Born to Be Riled (29 page)

Let’s ensure we keep it that way. Send the people of South Korea food parcels and emails wishing them well. Send money in brown envelopes, but make them promise that the Enterprise boldly stays at home.

Well it’s been a lovely, long hot summer and frankly, right now is a good time to be British. The economy is booming. House prices are back where they belong and unemployment is at its lowest levels since 1981. By pulling all the right faces and not actually doing anything, [email protected] seems to be popular, and even when his fat sidekick, John Prescott, made some silly noises about two-car families they were drowned out by reports that half a million people had bought a new set of wheels in August.

The trouble is, of course, that columns like this thrive on bad news. I need to stand on a rake or fall in a vat of sheep excrement for there to be something to write about
each month. Good news, frankly, is dull. I haven’t even had the privilege of driving any spectacularly awful cars in recent weeks. There was the Toyota Corolla, of course, which is motorized mud, but it’s not ‘bad’ by any means. And the same goes for Saab’s 9-5, on which you light the blue touch-paper and then hang around – nothing at all exciting will happen. In a world of ceremonial fireworks, this new Swede is a damp sparkler. And anyway, this dreary twosome are more than outweighed by some of the most exciting stuff we’ve seen in years. There’s the Puma, of course, and the new 911. But what can I say about that? It’s very reliable? Whoa Jezza – incisive stuff.

In the spring we were treated to an onslaught of new convertibles like the SLK and the Boxster, and now they’re tickling our erogenous zones again with a welter of coupés. Alfa has announced that it will be importing the 220bhp, six-speed three-litre GTV, but it’ll find life tough out there as it competes with the Mercedes CLK, the Peugeot 406 and, of course, that rocket ship Volvo C70.

The next big deal will be the advent of the serious niche car. There’s the Land Rover Freelander of course – a car that’s making our nanny almost moist with anticipation. Then there’s the BMW Z3 coupé, the VW Beetle and the Audi TT. I’m starting to swell just thinking about them. Obviously, what’s happening here is that platform-sharing is starting to pay dividends. If you can bolt any body onto any chassis, you can make new cars more quickly and cheaply than ever before. In the past Ford could never have given us a Ka, a Fiesta and a Puma, but seeing as they’re basically the same, nowadays they can. And this means more choice for you and I, which makes picking your ideal five-car garage harder than ever before.

Obviously, I’m a fifth of the way there because already I have a 355. But in La-La Land it would be a Berlinetta, and not a GTS. This would leave space for my convertible to be a big fat barge of a car – and that leads me straight to the door of the Mercedes SL. Also, now that I’ve started to shoot anything that moves, I’ll need a four wheel drive and, much as I respect the Land Cruiser and the Grand Cherokee, I’d have to have a Range Rover. It would come in new ‘Autobiography’ trim where you get to select whatever colour and interior appointments take your fancy. I’d demand wood from that 2000-year-old tree in California – just to annoy the Americans – and then I’d fit television screens in the back of the front headrests. These will be visible to following traffic to make for all sorts of fun as I drive up and down the motorway with
Debbie Does Dallas
on the video. As far as an everyday car is concerned, I’d have the new Jaguar XJR V8 for all the reasons I outlined last month, which leaves me with the need for a family estate car. I’ve considered, obviously, the Volvo V70 T5 and its V8 rival from BMW. The Mercedes 300E is a contender too, but I’ve decided the kids should walk and that dogs don’t really need to go on outings. My final car would be one of the 100 Nissan Skylines. I don’t care that it got trounced in our Nurburgring feature last month or that it failed to do well in this month’s handling test.

We need cars like this because, pretty soon, tony@ numberten.co.uk will stop pulling faces and let Fatty Prescott loose. Time is running out. Winter is almost upon us. For God’s sake, get out there and live.

Careful and studious readers may know that A.A. Gill is being hauled in front of the Commission for Racial Equality after describing the Welsh as being ‘pugnacious little trolls’.

Well, though we write for the same newspaper, I wish to distance myself from these attacks. Wales is a pretty and charming part of the country and the Welsh have a rounded range of abilities – singing and er… setting fire to things.

I think if we’re going to single out a part of Britain for ridicule and hatred, Wales comes a very distant second to that jumped-up lump of suburbia called Surrey. If I may be permitted to liken the British Isles to a beautiful woman, Surrey is her most stubborn dingleberry.

In the past three years I have travelled to many countries and seen traffic to frustrate even the most dedicated petrol-head, but on Monday morning Guildford made Tokyo look like the Brecon Beacons. To get from one side to the other took two hours, at an average speed of 6mph.

All around, people were sitting in their horrid neo-Georgian houses congratulating themselves on having moved out of London to the country, obviously unaware that they have not left London at all. They’re as much a part of the metropolitan sprawl as Tottenham.

Except that in London, if a main thoroughfare is full locals can use any number of rabbit runs whereas in Surrey this is not possible.

Sure, there are a few open spaces and, given Surrey Man’s tendency to drive a large four-wheel drive car, none
would present much of a problem, technically speaking. But to drive off-road in Surrey is to invite a confrontation with one of its rangers.

Now, a friend of mine once signed on at the Kensington dole office saying he was a shepherd, and I dare say an investment banker would find life hard in Swaledale, but a ranger? In Surrey? Why?

What they do, apparently, is drive around the much coiffeured heathland in Land Rovers telling other people in Land Rovers not to drive off-road, and to get back to central London where they belong.

So everyone sits on the roads, not moving for hour after hour after hour. Every Laburnum Close and Orchid Drive is full. Every B road is full. Every dual carriageway is full. And there’s no way in hell that Fatty Prescott is going to get this lot onto a bus.

For these people, image is everything. They won’t even admit to living in Surrey, saying instead they live on the Surrey/Hampshire borders or, for those in the know, that they live in GU4 – which, the postman will tell you, is a ritzy suburb called Shalford.

Here, I saw mothers depositing their children at school from cars that were several miles long. One had an American off-roader that was easily bigger than an Intercity 125. Why should she use a train when she’s already got one?

And these people don’t park their cars neatly outside the school gates. They simply abandon them nearby and stand around with the other mothers, who’ve abandoned their space shuttles and coaches, arranging bloody coffee mornings. ‘Actually I can’t make it today. I’m having sex with the gardener.’

That, of course, is after the gardener in question has helped the ranger to chop down a few more trees. Trees need to be murdered here because, to convince themselves that Surrey is not simply London SW37, the locals demand that the open spaces be kept as such. They call them beauty spots, and that’s exactly what they are – spots, tiny little pinpricks of manicured green in a sea of fake marble pillars and Mitsubishi Shoguns.

When the rush hour has subsided and Surrey Woman is at home watching the gardener pant over her panties, old people come out of their houses and climb into their Chevettes and Rover 600s and head for the hills – where the ranger has ripped up some more trees to make car parks.

I spent two days in such a car park this week, and have rarely felt so depressed. The view was undoubtedly pretty, but you know that it’s stage-managed and that just over the next hill lies Esher, which isn’t pretty at all.

And you know that you must not let your dog off its lead or pick a flower. This is countryside in the same way that the Spice Girls is a rock band, that is, it isn’t countryside at all. If it were cheese, it would be Primula.

And the visitors know it. They sit in their cars, not daring to get out in case they break one of the ranger’s rules, and they stare at that pitiful facsimile of nature for hours on end. They don’t talk. They don’t eat. They don’t read.

They’re sitting in a bloody car park, surrounded by hundreds of other people in cars, listening to lorries lumbering up the A25, watching a tree being chopped down by nature conservationists.

One man turned up in a brand-new Bentley Turbo R
and sat in his car facing, not the view, but the café which sells chips.

And the staff there explained that Paul Weller is a regular visitor. Small wonder the poor bloke has such a strange view of the world when he’s forced to sit in a traffic jam for two hours just to get one.

Surrey is more awful, I suspect, than hell. If that’s the future for commuting then, my God, you can have my keys right now.

I’ve been sitting at my computer now for two hours, unsure about how this week’s column should begin. You see, after years of Biro-sucking, I’ve finally decided the Land Rover Discovery is absolute rubbish.

But we’re talking here about a national institution – an automotive Prince Philip – and you can’t just launch into attack mode saying it’s a completely useless waste of everyone’s afternoon.

But it is, that’s the trouble. It’s ugly; really, really ugly and I have no idea why this has never occurred to me before. It’s been around for years but only this morning did I start to ask the important questions.

Why does it have that raised bit at the back? No dog I’ve ever seen is 15 feet tall and not once, ever, have I heard of someone keeping a pet giraffe. The Discovery doesn’t need that rear end lump.

And why’s the back window cockeyed? And have you
seen the panel gaps, for God’s sake? I reckon you could get into a Discovery without opening the door. And the windscreen’s too flat, and the wheels are lost in those huge arches. They’re like Polo mints mounted at the entrance to Fingal’s Cave.

Seriously, next time you’re down in Guildford have a look. You’ll see that the Discovery is even uglier than a Ford Scorpio.

It is also dangerous. Now that’s contentious stuff. You can say a car manufacturer’s new product is a waste of the world’s resources and they’ll do nothing. You can liken it to a cup of cold sick and refuse to test it, saying it’s more boring than dying, and still they won’t react. But call a car dangerous and whoa, what’s this? A writ? Blimey.

Well, here’s the defence. I’ve always felt that all cars are capable of stopping in roughly the same distance but this, it turns out, is just not true. I tested a handful of cars last week and was simply amazed by the results.

A Lexus GS300 took just 139.8 feet to haul itself from 70mph to a standstill whereas the aforementioned Land Rover Discovery came to a halt in an almost unbelievable 224.1 feet. And that, to save you the bother of working it out, is a difference of 84 feet. I’ll say it again: 84 feet, 28 yards, five car lengths.

Think about that. You crest a brow on the motorway to discover the traffic ahead is stopped. If you’re in a Lexus you’ll pull up just in time, but if you’re in a Discovery you’ll still be going at a fair old lick when you have the smash.

Now I want to make it plain that the Discovery is not the only car to perform badly in this test. The Toyota
Rav4 is awful and the Ford Explorer is horrific, but whereas the other two have many strings to their bow, the Disco does not.

Yes, it is a fine off-road car, as well it should be with those Range Rover underpinnings and a lusty V8. There’s a diesel too, but quite frankly, I’d rather take my own appendix out.

The only good thing about the diesel is that it’s not terribly powerful. Thus, you’ll never get up enough speed to turn it over, which is something that I suspect could happen very easily indeed in a V8. A top-heavy, 2 ton car simply cannot be as wieldy as a low-slung saloon.

Of course, the big safety device fitted to all Discoveries is the build quality. As they spend most of their time on the back of low loaders, all the braking and cornering problems are cured at a stroke.

Now, I’m machine-gunning the Discovery because I’ve recently spent some more time with the new Freelander, whose praises, you may recall, I sang a few weeks ago in a deep and lusty baritone.

Well, after several thousand miles I can report those initial findings were just about right. On the road, the Freelander stops and corners like a normal car, even if it is perhaps a little slow. On a long uphill motorway gradient, you sometimes need fourth gear to maintain a 70mph cruise.

Off-road, however, it’s even better than I first thought. On one shoot, mud that stopped both a normal Land Rover and a Toyota Landcruiser proved no problem at all for the Freelander’s traction control. I simply adore this little car which, in every way, knocks spots off its bigger brother.

What Rover must do, and now, is stop making the Discovery. It is so far past its sell-by date it should really only be sold in one colour – mould.

But even if they do, there is still the problem of used Discoveries, sitting on the secondhand market looking all innocent and tempting. Pop down to the auctions and you’ll find J-registered diesels going for less than £8000. And more worrying still, a P-registered 25,000 miler is available now for just £19,000, making it seem like a large and sensible alternative to the Freelander.

It isn’t. It’s a huge, salivating dog that, at best, will sit around in your drive wetting itself. Worst case scenario? It’ll tear your leg off and beat you to death with the soggy end.

The choice is easy. Buy the puppy instead, the dog that you know has been bred properly by a registered member of the BMW kennel club. Buy the Freelander.