Born to Be Riled (57 page)

So off we went at 113mph in a straight line from Clitheroe to my garden, where we’d touch down in a furious flurry of spinning blades and strobing lamps. My children are going to love this, I thought. Nearly as much as I will.

But with just 13 minutes left to run, snow began to fall, the pilot dived for the deck and dropped me on an industrial estate in Banbury. Naturally, I carry the phone numbers of all Banbury’s cab companies in my head. And take it from me: absolutely nobody laughs at you as you tramp around a provincial town on a Saturday evening dressed in tweed plus-fours.

Then we have the children. Be assured that they weren’t the slightest bit disappointed that Daddy didn’t drop into the garden from a helicopter but came up the drive instead in a Ford Mondeo with a Mr Whippy aerial.

I’m afraid that while helicopters may be man’s greatest achievement thus far, they have one big drawback. If the weather goes wrong, you end up miles from home, on an industrial estate, trying to pacify the guard dogs with the pheasants you’ve shot.

The Bora, on the other hand, can cope with any weather you care to throw at it, even the British winter sun that can’t really be arsed to haul itself more than six inches above the horizon. You know what I’m talking about here. It doesn’t matter if your car has sun visors the size of barn doors, if they swivel or if they come with illuminated mirrors on the back, the sun will always be in that tiny gap just above the rear-view mirror.

I bet that’s what got Q. Over the years he’s come up with ejector seats and machine guns in the sidelights, but I bet he was finally and tragically nailed because he never thought to fit his own car with a central sun visor.

The Bora’s got one; a bit of plastic six inches wide and an inch deep which, all on its own, justifies the £19,000 price tag. It means you can see where you’re going but, unfortunately, you will not necessarily know where you are.

To make the satellite navigation work, you need to slot a CD-ROM into the CD player and, if you want to listen to ‘The Best of the Pretenders’, you must take it out again. This means you could end up on an industrial estate in Banbury or, worse, one of Birmingham’s pretty valleys.

So what of the car itself? Well, bearing in mind that I need to say ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone, there’s only enough space left to say that all is not as it seems. This is not, as we’ve been told, a driver’s car for the thirty-something architect with a lost pen. It’s a Golf with a
boot, and claims to the contrary are nothing more than 15 feet of warm wind.

Satellite navigation will soon become a standard feature in all new cars, and some of you may be very happy with that. Me? Well, I’m not so sure.

Here’s why. Your car will be receiving information from satellites, so how long will it be before it starts to receive instructions? How long before it’s restrained from doing more than 70 on a motorway or 40 in the suburbs?

You might think that this is all some kind of pie-in-the-sky dream that could become available, one day, perhaps some time in the new millennium. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it squeak into reality before this one is over, 13 months from now.

The impact would be colossal. Think. If you were suddenly unable to break speed limits, there would be absolutely no point, at all, in buying a car with a large engine. And please don’t talk to me about track days or big torque making for relaxed driving, because that’s nonsense. If you could never go faster than 70, you wouldn’t even think about a 1.6, leave alone a supercharged 12. You’d buy a bloody Yaris.

No, worse; you’d buy a hybrid, a half-petrol/half-battery-powered obscenity with smooth rear wheel arches and an electronic Prescott under the rear parcel shelf, charging you £4000 for moving and £4000 every time you stop.

That’s coming, too, you know. It doesn’t matter how many times the RAC says motorists are up in arms, and it certainly doesn’t matter how many pages I manage to fill with pro-car news, Phoney Tony has a 170-seat majority, so he can do whatever he damned well wants. And what he wants is to hang you up and bleed you dry.

He wants empty streets for his new baby to play in, and to get them he’s going to impose legislation that’ll make the tax disc of today seem about as costly as a penny chew. The technology already exists. Each car will be fitted with a black box, and every time you drive on to a motorway or into a town centre, your credit card will be debited.

There will be automatic debits for lawbreakers too. Obviously, you won’t be able to speed, but anyone who jumps a red light will have £50 deducted from their pay at source. We already have this for absentee fathers, and forget the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty. You’re a motorist, and that makes you as guilty as hell.

A few classic car magazines will survive, but
Top Gear
will be an early casualty. Along with all the lads’ mags. These promote a lifestyle not in accord with the teachings of the Blair Witch Project and, bit by bit, their editors will be made to see the error of their ways.

This is already happening. A government think-tank, made up of no-hoper housewives in ill-fitting trouser suits, decided this month that the time has come to nail some sense into motoring programmes that promote speed. Pretty soon now, James Bond will be on the sparkling mineral water. And she’ll not be allowed a car, either.

You probably think that if this were to come to pass,
there would be riots in the streets and burning effigies of Prescott lighting the night sky. But look what’s happened already. They’ve put speed mountains on every back street in the land and no one has done a thing about it. And every time they slide a bus lane down an already congested street, there’s a chorus of silence.

They do nothing to bring down car prices, which has only managed to inflame the Consumers’ Association – a body with as many teeth as the Padstow Tufty Club. Performance motoring is doomed, and we’re all remaining silent.

This is because we don’t have a single leg to stand on. They need only to wheel out the bereaved parents of a four-year-old girl who’s been killed by someone doing 50 in a 30, and there’s not a damned thing you can say. Not a thing. You may say that we’ll behave in built-up areas if they leave us alone on derestricted normal roads, but this time, they wheel out the kids of a man who was killed when two nutcases in a brace of 911s ran out of talent at a critical moment. And again, you’re stumped.

They have a way of dealing with us, even now. When we turn up in a bespoilered GTR or Evo VI, they smile the smile of someone who has the moral high ground and one day will win.

This is a promise. In 15 years you won’t be able to buy a performance car in Britain. Ferrari will survive, making art forms for people’s garages, but the days of fire-spitting Subarus and hot Pugs are numbered. Mr Blair is going to win the next election and, with or without European help, he’ll make fast driving about as acceptable as rape.

And there is nothing you or I can do to stop it, so I suggest that very early tomorrow morning you head for
the Buttertubs Pass in Yorkshire. Drive it hard and fast, concentrating until your back and armpits are flowing like Niagara. Scare yourself, because that thrill, that sense of being over the edge, that moment when you’ve never felt so alive: soon, it will be a thing of the past.

Welcome to the world of Johnny Cabs. No need to fasten your seatbelts. We’ll never be going fast enough.

Let me guess. This morning, you did not get dressed in a Bacofoil suit, you did not eat a pill for breakfast and you did not use a robot dog with aerials coming out of its ears to fetch the papers. I’m sure you were given a gadget for Christmas but, let’s be honest, it was a lava lamp, and that’s about as now as Slade.

I think it’s fair to say that pretty well every single prediction about life in the year 2000 was wrong. We weren’t hit by a giant meteorite on New Year’s Eve. There was no second coming in Bethlehem, and the only millennium bug out there is the one that’s making your wife’s nose run.

But one thing did change. Over the Christmas holidays, a new type of car crept on to the market and, at a stroke, changed things for ever. Oh, sure, it still uses a series of small explosions to move about, rather than dylithium crystals, but it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Rarely do I lament the absence of a picture with this column, but today I could really do with one because using old-fashioned words to describe the new Fiat
Multipla seems almost philistine. We should be tele-pathizing.

The whole back end is square and slopes inwards, like the rear window on a Ford Anglia. The roof is perforated by two sunshine roofs and has a dip in the middle so that, after a rainstorm, you have a lake above your head.

Then there’s the front, and that’s just insane. It’s as though Fiat used two designers. One made a bus, the top half of which has been lowered on to the bottom half of the other’s low-slung sports car. Aesthetically, it’s a shambles, a jumble of shapes and angles that have no place in the same country, leave alone the same car. It is roast beef and gooseberry fool, served up in a bowl that’s part sherry schooner, part fish.

I could tell you that the Multipla is now
the
car in St-Tropez, but it won’t make any difference. The first time you see one, your jaw muscles will turn to uncontrollable mush. ‘Why,’ you will wail, ‘does it have eyes in its forehead? And why does it have a duck pond on the roof?’

You’ll be sucked in for a closer look and then you will be converted because, inside, there are six seats: three in the front and three in the back, each of which does the triple salchow at the touch of a button or the tug of a lever.

So what we have here is a car that’s a bit shorter than a hatchback but, because it’s wider, can take six people and still leave room for a boot. So who cares if it looks strange?

And we haven’t got to the dashboard yet. Obviously, it’s carpeted, but, less obviously, all the instruments are in the middle except the satellite navigation screen, which
slides out of its box right behind the wheel. This is logical. Who cares how many revs you’re doing or what track is on the CD? You want a talking road map in your line of sight because you’re in Birmingham and you want to get out.

But people carriers tend to be expensive and thus the preserve of only the more affluent prime ministers. A bottom-of-the-range Ford Galaxy, for instance, costs £18,000; the Renault Espace is even more. This new Fiat, however, is yours for just £13,000.

And that means it appeals on all sorts of levels. On the one hand it’s an inexpensive, practical car that will suit the family man in a cardigan. On the other, it’s very new Labour. Very Guggenheim. With its truly innovative design, it would fit right in at the Groucho. But it is also ideal for someone who wants to stand out from the crowd and no longer wishes to walk round in a lime-green knitted suit. It even works as a minicab.

You could use it on the moon or to fetch the papers. I dare say you might even be able to eat it as a sort of twenty-first-century food substitute.

And I think we’ll be seeing more of its type in the years to come. You see, the days when cars broke down or got punctures are gone, so car companies can now begin to concentrate on being clever rather than worrying about reliability and safety. I mean, the Multipla is available with either a petrol engine or, if you spend more, a diezzzel. Both can get from 0 to 60 and would exceed that on the motorway. Both use some fuel, make a bit of noise and go round corners.

Really, I have no idea what it’s like to drive because, while I was there, in the driver’s seat, pressing the pedals
and things, I wasn’t really driving. There was no wrestling with the wheel, no leather helmet, no need for supersonic derring-do.

It was a car, like any other, and yet it just wasn’t – and that’s why, without any question, it’s the best new model we’ve seen for a long, long while. It crept into the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth, but it’s the only car out there that really belongs in the twenty-first.

When a new car is launched to the motoring press, it is a lavish affair. Hundreds of hacks in Rohan trousers and Christmas jumpers are shepherded into the front of an aeroplane and flown to some exotic hotel, where they spend an evening eating artichokes with butter knives and wrestling with those snail-vice things that have no name. The next day they climb into the new car and drive on a predetermined route back to the airport. Simple, but a complete waste of time.

You see, in order to discover what the car is like, all you need do is ask the manufacturer to fax a copy of that predetermined route. They choose it specifically to suit the car they’re launching. So, for instance, if it is made up entirely of twisting mountain roads, the car is obviously noisy on the motorway. Or, if it is short, there’s a strong likelihood the car is uncomfortable over a long distance.

When Saab launched the 9-5 Aero, journalists were flown to southern Germany and asked to drive 150 kilometres up a motorway and 150 kilometres back. And
what can we deduce from this? Easy. The Saab 9-5 Aero doesn’t like corners. More than that, actually: it hates them. I’ve just spent the Christmas break driving the saloon and the estate, and I’m duty bound to tell you something. In the same way that you would not call a member of the Russian Mafia a big girl’s blouse, you should not say to a Saab salesman: ‘Yes, I’ll take it.’ The results will be the same. Great discomfort, followed by lots of bleeding.

It’s not the torque steer, the desperate writhing of the wheel under harsh acceleration, and nor is it the astonishing lack of grip. No, it’s a combination of the two, made worse by a traction control system that works in geological time. Only after you’ve left the road, ploughed through a hedge and are halfway to hospital does the silicon brain think ‘Oh-oh, something’s not right here’ and try to cut the power to an engine that, by now, is three fields away.

Saab, of course, is now owned by General Motors, and the 9-5 is basically a Viking version of the Vauxhall Vectra, itself one of the worst-handling cars of the modern age. But the Vectra is never asked to handle more than 200bhp, whereas this Aero is fitted with a 2.3-litre turbo motor that churns out up to 240bhp. It’s like fitting a Saturn V rocket to Ben Hur’s horse. It’s a damned shame, because the engine is wonderful. After 23 years at the forefront of turbo technology, Saab has eliminated ‘lag’ and come up with a blinder, a strong, immensely torquey, rip-snorting power plant that desperately needs a better home.