Born to Be Riled (38 page)

The television reviewer for a local newspaper in London hates every molecule in my body. In recent years he’s described me as Stephen Fry’s older, fatter sister, he’s said I’m talentless and recently he even wished me dead.

As a result, I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a savage and vitriolic review. And therefore I have some sympathy this morning for the people at Chrysler who, just before Christmas, asked if I’d like to drive their new diesel-powered Voyager people-carrier.

Obviously, the right answer was, ‘No, I would rather rip my own head off than drive something with a diesel engine’ but sadly, my wife took the call and said instead, ‘Yes, Jeremy would be delighted.’

Well, I’d only gone a couple of miles in it before I smelled a rat. This was a Noel Edmonds ‘Gotcha’. I knew exactly what had happened – the bearded one had fitted the engine from a cement mixer, and hidden cameras were going to see how far I went before realizing.

Keen to demonstrate my prowess, I pulled into a lay-by just two miles from home and ripped the interior apart looking for the Pulnix minicameras. And there weren’t any. This was not a joke. Almost unbelievably, this car was for real.

I know what’s happened here. In the last few years, potential customers have told the salesmen in Chrysler showrooms that they would love to buy a Voyager but that the big, 3.3 litre petrol engine is too thirsty. ‘If you did a diesel, we’d buy it.’

Why do people do that? When we’re buying a petrol
engine we agonize over the technical data for hours, working out torque figures and analysing the brake horsepower. We look carefully at the top speed and even worry about the meaningless 0 to 60 time.

But when people want a diesel any old rubbish will do, a point that was obviously not lost on Hank the Yank from Chrysler, who simply bought ‘a diesel engine’ from the Italian company VM and fitted it under the bonnet of the Voyager.

The results are catastrophic. Nought to 60 takes a woeful 13 seconds and on the motorway 60 is realistically your top whack. Beyond that, the growl of the engine, allied to the whistle of the turbocharger, renders the stereo useless.

I’m told, however, that fuel economy is dramatically improved. Apparently, back in the summer, a family drove across Europe in a Voyager diesel and averaged 53mpg. Well I’m sorry but they must have pushed it because, realistically, it won’t do more than 33mpg.

And nor will it go round corners properly. Even with the miserable power output which dribbles to the front wheels like it’s coming out of a pipette, the Voyager diesel suffers from dramatic understeer on wet roundabouts.

I was just driving normally, and each time I let in the clutch after a down change the front wheels just skidded. It was like trying to drive to work on a halibut.

Only less comfortable. Chrysler seems to have achieved the impossible with this car, combining a bone-jarring ride with the pitch and roll characteristics of a small yacht.

So, after three long years, the Vectra has finally lost its crown. By a huge margin, this new bus from America is the worst car on the market today. And that title is earned
not simply as a result of the terrible engine or the unusual handling characteristics.

I once described the Voyager as the best of the people-carriers, but for the life of me I cannot remember what possessed me to do such a thing. For a kick-off, the interior layout is all wrong, with a poky park bench in the back and only two Parker Knoll recliners in the middle. Why not three? Everyone else has three.

And why, in such a huge car, is life so cramped for the driver? You have to rattle along, hunched over the wheel, changing gear every 15 seconds to keep that useless engine in its power band. The rev counter is red-lined, for heaven’s sake, at 4000rpm. What good’s that?

And why is the handbrake buried under the driver’s seat? And why do all the controls feel so cheap? And why is it a condition of the loan that I don’t smoke while driving the vehicle? According to a letter I found in the car, future owners will be non-smokers and will not like the smell I leave.

Oh I see; they’re going to buy a diesel which will pump the world’s most carcinogenic substance – 3-nitrobenzothrone – into their children’s frail little lungs. But they’ll be put off if it smells of burned leaves. Well, they can p*** off.

To be honest, I can’t see anyone with even half a brain buying this car. Sure, there are bound to be a few idiots who’ll do so because it’s a big diesel, but for the rest of us, here are the facts. The cheapest model is £19,600, but for that you only get five seats. You may as well have a Ford Focus.

To get a proper model with seven seats and a boot, you need to spend £22,000, and I simply do not have the
space here to list all the things I’d rather have instead – venereal disease, for a kick-off.

I’m afraid I didn’t even complete the test with this new car. I eventually left it at a remote airfield in the middle of Wiltshire and hitchhiked home instead.

On the face of it, motoring in India could not be easier. The Highway Code states simply that ‘might is right’, and that you must give way to anything which is larger.

At all intersections the lorry is king and then, in descending order, you have the bus, the van, the elephant, the car, the auto-rickshaw and finally, the mushy and pliable pedestrian.

So why, if there is only one very simple rule, do the Indians kill 168 people on the roads every day? Well, first of all we must face up to the simple problem that Indians can’t drive. Think about it. The world of Formula One is hardly littered with names from the subcontinent. And no Indian has ever won the RAC Rally.

And then we have the question of religion. A majority of Indians believe that their death is preordained and that they can do nothing about it. So they arrive at the intersection knowing full well that they
should
give way to the truck, but they don’t know which of the three pedals is the brake, and they don’t really care about the consequences anyway.

It’s a dangerous mix, and that’s before we get to the wild card, the four-legged two of clubs. If you encounter
a cow you must swerve on to the wrong side of the road irrespective of what is coming the other way, whether it’s a school bus, some nuns, or Buzz Aldrin on a tractor.

Elsewhere in the world this would not be a big problem because cows tend to be kept in fields, but in India you round a bend on the equivalent of the M6 and oh no: there, right in front of you, is Ermintrude enjoying a round of gin rummy with Daisy.

Be aware, then, that if you are planning to drive in India you may not listen to the radio or chat with your passengers. If you lose concentration for a split second your head bone will become connected to your windscreen bone.

It’s all so very different in Britain, but remember, we also have a wild card – White Van Man. He is our equivalent of the sacred cow. He should be in a field, with a ring in his nose, but he isn’t. He’s on the road with a ring in his eyebrow.

Now a report out this week tries to defend the man in a van, saying he is courteous to other road users, that he is likely to have a pet and that he is first to get out of the way should an ambulance want to come past. Of course he is. That way, he can tuck in behind the paramedics and get home even faster.

The whole point of this survey, paid for by Renault, is to demonstrate that there is no such thing as White Van Man, and that people who drive trannies for a living are as demographically disparate as the nation as a whole.

I see; so how come then, that 40 per cent of van drivers questioned said they had a satellite dish and that 28 per cent take the
Sun
? Only 4 per cent do any gardening and, here’s a good one, only 4 per cent are women.

What we’re dealing with here are young men who like football, beer, curry tours of Corfu and films where people get chopped up. And I’m sorry, but I don’t subscribe to the report’s findings, which say White Van Man drives fast because his boss has set an impossible schedule.

White Van Man drives fast because his boss will pay for repairs when he crashes. That’s why he never changes gear until the valves are coming through the bonnet. That’s why he lunges about with his front bumper in the small of your back. And that’s why he treats red traffic lights as advisory stop signals.

The report suggests we all try driving a white van once in a while to see what it’s like. Well I have, and I’ll tell you. It’s great.

You’re big enough to mix it with the trucks, but nimble enough to get out of their way when the going gets rough. You can go head-to-head with taxi drivers, and win. And as for drivers in their precious, shiny cars. They’re not people. They’re targets.

You can send White Van Man on as many driving courses as you like. You can attach a ‘How’s My Driving?’ sticker to his rear bumper, and you can fit a wireless which only plays Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’, but it won’t make the slightest bit of difference.

Like the Indian cow, White Van Man is immune to all known forms of assault. You can carve him up and he’ll hit you. You can brake-test him and he’ll ram you up the backside. You can get out and remonstrate, but you’ll find the back is full of navvies who will practise the ancient art of origami on your arms and legs.

The solution is obvious. Week in and week out I tell you all about the new whiz-bang GTi which will get
from 0 to 60 in one second, but I appear to have been missing the point. If you really want to get around quickly, become an urban terrorist. Rent yourself a Ford Transit.

And if a market researcher asks any questions, do everyone a favour and set the record straight. You like beating people up. Preferably with chips.

Right: think back now to the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done in your whole life. Maybe it was the porn mag you shoplifted when you were 11, or maybe it was the one-night stand you had last month… with your bank manager. Come on. Feel the guilt. Squirm. And now, imagine what it would be like to suffer from that feeling every single morning.

Here’s the problem. I get a car to test, for a week usually, and in that time I’m able to work out almost nothing. Oh sure, I can tell you how fast it goes and what it looks like. I’m even able to determine if it’s noisy. But in actual fact, none of this stuff really matters. Take the Ford Puma, for instance. Having been bowled over by the styling, the performance and the promise of low, low Ford-style running costs, we made it the
Top Gear
Car of the Year.

And, impressed by our report on the programme, a friend of mine bought one. And over dinner last week he shoved his finger up my nose and explained that if you lift the tailgate up when it’s raining, several gallons of water
pour into the boot. I never spotted this because when I tested the car, it was dry. But in the big scheme of things, it’s not the end of the world. What concerns me far more is that I can’t report on the one area that really matters – reliability.

In the last series I decided that the new Alfa Romeo GTV was the best coupé you could buy. It was pretty much the fastest and, though looks are subjective, I’ll come round to your house with a broken bottle if you disagree that this mini-Ferrari is a supermodel in a sea of excrement. Now I knew it would not be reliable. I knew that after six months, if I’d pressed the window switch, the boot would have opened, and that if I’d mashed the throttle into the carpet, the bonnet would have flown away. I knew all of this. But I had no proof. So I couldn’t say it. And as a result Dr Lynch of Belfast bought one. And now he’s written to say that it’s the most unreliable piece of donkey-do ever to grace the Emerald Isle. In nine months, the car has been off the road for eight weeks. And I told him to buy one. Oh my God. The guilt. The angst. And what’s this? The next morning I got a letter from Simon Saunders who, following my report, has a Land Rover Freelander. It arrived with the speedo calibrated in kilometres. And over the summer, the speaker fell out of the door, the transmission began to rattle, it ate oil like a school boiler and the air conditioning began to think it was a shower, hosing water into the cabin.

Sadly, it hasn’t actually broken down so, technically speaking, under the terms of my agreement with the managing director of Rover, Dr Hasselkus, Simon is not allowed to burn anyone’s house down. But he is cheesed off. And so is Andy Jones. Because he bought a Volvo
T5R, which received the Clarkson small-boy-in-toy-shop treatment on television. I loved it. I raved about it. Andy bought one, and to list all the faults he used up all the paper in my fax machine. My hair stood on end as I digested the litany of problems. Oh God, the CD stopped working; pass the razor. Oh no, it judders; where are the Disprin? And then, this morning I really did reach for the carving knife. A driving instructor wrote to say that in the last four years he has covered 130,000 miles in his Nissan Micra. It has been subjected to the worst kind of brutality from Maureen and her ilk and, apart from regular servicing, it has only needed two new brake pads.

A Nissan bloody Micra, for heaven’s sake. I hate the Nissan Micra. I have joked about this lump of Japanese junk for years. It is as sensible as a sandal, with as much flair as Johnny Rotten’s trousers. Yet it works, every single day, without fail. There is only one solution. Treat what I say about cars as entertainment – but under no circumstances actually go and buy anything I like.

Seriously, the guilt is killing me. Every morning, Postman Pat delivers another tale of woe from some poor sod who wanted that 150mph top speed. He wanted to generate 2 g on every roundabout. And now the car is sitting in a workshop with oil spewing out of its heater vents. Please don’t write to me any more. Please. Write to Quentin. It’s all his fault.

The road which passes my house is a beauty. Ten miles or so of sweeping corners, a wiggly bit, some truly mouthwatering views and a brace of long, long straights which plunge like an arrow into the heart of Cotswoldy Britain.

There is one tiny little problem though. The road’s in my backyard. I don’t mind one bit if you drive like a bat out of hell past someone else’s house, but when you go past mine I want you to turn off the engine and coast.