Born to Be Riled (43 page)

But that said, Peugeot is different. Tell Peugeot to design a small hatchback and they’ll give you a sports car. Tell them you want a sensible family saloon and they’ll give you a sports car. Explain that you’re fat and that you want a slushmatic machine for getting to the golf club and they’ll give you a sports car. Someone deep in the bowels of Peugeot’s chassis department understands what the enthusiastic driver wants: razor-sharp turn-in lift-off oversteer, seat-of-the-pants message delivery, and a ride-handling balance that’s just so.

Peugeot engines are nothing much to write home about, and they cannot compete with Toyota’s on the important question of reliability. But when you stick your Peugeot into a corner and feel that passive rear-wheel steering kicking in, you’ll forgive it anything. So, truth be told, I was expecting big things from the Peugeot 806 people carrier. I was expecting a bit of a Yasmin Le Bon, a car that manages to be mumsy and phwoar all at the same time.

To behold, the 806 may be identical to the Fiat Ulysse and the Citroën Synergie, but I knew that with a wave of his magic wand Peugeot’s brown-coated Mr Suspension would have turned Wendy Craig into Mimi MacPherson. So I ignored the curious – some might say ugly – styling and climbed aboard. And then I ignored the cheapness of
the trim, telling myself that this was the ordinary £18,000 2.0 litre CLX, not some motoring journalist special.

I had no sunroof, no air-conditioning, no leather trim and no CD player, but I wasn’t bothered because you don’t expect this from Peugeot. It may be a van, I thought, but it’ll go like Van Halen.

And it didn’t. It went like Van Morrison. I tried, really I tried, to push it hard, but driving the 806 quickly felt all wrong, and now I know we’ll never have a sporty people carrier. If Peugeot can’t do it, nobody can.

So what’s it like, then, as a device for moving large families around? Well, it’s got the usual array of flexible seating, the usual small boot, the usual oddment tray under the passenger seat and the usual woeful performance: 0 to 60 takes 13.7 secondzzzz. It’s so inoffensive that given half the chance it would drive down the middle of the road. And this way you could test the usual airbags.

As you may have gathered, the 806 failed to light my fire, but, again, this is nothing unusual. People carriers just don’t cover themselves in margarine and rumble around in my underpants. Making me choose the best is like making me choose which limb I’d most like to have amputated.

I can, however, tell you which ones to avoid. The diesel-powered Nissan Serena is a no-no because with a 0 to 60 time of 28 seconds it is officially the slowest car on sale in Britain today. Then there’s the Chrysler Voyager, which is ghastly, and the Ford Galaxy, which is unreliable.

The trouble is, though, that you still have a list of possibles that stretches from here to the seventh seat way over there in the offside corner. I’m tempted to be obtuse and suggest you have a look at the Mercedes V-class
because it’s the biggest, but then the Seat Alhambra is just about the cheapest and comes as standard with air-conditioning. Or better still, avoid the need for such a car in the first place.

Might I suggest the rhythm method?

Have you ever driven down the motorway at the speed limit? No? Well, don’t, because it’s not big, it’s not clever and nor, surprisingly, is it desperately safe.

You may have seen me trundling down the M40 at 69mph with a bus fastened to my rear bumper and a face the colour of parchment. And I’m sure you wondered what on earth I was doing. Well, I’ll tell you.

Since Gordon Brown decided to knock £55 off a tax disc if you buy a 1-litre car, I thought it might be a good idea to try one out, to see if an engine this small can actually be used to propel a car. I would expect to find a 1-litre engine in a cappuccino machine. I believe my hedge clippers have a 1-litre engine, and that seems about right. For pulling the leaves off a bush, 1 litre is sufficient, but for moving around I’d always assumed you needed 4 litres, preferably with some kind of forced induction.

Needless to say, there aren’t that many 1-litre cars on the market. If you discount the ridiculous selection from our dog-eating friends in Korea and the stupid Wendy houses from Japan, there are, in fact, six. And the best is Toyota’s Yaris. This does 50mpg and comes with a 3-year mechanical warranty, a 12-year guarantee against rust and
whopping 20,000-mile service intervals. Prices start at £7500, but if you go for an £11,000 CDX you get air-conditioning, two airbags, a sunroof, a CD player and, if you want, satellite navigation and a clutchless gear change.

It’s a handsome little car, too, which causes girls to go oooh and aaah as though you’d just driven past in a baby seal. Blokes like it, too, because it has alloy wheels and a badge saying VVTi. Which sounds aggressive. But it isn’t. Sure, the engine, which is Welsh, comes with variable valve timing, but there’s no getting round the fact it displaces just 1 litre.

Now, the quoted top speed is 96mph, so theoretically it could keep up with the traffic in the outside lane of a motorway in the same way that Stephen Hawking, theoretically, could sing
La Traviata
. But at outside-lane cruising speeds the Yaris is loud. You can forget about conversation and the fancy stereo, because all you can hear is a wall of white noise. Couple this to a digital dashboard that acts like a strobe and you have a mobile torture chamber.

After a mile I was ready to admit that I’m useless in bed and that Jeffrey Archer ghostwrites this column every week. After two miles you’d have learnt that I fancy Esther Rantzen. And after three miles, begging for mercy, I slowed down to 69 and sought sanctuary on the inside lane. I’d never been there before, and frankly I never want to go there again. You end up sandwiched between two trucks, and in a Yaris, with its miserable engine, you don’t really have the power to build up enough speed for an overtaking manoeuvre.

I tried it once, lunging into the middle lane, and immediately my entire rear-view mirror was filled with the front of a massive, snorting coach. And what are you supposed to do then? You can’t get back on the inside lane because you’re overtaking a lorry. You can’t slow down or the bus will come through your rear window, and because you only have a 1-litre engine you can’t go any faster either. Still, you’ll be saving a pound a week on your road tax, so I guess that makes it all worthwhile.

At this point I don’t doubt that people who live in London are running around the room waving their arms and telling everyone who’ll listen that the Yaris sounds just perfect for inner-city life. To which I say: Pah. If you only want to move around London, why have wheels at all? Ten grand puts a taxi outside your door 24 hours a day. The whole point of having a car is that it can get you away at weekends, and the Yaris can’t. It’s terrifying on the motorway, and on normal fast A-roads it’s even worse.

You come up behind a tanker and a quick glance shows that the road ahead is clear for 2000 miles. So you drop down to third, bury your foot in the carpet and pull out to overtake. One hour later you’re alongside the tanker’s rear axle and there’s a queue of cars behind, their drivers wondering why you’re on the wrong side of the road, making no attempt to overtake. But you are. You’ve even gone down to second, but with the engine revving its head off and blood spurting out of your ears, you’re still not making any progress. And now there’s a car coming the other way, so with much apologizing to those behind you give up, back off and get behind the lorry again.

In my week with the Yaris I arrived everywhere 20 minutes late, bathed in sweat. It could be a really good car this, brilliant even, but it desperately needs a bigger engine.

And a better name. Yaris sounds like Paula Yates’s dog.

Last weekend, Andy Wilman, that human carpet you sometimes see on
Top Gear
, asked if he could borrow the keys to a Mercedes S-class I had on loan.

No surprises there. People who come to stay are always asking if they can try out whatever cars are parked in the drive. And the S-class is big news. Some say it’s the best car in the world. Some say it’s even better than that, so Andy wanted to get out there to see if the reality lives up to the legend.

Strange, then, that after just a few minutes he was back inside the house having not driven the car at all.

‘Why?’ I asked him.

‘Because there’s no need,’ he said.

And he might be right. When you’re presented with a new Mercedes S-class, you sort of know it’s going to be utterly silent and effortlessly fast. You can be assured there will be no twist in the tale or, thanks to the traction control, the tail. So, really, what’s the point of actually driving the damned thing?

What you want, frankly, is to be amazed by the toys – and, believe me, the S-class amazes, and then some.

I mean, the seats come with a grand total of 40 motors apiece and small fans that cool or heat your buttocks as
you move along. And it gets better, because as you adjust the temperature a small bank of blue and red lights illuminate. That’s great. You don’t have to sit there thinking: ‘Is my arse hot or is it cold?’ A simple glance will tell you.

And then your attention is drawn to the television, telephone, stereo and satellite navigation system, all of which are fitted into a six-by-six box which lives on the centre console.

Now, to those of us who are over 35 years old, this is deeply impressive – when we were growing up, your amp was the size of a washing machine, your TV was black and white, there were no satellites and your phone number was Darrowby 35.

Obviously, having been brought up in a pre-calculator age, I am completely baffled by computers. But that didn’t stop me stabbing away at the various buttons, responding with an excitable shriek when the readout on the TV screen changed. Simply getting the radio to come on, and play music, gives hope to the world’s old people that maybe one day they could buy an Internet and make it mow the lawn.

For all I know, the air-conditioning system in an S-class could mow the lawn and a whole lot more besides: bikini-wax your wife, make a pizza? Who knows? I certainly don’t, because the controls made no sense to me at all.

In American cars, the function performed by a knob is written in English on the knob itself. The button to open the sunroof actually says ‘sunroof’. Now in the rest of the world, people recognize that there’s such a thing as a language barrier, and, as a result, they use symbols instead.

Again, this worked fine. Find a button with a drawing of a sunroof on it and, unless you’re in an Alfa, it’ll open
the roof when pressed. But what happens when a car offers a new function you’ve never heard of before? The symbol on the switch will be meaningless.

There’s one button on the S-class dashboard which appears to have a corn circle drawn on it. So you press it and – guess what? A small red light comes on. There’s no whirring noise, no soft whoosh such as you’d get when the doors open on the USS
Enterprise
, just that little red light. And next to it is another button with what looks like a Breville snack and sandwich toaster stencilled on it. Again, when you press this, absolutely nothing happens. I would say that, of all the buttons in the S-class, and there are hundreds, 80 per cent appear to have no function whatsoever.

Obviously, the solution can be found in the handbook, but, look, it’s the size of the Bible and makes even less sense. By the time you’d got to the chapter marked ‘How to Walk On Water’, your car would have rusted away. And anyway, I sort of know what all those buttons do. They change the driving characteristics slightly, making the car perhaps a little more lively in the bends or a little more prone to rear-end breakaway. And honestly, this is silly because you can’t induce power oversteer when you’re still at home, with all your friends in the back saying: ‘Hey, what does that one do?’

Certainly, you should attempt to drive an S-class by yourself. What with Maureen lunging at you from every side road, and schoolchildren surfing on your back bumper, you have enough to worry about without having to translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics every time you want to turn the radio up a bit.

Of course, no one who buys an S-class ever actually does the driving. You have a driver, but from now on
you’re going to need two: one to drive the car and beat up pedestrians who want your autograph and another who must be computer-literate, skilled in satellite guidance and fully conversant with road-going avionics. So that’s Andy Wilman and me out, then.

When a new play opens for business, the reviewers give it one chance. They do not go back again and again just because the make-up lady’s changed, or the auditorium’s been vacuumed.

The same goes for food. A.A. Gill does not re-review a restaurant because one of the waitresses has been to the hairdresser. ‘Yes, I know we’re still drizzling your halibut with synthetic Norwegian truffle oil, but what do you think of my new bob?’

So it is with a sense of shame that I find myself writing this morning about the new Audi A8. I know I’ve written about it before and I know I finished that review by saying: ‘Don’t bother driving it. You won’t like it.’ But, truth be told, I’ve always had this thing about Audi’s flagship. I don’t much care that it’s made from aluminium or that it has four-wheel drive. Nor am I bothered that the Audi badge is rather Fulham compared with Premier League names like Mercedes or Jaguar.

I like the A8 because it’s so damned handsome. I used to see a black one kicking around Regent Street. It had blacked-out windows and polished chrome wheels, and the want-one factor was way up there in the red zone.

I used to think of it as the only real rival for Jaguar’s XJR. But then I drove one and the dream fell apart, along with all my bones. The ordinary version was too soggy, and in the sport models the ride comfort was abysmal. A cat’s-eye could remove your teeth, a pothole could sever your spine and a humpback bridge could bounce your passengers clean through the roof. It had very obviously been developed in Germany, where road surface irregularities are taken outside by men in leather shorts and shot in the back of the head. But here in Britain, where councils deliberately build bumps in the road, it didn’t work at all.