Born to Be Riled (25 page)

My mobile phone has worked 100 miles from Alice Springs in Australia and on a glacier in Iceland. It was fine on an oil tanker off South Africa, and just last week in Italy – Italy for God’s sake – I used it for an hour while driving down the autostrada and it never fizzled out once.

But it doesn’t work in Fulham, or on the Oxford ring road, or on large chunks of the M40, or near Coventry. Which means Vodafone are charging me for a service that they are simply not providing. And that, I’m afraid, means they’re going to need some new office furniture. And some teeth.

It’s the same story with fax machines. My first simply tore any paper that came near it into very small pieces. And my new one just does alternate sheets until it gets bored. Then it starts screwing them up and throwing them on the floor so the dog can eat them.

It’s all a marketing thing. I have to have a fax machine because the hype says you’re a nobody if you don’t. Having a fax that doesn’t work is fine, but not having one at all is social herpes. And can you imagine going to
a meeting and telling someone you don’t have a mobile? It would be worse than not having genitals.

And now this phenomenon is creeping into the world of cars as well, in the shape of traction control.

There are a number of different systems, but each, effectively, does the same job. If you apply too much power, sensors detect the moment when the driven wheels are about to lose traction, and issue warnings to the engine management system. It then reduces the power being despatched to the overloaded wheel, and as a result you don’t crash. The trouble is that, like mobile phones and faxes, traction control doesn’t work.

If I put my foot down on a wet road in the Jag, it senses that something is wrong and does what we all do when we’re in a quandary. It goes for a long walk round the garden, where, after much chin-scratching, it decides that, yes, it ought to warn the bridge.

But way before the central computer pushes the throttle pedal back where it belongs, the car is going backwards through a hedge. Electrons are fast, but once the pendulum effect of a tailslide has gotten its teeth into the equation, the result is a sure-fire certainty.

And anyway, the usual cause of a tailslide has nothing to do with excess power. It’s when the driver realizes he’s turned into a corner too fast and backs off. This causes the weight of the car to pitch forwards, lightening the rear end and causing a spin. No power is involved and, as a result, the traction overlord is about as useful as a picnic basket.

It can only sit there feeling dizzy as the car spins round and round. Unless, of course, the driver is a talented and
brave young soul who knows how to react when the rear end makes a break for the border.

He knows he’s going to need power to sort the problem out, but the traction control will have none of it. Any attempt to press the throttle down will be met with a metaphorical slap in the face.

This means that good drivers tend to hurtle around with the traction control turned off. And that’s the biggest problem of them all, because
everyone
is a good driver. Everyone thinks they can beat the system, so everyone turns it off. Driving around with your traction control on is the same as walking down the High Street telling passers-by that you’re impotent. It is deeply, deeply uncool.

And that’s staggering. We’re all gladly paying for something that doesn’t work, and then we’re turning it off. Why?

Simple. Any car maker knows that traction control sounds good. It implies that the car to which it’s fitted is such an untamed monster that ordinary drivers couldn’t possibly be trusted with all the power.

Wow. The makers themselves admit that the car is too fast. I must have one, and then I shall turn off the device meant for
ordinary
drivers. Men, remember, are egos covered in skin, and the car makers know this.

But unfortunately, the boffins in the back rooms with the beards and the taped-up spectacles do not. Such has been the demand for traction control in recent months that they’ve started to improve its reaction time, believing this is what we want.

Every time you put your foot down in the new Jag, or
the Ferrari 550 for that matter, the electrons go bonkers and it feels like you’re low on petrol. The engine stutters. The ABS system cuts in and even sane people begin to wonder why on earth the damn computer won’t unleash the full potential of the car.

So they turn it off too, and then ring up the dealer to express their concern. But unfortunately, they do so on a mobile, and the dealer is left wondering why his phone keeps ringing but there’s no one on the other end.

This article was first published on August 10th 1997 and refers to levels of service at this time.

If you’d followed me around this week, you might have suspected that from time to time I was driving while under the influence of a blindfold.

But it’s OK. I was in a Range Rover, and the damn thing just wouldn’t go in a straight line, unless, of course, I wanted to go round a corner. By normal saloon car standards, it really is absolutely hopeless and so pedestrian that I kept being overtaken by continental drift.

Throughout August, Chipping Norton has been hosting a championship to find the World’s Slowest Driver, which is no big deal when I’m in the Jag – I just press the noisy pedal and surge past – but in the Range Rover I came home with the trophy.

In London, things were even worse. In the cotton-thin residential streets of Fulham, where, for some extraordinary
reason, everyone has an off-roader, it felt as wieldy as Pooh after a honey binge.

And you can’t park it anywhere either. I tried to go out for dinner at the Mao Tai on the New Kings Road, but no space within a mile was even nearly big enough so I ended up in the Blue Elephant on Fulham Broadway which, as usual, fielded the rudest waiters I have ever met.

I should have driven the Range Rover through their indoor flowerbeds, instead of a tip, but you can’t really take it off-road in case it gets all dirty.

Strangely, I still love this enormous great brute of a car, and that’s mainly because of the driving position – you really do feel like you’re bouncing along in an automotive penthouse flat, looking down on the riff-raff.

You should be warned, though, that they are not looking up at you. They hate you on a cellular level. They would like to feed you, and everyone you’ve ever met, into a lawnmower. In just one day, two people suggested for absolutely no reason whatsoever, that I worshipped at the altar of Onanism.

They hated me even more than if I’d been drunk, and finally I get to the thrust of this week’s rant – drinking and driving. And specifically, this ludicrous idea of reducing the limit from 80 to 50 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood. In English, that works out at a pint.

Now look. It really isn’t fair to take away someone’s licence and therefore their job just because they had an extra big helping of sherry trifle at lunch time.

I’ve never met anyone who is pissed at the current limit – only relaxed, and surely that’s a good thing. Certainly, I score better times on my Sega Rally Machine after a
calming drink than I do after a row, or when I’ve got hay fever.

Baroness Hayman, who is Labour’s minister for road safety, says that the decline in drink-related accident casualties has levelled off – but decreasing the limit to the point where a pipette of ginger beer makes you Myra Hindley will only
increase
the figures.

Think about it. If every driver who crashes is psychoanalysed to see if they’ve ever had a beer, just about every accident will become ‘drink-related’.

And anyway, the figures have only tailed off because so few people drink and drive these days. In 1996, the police breathalysed more people than ever before – 780,000 – and only 13 per cent were over the limit.

This means that 87 per cent of people who were seen driving in an erratic fashion were stone-cold sober. So, if the baroness wants to do something about road safety, this lot would surely be a better target.

Certainly, there is no point fiddling about with the limit because this won’t give old people better eyesight, and nor will it mend the ways of the so-called ‘hardcore’ drink driver. It won’t temper youthful exuberance either.

And to be perfectly honest, another round of tear-jerking advertisements to ruin the feeling of good cheer as we run up to Christmas will also be a huge waste of money because, frankly, most of us think the drink drive rules are a damn nuisance.

We don’t do it because the punishment is horrific – a year or more on the bus. And on this front, I can see a big problem just around the corner. Buses are getting nicer.

The pro-public-transport people should remember, as they campaign for more trains and comfy, air-conditioned
double deckers with Jacuzzis and satellite television, that if buses suddenly become a viable alternative to the car, drink driving will go through the roof.

We need to go the other way. Buses should come with luggage and chickens on the roof. The suspension should be replaced with scaffolding poles, and passengers should be encouraged to cook in the aisles on Primus stoves.

And as for the trains: make them late on purpose. Even if the Fat Controller reckons one is going to reach the station on time, he should order the driver to slow down… as jerkily as possible.

And instead of forcing a drunken driver to use public transport for a year, it should be five years for a first offence and life thereafter. If you want to keep them off the road, hit them with a stick the size of a giant redwood.

And use a cattle prod on anyone caught driving badly while sober, unless of course they have the perfect excuse: ‘Your Honour. I was in a Range Rover at the time.’

People say that the world is a smaller place these days. Well, having just been to South Africa via western Canada, I can only assume that it used to be absolutely bloody enormous.

The first leg of the journey, from Heathrow to Calgary, was undertaken in a Boeing 767 which only has two engines. Thus, if one should develop a fault you have to run around the cabin screaming.

But even when both are working, it’s a winged
Volkswagen Polo diesel. Point it at a stiff breeze and all attempts to fly forwards are thwarted. You end up landing in reverse, six hours later, in Helsinki.

Happily, we had the wind so nine hours after setting off I was cruising towards the tumbleweedy town of Red Deer in Alberta, which was playing host to a Jehovah’s Witnesses convention.

By pretending to be a blood transfusion specialist, I managed to keep them quiet in the lift on the way to breakfast. And even more amazingly, I managed to win a trophy later in the day for taking part in a combined harvester V. banger race, which put me in good spirits as I boarded an Airbus for the trip home.

Now the Airbus is great. Even though it had four engines, which is about half as many as I like while over the North Atlantic, it was as quiet as a lift full of Jehovah’s Witnesses when a 16 stone man is glowering at them.

Certainly, it was much quieter than Heathrow, which, these days is twinned with Brent Cross. I sat next to Sir John Egan at a dinner the other night and thought he was looking a bit pleased with himself.

No wonder: he’s worked out that as chairman of British Airports Authority, he can get men to do what a billion women can’t – shop. In my six-hour stopover, I went mad.

Burdened with four new pairs of sunglasses, some Pink shirts and a watch I don’t need, I set off for South Africa and my appointment with the
Jahre Viking
.

This is the world’s biggest supertanker, and could swallow St Paul’s Cathedral – four times over. However, as there’s little demand for ecclesiastical removals in the southern seas it was, in fact, carrying 137 million gallons
of crude – enough to power every Jehovah’s Witness in all of Canada to Mars. But not quite enough to bring them back again.

After a day on board, mostly looking for somewhere to smoke, we had a bit of bother with the weather and had to be rescued at four in the morning by a tug which was exactly the same size as an ashtray. This meant that in a raging storm I had to climb down the side of the hull on a rope ladder which had been wrested from the ship’s mascot – a hamster.

There was no sleep that night, and none the next either, because South African Airways models the seats in its 747s on those found in rural Vietnamese buses.

So, in nine days, I’d slept in a bed just three times. I’d done 24,000 miles. I’d crashed a combine and had been through the most dangerous seaway in the world on a floating bomb.

But travel does broaden the mind, which is why I can now impart two nuggets. First, Air Canada’s business class is very good, and second, you shouldn’t buy a Japanese or Korean car.

Here’s why. In America, fuel is cheap and people are fat so American cars tend to be large with a voracious appetite for gas. In Europe, the streets are narrow and fuel costs a bomb, so Renault and Fiat give us little cars with pipettes for petrol tanks.

That leaves the cars that come at us, like a blizzard, from the Far East, cars that are sold in Milton Keynes, Montreal and, because I loathe alliteration, Agadez.

Now look, they can’t have it all ways. They can’t tell a Canadian that it’s a full five-seat sedan, an Italian that it’s a nifty little pocket rocket, an Australian bushman that
it’s tough and the American safety lobby that it’s soft.

Cars like the Hyundai Accent must be aimed at someone, and now I know who – African taxi drivers.

In the Third World, people have grown up with an acquired immune deficiency syndrome towards the notion of cars being, in some way, linked to social standing. Alfa Romeo is currently promoting its 146 by saying that ‘everyone in the office will think you’ve been promoted’ – a slogan that wouldn’t work at all well in Angola.

African taxi drivers are not bothered about a car company’s past racing successes, or styling or whether it can generate 4 g while parking. They want total reliability at a nice price, and that’s what Japan and Korea are giving them.