Born to Be Riled (27 page)

Eureka. We can learn something about Saab Man after all. He is, without doubt, the safest driver on the road today. Insurance companies pay him to have a car. He is never harassed by the police. He has no points on his licence. Without any doubt at all, he is a Virgo.

And I do mean ‘he’ because I can’t recall a single time when I’ve seen a woman at the wheel of a Saab. Weird.

I’ve just driven from Milan to Avignon via Pisa, Bologna and Monte Carlo and in not one of the 1500 miles did I see a single motorway lane closure. There were no roadworks at all. There were no cones. It was a high-speed highway to heaven. Even though the Lancia Dedra Estate I’d rented was terminally backward, and any assault on the car’s upper rev limit caused my ears to explode, I could do 90 for hour after hour after hour. On one downhill stretch I hit 100, but the doors fell off. Then I came back to England, where on the simple 85 mile journey from Gatwick to Oxford there were three major sets of roadworks.

Now the M25 I can understand. They screwed up and built it too narrow. Fine. God made a mess, remember, when he did the flamingo, which is an idiotic bird with legs that are far too long. Then he did the totally purposeless nettle. We all make mistakes.

So ever since the M25 opened they’ve been widening it. Then there’s the roadworks on the M40, which, again, are understandable. The road has worn out and needs replacing.

Mind you, I don’t understand how they intend to do this by coning off the offending few miles and employing guys in hard hats to stare at it. I’ve driven down the single lane they’ve left a lot recently, and I have yet to see a single person doing anything. Still, they’re experienced roadworks johnnies so we can rest assured they know what they’re doing. But I do not understand what is going on where the M40 meets the M25. The signs say it’s
being widened, which is nonsense. It was already wide enough, by miles. The M6 needs widening. The M5 needs widening. The M1 needs widening. But they’ve decided that none of these real problems will be addressed until they’ve had some practice on the under-used M40.

And boy are they going to take their time – two years, to be precise. Now look, a road is some stones covered with sticky stuff that sets. In two years, I could build a road from here to Sofia. In two years, they could close the M40, plant crops, allow them to grow, harvest them and then build a new motorway. And there’d still be time to stand around in hard hats, pointing at things. When an earthquake devastated Los Angeles, I don’t recall signs saying the freeways would be open again in two years. No, I saw teams of worker bees shovelling ruined bridges away and building new ones so the entire network was up and running again in less than 12 months. In Japan once I saw them replace an entire Tokyo highway before sun-up.

Now at this point, some people will be reaching for the notepaper, eager to point out that we don’t pay tolls to use our motorways and that we can’t expect better service as a result. Well, that’s crap. Britain’s motorists pay £25 billion a year through vehicle excise duty and petrol tax and car tax and VAT on tax, etc. etc. etc. That’s a lot of money. In fact, we’re paying so much, the government simply doesn’t know what to do with it all. This can surely be the only reason why they’re spending two years widening an already wide road. Either that or it’s the bloody freemasons again. In the past, I’ve blamed freemasonry for the destruction of our car industry, arguing that a component buyer from British Leyland wouldn’t
fire a company for sending dodgy parts if its managing director had a weird handshake. Week in and week out, lorry loads of crappy speedos, or whatever, were delivered and no one did a damn thing about it because of some barbaric ceremony every Tuesday night where a bunch of grown men run around throwing salt at one another. Well now they’re at it in the construction industry, taking ten times too long to do a job that didn’t need doing anyway, in exchange for a new apron and an oddball boater.

Britain stands no chance of becoming a driving force in Europe unless we build roads properly and get urgent repairs done quickly. I suspect things will be better under ‘call me Tony’; he is a village idiot and his backbenchers are teachers with beards, but they haven’t yet been exposed to white-collar Britain.

So when Mr Motorway Builder walks in and shakes hands while doing a handstand, they will ask him to leave or they will call security.

Oh deary me. It seems that every five days air pollution exceeds harmful levels somewhere in Britain, and that as a result we’re all going to be dead by tea time.

That’s if we don’t choke to death first. According to the National Asthma Campaign, Britain’s 3.5 million sufferers are fed up. ‘People should not have to make the choice between their health and being able to go outdoors and live a normal life,’ said a spokesman.

Absolutely. I want to see a ban on the production of bread too. I am sick and tired of being struck down by asthma every time I wander through a cornfield – and I hold the Hovis board entirely responsible.

Grass is nasty too. Ask me to stroll down Jermyn Street on a hot day and I’ll suffer no ill effects whatsoever, but let me loose in our paddocks on a summer’s afternoon, and after a minute or so I’m a dribbling vegetable.

I was therefore impressed by Indonesia’s attempt to help asthma sufferers by burning the countryside, though I see it’s all got a bit out of hand now and that entire villages are being wiped out. You can see the smog from space.

You can also see an equally large and gaseous cloud over Britain, but this time it’s coming from the British Medical Association. It says that traffic levels, diesel emissions and vehicle noise should be reduced, and that to help, we must all hop to work. Or use a bicycle.

Now this is odd. I’m used to vegetarians running around pointing their organic fingers at the car, but now a bunch of doctors has also decided that motoring is bad for your health.

Well now I’m sorry, but I suspect that this is nothing more than sour grapes. I mean, really, can it be a coincidence that the BMA report came out in the same week that Volvo announced it was to terminate production of its horrible 900 series?

This is a bad car with a power delivery that beggared belief. In most cars the throttle is connected to the fuel injection system by a cable or, increasingly, by an electronic fly-by-wire pulse.

But this obviously wasn’t the case in Volvo’s old barge.
Put your foot down in a 900 and it simply telegraphed a message to the engine room, where a fat man in an oily vest reluctantly put down his copy of
Razzle
and, after a bout of anal scratching, chucked a few more lumps of coal on the boiler. Then there was the handling. Or rather, there wasn’t.

It was safe though. I’ve often wondered why Middle Eastern suicide bombers bother to load their cars with difficult and complicated explosives when they could achieve exactly the same level of destruction by driving an old Volvo into the building. The added bonus, of course, is that in the Volvo they’d survive.

The 900 series wasn’t so much a car as a statement. By driving around in this wheeled house-brick you were telling people that you had no interest in motoring – though of course we all knew that simply by looking at the way you drove.

When we saw a Volvo 900 coming the other way or lumbering up a side road we took nothing for granted.

Just because it was in the left-hand lane with the left-hand indicator flashing didn’t necessarily mean it was actually going to turn left. It may have gone right, or straight on, or stopped very suddenly for no obvious reason.

All the country’s bad drivers were in Volvos, and we could therefore prepare ourselves. We would give them a wide berth because we
knew
the driver’s reaction times could be measured with a calendar.

Now, because the old warhorse is gone, some may worry that these bad drivers will no longer be so easy to identify. Some may disguise themselves and buy sturdy Mercs, while others could go for a Rover 800. There may
be a few who stick with Volvo… buying one of the new superfast C70s, for instance.

But I urge you not to be too concerned. This won’t happen. The people who bought the evil-handling, sloth-like 900 – and a lot of them were doctors – will not be scattered to the four winds. They will deduce that there is no alternative and simply replace their car with a bus pass.

And then they’ll insist that we follow suit. That’s why the BMA wants us to hop to work – it’s because Volvo has killed their beloved car.

The solution as I see it is simple. The last of the 900s are being fitted with 2.3 litre light-pressure turbo engines which should make them sing a bit. And remember, they are rear-wheel drive, which is what enthusiasts want.

Inside, you’ll get heated, leather seats, air conditioning, a sophisticated stereo and electric windows all round. There’s a three-year warranty too, and an airbag, all for £18,500.

My advice is to buy one. Other road users will think you’re an idiot and flee from your path, thus ensuring you’re never held up in a jam again. You can drive like a fool and people will expect it, and if you do crash, it won’t hurt. What more could you possibly want?

Well there is one thing I suppose. What I’d really like, even more than a Volvo 900, is for Britain’s doctors to stick to mending people and stop trying to shape the way we live. And anyway, every doctor I’ve ever met
does
smoke.

Bad news, I’m afraid. Kinnock’s back. After we decided it was a bad idea to let someone who’s Welsh represent our interests on the world stage, he disappeared into the Euro-abyss, where, it turns out, the Man of Harlech has been biding his time, waiting to wreak his revenge on the people who snubbed both him and his nuclear-free wife.

In his role as European Union Transport Commissioner, he has decided to turn Christmas into an orgy of orange juice and church by harmonizing drink driving laws across the Continent. This will mean bringing the British level down from a couple of pints to one wine gum.

This idea was mooted a couple of months ago, but as is the way with New Labour, all ‘proposals’ become ‘discussion documents’ if there’s the slightest hint of an outcry. And there was – so much so that I thought the monumentally stupid plan had gone away. But now, thanks to Captain Kinnock, it’s almost certain to become reality.

Taffy told a meeting of European transport ministers that there is a fivefold increase in the risk of an accident when a driver’s blood alcohol is 80 mg compared with his proposed limit of 50 mg.

Sadly, he was unable to verify that with actual crash statistics. He just says we’re five times more likely to run into a bus queue if we’ve had two wine gums, rather than one, and we’re supposed to take his word for it.

Well hold on a minute. What if we lower the limit to nothing at all? This would surely remove the risk of an
accident altogether. So let’s go the whole hog. And let’s all slow down to 4mph. And let’s ban cars from towns and villages. And while we’re at it, let’s really nail the companies that actually make the damn cars in the first place.

I was horrified to see that Chrysler, the smallest of the US car makers, has been ordered to pay £164 million in damages after a South Carolina jury decided the company had sold its people-carriers with rear-door locks that it apparently knew to be faulty.

It seems that a 12-year-old boy was killed when the back door on his father’s Dodge allegedly flew open. Never mind that the van had jumped a red light and was hit by another car, and never mind also that Chrysler had offered to change all its door locks free of charge.

With this settlement made, and it’s more than twice the size of any previously doled out by a car maker, the floodgates are set to open with 37 other cases being lined up to punch Chrysler on the nose. Experts are saying it could eventually cost the company £5 billion, which would pretty well finish them off.

Now you have to remember that this is America, where there are two types of people: dim ones and lawyers. If a lawyer can ham it up in court, the dim people in the jury will think they’re watching
Oprah
and vote to finish the big, nasty, child-killing corporation.

Apparently, the jury in Chrysler’s case were peeved that a car maker had seemingly put economy in front of safety, but look: having seen the Mercedes in which Princess Diana was killed, and noted that the front seat passenger survived, I am more convinced than ever that the S Class is about as safe as cars get.

But Mercedes could do more. They could limit the top speed to 10mph and fit a device that would prevent the engine from starting if the driver had eaten some sherry trifle. They could fit airbags in the ashtray. All the technology exists to do this, but it is so expensive that no one would buy the end product.

Even Mercedes could therefore be accused of putting economy before safety, but come on, if money wasn’t important we’d spend all day under the bed, refusing to work in case a tree fell on our heads.

America seems to have forgotten that while life is precious, it isn’t much fun without at least some risk.

So what’s to be done? Well, there’s talk that Clinton is going to limit the awards made by a jury, but this move would be fraught with danger. You must remember that in the bad old days Ford was alleged to have sold the Pinto knowing full well that in a rear-end collision it could catch fire. It was claimed they did nothing because the cost of changing the design outweighed the odd death.

If this had been proved, and it wasn’t, obviously it’s only right and proper that a jury should have been free to beat Ford about the head and neck with a chain saw. If a company wilfully exposes its customers to an early grave, hit them with a fine that would wipe them from the face of the earth. And to hell with the thousands of workers who’ll be thrown out of a job through no fault of their own.

And who cares about the towns and cities that depend on the auto maker for life itself? Close Ford down and in Britain alone you close Coventry, Essex, Newport Pagnell and big bits of Liverpool.