the hum of a gardener who’s happy in his work.

I’m sure that if you were really determined, it could be made to whiz about at 155 mph in a fog of tyre smoke. But that would be like trying to make a teenager tidy its room. Possible but, ultimately, too much effort is required.

You don’t drive the 640. You waft along. It’s one of those cars that’s extremely happy to plod up the motorway at 65 mph, unless you aren’t concentrating, in which case it will slot some Barry White into the CD player and drop down to about 3 mph.

At the lights, the engine is so lazy that when you come to a halt it can’t even be bothered to keep going and falls asleep. The idea is that when you take your foot from the brake pedal it wakes up. And that sounds very green and polar-bear-friendly. But you wait till you’re trying to pull onto a fast and busy main road. It can be a bit hairy, spotting a gap and then thinking, Oh Christ. The engine’s nodded off.

Even the satnav is lazy. After you’ve given it the first four characters of a postcode, it can’t be bothered to listen any more and finds what it thinks is roughly the right road to nearly where you’re going. In some cars these days the satnav will suggest alternative routes to miss jams that lie ahead. Not the BMW. It can’t be bothered. It likes jams. It can have a nap.

I know a great many people who would absolutely love this car. People who have a few bob and want to park something a bit tasty on the drive, but who actually can’t abide driving and aren’t very good at it. The 640 would be perfect, because it isn’t really a car. It’s a bed.

When you climb into most BMWs, you feel as if you should be wearing racing bootees and a suit made from Nomex. In this one, the correct attire would be a pair of pyjamas.

19 June 2011

Are you a serious car enthusiast? I mean, really serious? Do you drive round every corner as fast as the laws of physics will allow? Do you open the taps whenever you can to revel in the intoxicating, mesmerizing power of internal combustion? Does G-force tickle your G-spot? Do you talk about torque at parties? Are cars, for you, the light and the life and the meaning of everything? Right. Well why don’t you have a Nissan GT-R, then?

The GT-R is not designed to impress other people. There is no hand-stitched leather and no monogrammed luggage. It’s a Nissan, too – a Morphy Richards in a world where Dolce & Gabbana rules. Does it look good? No. Will it turn heads? No. But only because no one’s neck muscles can move that fast.

The GT-R is designed to examine carefully the scientific laws that govern movement and then systematically to break them. It is designed to go faster than you ever thought possible, possess more grip than is physically allowed, change gear more quickly than you can blink, and stop with such ferocity that you can actually feel your face coming off. No style. Just engineering.

It is made in a hermetically sealed factory, which is climatically controlled to ensure all the components are in the same state of thermal expansion when they go together. The tyres – this says a lot – are filled with nitrogen because the normal air used in humdrum cars such as Ferraris and Aston Martins is too unpredictable. It expands and contracts appreciably according to tyre temperature. Nitrogen does not.

Then you have the wheels. They are knurled to stop the tyres
coming adrift during cornering. Does a Ferrari have that? No. It’s not necessary.

The new 2011 GT-R is built along exactly the same lines but now there’s more power, more grip, more downforce and even more speed. It’s still not designed to impress your passengers. It’s designed to hurt them.

Let’s begin with a standing-start full-bore acceleration run. You put the gearbox in race mode, and then you hold down the traction control button for a moment, put your left foot on the brake and mash your right foot into the carpet. When the revs have settled, and the 523-horsepower 3.8-litre twin-turbocharged engine is screaming its head off, you take your foot off the brake.

What happens next is extraordinary. There is no wheelspin. The clutch does not slip. One second you are stationary, and the next you are doing 100 mph. Imagine sitting in a deckchair in your garden on a summer’s day. It’s quiet and peaceful and you are enjoying the birdsong. Then you are hit from behind by a Boeing 747. That’s what the acceleration feels like in a GT-R. Absolutely unbefrigginglievable.

Of course, there are lightweight, low-riding track-day cars that, on paper, can get from 0 to 60 just as quickly. But they don’t get from 0 to 5 with anything like the savagery. And they run out of puff at 100. The GT-R does not. It just keeps on going, and when you get to the red line, you pull the paddle and instantly – not something that could be said of the previous model – the next gear is engaged. I have never experienced anything quite like it, if I’m honest. It’s wild. It’s relentless. It’s intoxicating. It’s amazing.

Certainly, you should never use the launch control in this car unless you are bracing your head against the headrest at the time. Because if you’re not, the whiplash could put you in hospital.

It’s the same story in the corners, where the steering wheel becomes nothing more than a handle to hold on to so as to prevent yourself from being flung out of the seat. I should like very much to see an X-ray photograph of someone’s heart when they
are cornering a GT-R, because one thing’s for sure. The G-force is so severe, there’s no way it would be heart-shaped.

I was desperate after just a couple of laps of the Top Gear test track to turn off the traction control. This would let the car slide, which would a) be more fun and b) reduce the pressure on my neck. But it’s not wise to turn off the safety features, because if you spin a GT-R, you will break many complicated components.

So, the GT-R is very good. But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you’d still much prefer a Ferrari 599 or Aston Martin DBS. If that’s the case, I’m obviously not getting the message across. The Nissan will eat cars like this. Chew them up; spit them out. Bring whatever you like to the party. The GT-R will blitz it. It blitzes everything. It recently blitzed the Nürburgring in seven minutes and twenty-four seconds. Do you know anything else with number plates that could get round as fast? Because I don’t.

Of course, a Ferrari is a much nicer thing to own and to behold and to touch, but when it comes to the business of driving, or going from point A to point B as fast as possible, no Ferrari would see which way the GT-R went. Ferrari is Manchester United. The GT-R is Barcelona.

There are, however, some problems. First of all, it is extremely ugly. It tries to be unshowy in the same way as a bouncer tries to be unshowy when he slips into a dinner jacket. You can always see the tattoos and the neck like a birthday cake, so you know. You know with the GT-R, too, because of the scoops and the exhaust tailpipes, which are even fatter than before.

Inside, it’s worse. I can see what Nissan has tried to do. Keep it simple. But the slab of carbon fibre on the centre console is embarrassing, and the central command unit, which shows you the state of all the components and how many g you generated in the last bend? No. It’s all a bit too fast and furious for my taste. A bit too Jason Statham.

I wish Nissan had had the guts to truly hide its light under a bushel. As it did with the old Skyline. Not to pretend.

But, that said, the GT-R is a proper four-seater and it has a boot into which you could fit many things. It is also surprisingly quiet and remarkably comfortable, even on a traditional potholed British road. Of course, there’s a harshness to the feel, a sound that hints at the racetrack, but there’s no volume. And I like that.

I also like the price. Yes, it’s rocketed up by about £10,000 to £69,950, and that’s a lot for a Nissan. But it’s much less than half what you’d have to pay for a slower, less electrifying Ferrari 458. And it’s not as though the salesman can mug you with a list of options, because I’ve been on the online configurator and there aren’t any.

The new GT-R is demonstrably better than the old one. It’s faster, and the gearbox is a significant improvement. This means it’s demonstrably better than what was a benchmark. Yes, it’s an ugly son of a bitch, and there are some stupid gimmicks, but this car is a genuine phenomenon.

You’re interested in cars. You love driving. You like engineering. You have to have a GT-R. It’s that simple.

26 June 2011