Born to Be Riled (42 page)

But then we came to the off-roaders section of the supplement and everything went completely banana-shaped. The Mercedes M-class is built in America by Americans. It is too cramped, far too expensive, a bit ugly and apparently not even much cop off-road but, even so, the
Top Gear
magazine road testers put it on the top step of their podium.

This does appear odd, because the Toyota Landcruiser is the best off-roader in the world unless you live in Britain, in which case snobbery makes the Range Rover a better bet. And not the 4.6 HSE recommended by our team but the smoother and more economical 4-litre version.

Fuming, I turned the page to see that in the people carrier section, the Chrysler Voyager was praised for the power of its diesel engine. Hello, hello. Have you actually driven one? It is absolutely diabolical. And… oh, my God, there’s more. According to our boys, the Fiat Coupé is better than the Alfa GTV, which is just plain wrong, and the Mercedes-Benz CLK is better than the Nissan 200SX. Sure, in the same way that treading on a rusty nail is better than having sex with the entire sixth form of a girls’ school.

But they saved their most magnificent piece of wrongness for the supercar section. What on earth is the Aston Martin Vantage doing in eleventh place, when the Lamborghini Diablo came in third? Given a choice, these guys would rather take a drug dealer’s car than the Starship Blenheim Palace. Obviously.

Now I’m sure you read the supplement, too, and I’m sure you had a hernia from the stress it caused. Plus, I’m equally sure, you’ve read my views in this column and now you have full-on post-traumatic shock. This is what makes the automotive world go round. One man’s poison really is another man’s fruit of the forest. We may tell you that the Focus is by far the best family car that money can buy, but you may think it looks like the dinner of a dog. So you’ll buy a Bravo instead. Or an Almera. And that’s fine. Well, sort of.

So now we arrive at the new Rover 75. I understand that following our less-than-enthusiastic road-test report last month, the suits in the Longbridge division of Munich Central are apoplectic with rage. Because we didn’t like it, the Midlands will have to be closed down. Three hundred million people will be thrown out of work and, as the money runs out, local businesses will close too.

Children will be forced to spend their formative years up inside chimneys, and their parents will wander aimlessly over rubbish tips searching for bread and guano.

But look. If I don’t agree with our road testers on their choice of cars of the year, and you don’t agree with either them or me, why should anyone agree with either of us on the 75? I might tell you that
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
is the best film ever made and you may say
Betty Blue
is better. And no matter how much we argue about it, we’ll never, ever agree.

And so it goes with the 75. We looked at the overall package and decided that, while it offered submarine quietness and ocean-going luxury on the motorway, it fared less well as a driver’s tool. And while we said it was good value, we didn’t like the noisy wipers or the dash.

But what if you spend all day on the motorway, and you’re on a shoestring? You’re going to scoff at our findings and buy one.

There are only three objective reasons for not buying a particular car: it is unsafe; it is absurdly expensive; it is a Vauxhall Vectra. Bearing this in mind, there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t rush out to buy the Rover 75.

And I hope you do.

‘We’ll send a car to pick you up.’ Whenever anyone says that, I get a little tingle down the back of my shirt, a little jingle of the ego glands. They’re going to send a car for me. A car! And that means they’re not going to send a Hyundai Stellar.

A Hyundai Stellar is a minicab. When they say a car it means they’re going to send a Mercedes-Benz, and if you’re really, really lucky it’ll be an S-class.

Now for those of you who don’t know, the difference between an ordinary car and the Mercedes flagship is as great as the difference between cattle class on an American airline and first on a BA777. An ordinary car will bash into your elbows and not stop boning its seatbelt warning light until you wake up. In a big Merc you snuggle down with a mug of cocoa while a man in grey flannel trousers gets you home. In an ordinary car, you motor. In an S-class, you travel.

No car on the road, not even a Rolls-Royce, has such… what’s the word? Such presence. If you want to poke
the paparazzi with the metaphorical cattle prod, swish up to the kerb in the big Benz. But now there is a new S-class, and when that rolled up our drive this week the dog strutted outside and barked at it. For sure, it’s much more handsome than the old model, but that’s like saying Ralph Fiennes is much better looking than Lennox Lewis. He is, but I know who would make the better minder.

Basically, the new S-class looks like everything else on the road; the fist-in-the-face presence has gone, and get this: it doesn’t even have double glazing any more. Pity. In 1998 Mercedes launched a £14,000 hatchback and merged with Chrysler, best known for the Talbot Horizon. It’s dumbing down, and now even the S-class has gone all Big Breakfast.

But then I took it for a drive, and now I am speechless. Without a doubt it’s the best, most complete car I’ve ever encountered. Whether you’re in the back, slithering around W1, or in the front, doing a ton on the A66, it is utterly magnificent. Take the seats, for example. Naturally they move about electrically, and of course they’re heated. But they also have little fans buried deep in the upholstery which cool your buttocks on a hot day. And they pulsate. As you drive along, little pockets of air move about in the fabric, kneading your weary back. This means you can get all the way from London to Bassetlaw without having to stop off in Northampton for a bath. So it’s pretty comfortable, and that’s before we get to the air suspension. You don’t drive this car; you float around in it.

Which brings me on to the handling. You’re probably expecting to hear that it’s a bit of a liner, but it attacks corners with the agility of a small speedboat. If the
Titanic
had been built like this she would have missed the iceberg.

I’d love to tell you what happens
in extremis
, but way before the passengers are treated to anything so dramatic as tyre squeal, all sorts of electronic whiz-kiddery intervenes to slow you down. Good thing, too, because I was still playing with my seat, and the cruise control, and the satellite navigation, and the television, and the phone, and the trip computer, and the Tiptronic gearbox and all the other features you find listed in the three-inch-thick handbook. They even fit voice activation for various controls, and to make sure the computer is not baffled by accents Mercedes tested it on 180 people from every region of Britain. I’m told it even understands Geordie.

And then there’s the keyless ignition. You simply keep what looks like a credit card in your wallet, and as you approach the car the door-locks silently slide upwards. Then, to start the engine, you press a button on the gear lever.

But what sort of engine should you choose? The 280 and 320 have six cylinders, a bit mean in a car of this size, and while the 5 litre V8 and 6 litre V12 may be sublime, they are also ridiculous. I’d go for the 4.3 litre V8. It comes with three valves per cylinder, offers 280bhp, gets you in complete silence to 140mph, and in my hands returned a remarkable 22 miles to the gallon.

And here’s the clincher. There are 145 motors in the S-class – only one of which is the engine – and you are left in no doubt that for year after year none will break down. Not until the car has been sold 16 times and is finishing its days cruising the Melton Road in Leicester will there be any form of malfunction, and even then it’ll
probably amount to nothing more than loose stitching on the upholstery.

I do wish it still had the presence of the old model, but these are leaner, cleaner times, and anyway the weight loss is translated into a price loss. At £57,000, the new S430 is £3000 less than the old, which means you get unbeatable value from what is quite simply an unbeatable car.

Sometimes I send this column in to the newspaper knowing full well that it’s not very good. I set out to make something as smooth as the Queen’s lawn, but somehow I end up with northern Cornwall, all craggy and inaccessible. I go over it again and again, but all this does is create half a dozen meaningless oxbow lakes and a millstone grit outcrop. And before I have a chance to straighten things out, the deadline passes and I have to send it in anyway.

But let’s be honest: everyone can look back over his work and know which bits are best forgotten. Even God, I suppose. With the south of France, he can say: ‘I did OK there. I like the way you can ski down to the beaches and all the women have no tops on.’ But we must never let him forget Australia, a vast and useless desert full of spiders that’ll kill you and men in shorts. Or Florida.

Happily, though, life moves on and mistakes are buried in the mists of time. For God, earth is a distant memory as he busies himself with the planet Zarg. And me? Well, I’m writing this, and that rubbish I did last month about
electric gates is at the bottom of your hamster cage. Even people who create something lasting are safe. The architects who did those tower blocks in the 1960s don’t have to live in them. And an artist doesn’t hang his most idiotic work above the fireplace.

However, when you’re a car designer there’s nowhere to hide. When you make a mistake with a car, it’s going to come back and haunt you. Every single day it’ll lunge out of a side turning and you’ll be forced to say to your passenger: ‘I did that.’ So let’s spare a thought for Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose company, ItalDesign, is celebrating 30 years as the car industry’s most prolific design house. Remember the Maserati Bora? Well, that was one of his, and so was its six-cylinder sister, the Merak. Then there was the Lotus Esprit and the BMW M1. It may have had a German engine, and its plastic body may have been made by Lamborghini, but the styling: that came from Giugiaro. As did the DeLorean and more recently the Maserati 3200GT.

However, don’t think his talent lies solely in the high-horsepower world of the supercar. He also did the 1970s Alfa Romeo GTV, the Subaru SVX, the Lexus GS300 and the Saab 9000.

I’ve just finished a book that lists his creations and it’s incredible: the original Golf, the Scirocco, the Isuzu Piazza, the Renault 21, the Daewoo Matiz and, best of all, the Alfasud. All his. And the Ford Escort Cabrio. And the Lancia Delta. And the Fiat Panda. Been on a bus while you were in Italy? If it was an Iveco there’s a strong chance Ital styled it. He does vans, trucks, tractors – even pasta.

I met him once and decided, quite quickly, that I’d like
to punch him in the face. He was punctual, polite, and though it was over 100 degrees up there on the roof of Fiat’s Lingotto building he never broke into a sweat. His clothes were immaculate, and he was ridiculously handsome, despite some magnificently daft graduated sunglasses. We talked about our sons, how mine has a habit of mincing round the house with a pink handbag and how his has just designed a 12-cylinder roadster for Volkswagen.

He’s funny, too. When Triumph launched its TR7 at the Geneva Motor Show, Giugiaro stared for some time at the profile, walked round the car, and said: ‘Oh, no. They’ve done the same thing on this side as well.’

I just knew that I was dealing with a man who’d slept with more women than me, but despite everything I felt sorry for him. You see, his path to righteousness does contain one particularly large and virulent mistake. Flick through the book that celebrates his work and it’s there: a small picture tucked away on page 46 – a verruca on the foot of greatness. I’m talking, of course, about the 1974 Hyundai Pony, which is almost certainly the ugliest car of all time.

Quite how this happened I have no idea. Maybe the design was inadvertently torn up by an overzealous cleaning lady and she glued it back together all wrong. Or perhaps the clay model was damaged en route to Seoul, and the people over there were too full of spaniel to notice. Either way, Giugiaro has to get up every morning and have breakfast knowing that on his way to work he might pull up at the lights alongside the result of his darkest hour. And as he peers inside, the occupants will peer back, their faces saying it all. ‘You bastard. Why?’

Then, when he dies and gets to the pearly gates, there’s a chance that all the receptionist angels have Ponys as company cars. And it doesn’t matter how much he stands there saying he did the Bora and the Esprit, they’re still going to put him, for all eternity, in a room next to the lift shaft.

This morning, pretty well everything went wrong. The electric gates broke again, trapping the postman in our garden – a garden that was being systematically eaten by some cows that had escaped from the paddock. The baby was screaming, the three-year-old had put an entire loo roll in the lavatory, the four-year-old was refusing to eat her cereal and the nanny was in Canada skiing.

Me? Well, I was lying in bed thinking that, all things considered, I was pretty damned glad to be a man. I suppose I wouldn’t mind being a single girl, because I could tour the country, sleeping with all my friends. And there’s more. Your stomach is flat and your teeth are shiny. But all this has to stop when you’ve calved a couple of times. I don’t care what it says in
Cosmopolitan
; you can’t be expected to have a job, clear up sick and, when the kids are in bed, come downstairs looking like Caprice.

I ran into an old girlfriend the other day after 20 years, and though she was still pretty enough to turn heads in the airport terminal she had the harried look of a woman who’d been up since six herding cows. It was as though someone had stencilled ‘mother’ on her forehead.

And this, I think, is a fitting metaphor for that automotive Alice band, the people carrier. No matter how many times motor manufacturers tell us that their new breeder wagon has ‘car-like dynamics’, we know they’re talking rubbish. A people carrier may be built on the same platform as a car, but it is still desperately and unswervingly mumsy.